Product Details

• Actors: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto, Justin Chatwin
• Directors: Steven Spielberg
• Writers: David Koepp, H.G. Wells, Josh Friedman
• Producers: Colin Wilson, Damian Collier, Kathleen Kennedy, Paula Wagner
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS ES)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Dreamworks Video
• DVD Release Date: November 22, 2005
• Run Time: 116 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,012 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000BCDV6C
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #12,538 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #19 in	Movies & TV > Action & Adventure > Action Stars > Tom Cruise
  #27 in	Movies & TV > Action & Adventure > Action Directors > Steven Spielberg
  #39 in	Movies & TV > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Alien Invasion

• For more information about "War of the Worlds (Full Screen Edition)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Despite super effects, a huge budget, and the cinematic pedigree of alien-happy Steven Spielberg, this take on H.G. Wells's novel is basically a horror film packaged as a sci-fi thrill ride. Instead of a mad slasher, however, Spielberg (along with writers Josh Friedman & David Koepp) utilizes aliens hell-bent on quickly destroying humanity, and the terrifying results that prey upon adult fears, especially in the post-9/11 world. The realistic results could be a new genre, the grim popcorn thriller; often you feel like you're watching Schindler's List more than Spielberg's other thrill-machine movies (Jaws, Jurassic Park). The film centers on Ray Ferrier, a divorced father (Tom Cruise, oh so comfortable) who witnesses one giant craft destroy his New Jersey town and soon is on the road with his teen son (Justin Chatwin) and preteen daughter (Dakota Fanning) in tow, trying to keep ahead of the invasion. The film is, of course, impeccably designed and produced by Spielberg's usual crew of A-class talent. The aliens are genuinely scary, even when the film--like the novel--spends a good chunk of time in a basement. Readers of the book (or viewers of the deft 1953 adaptation) will note the variation of whom and how the aliens come to Earth, which poses some logistical problems. The film opens and closes with narration from the novel read by Morgan Freeman, but Spielberg could have adapted Orson Welles's words from the famous Halloween Eve 1938 radio broadcast: "We couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing: we annihilated the world." --Doug Thomas

War of the Worlds at Amazon.com

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Product Description

Dreamworks War of the Worlds (Full Screen)
Ray Ferrier is a working class man living in New Jersey. He's estranged from his family, his life isn't in order, and he's too caught up with himself. But the unthinkable and, ultimately, the unexpected happens to him in an extraordinary sense. His small town life is shaken violently by the arrival of destructive intruders: Aliens which have come en masse to destroy Earth. As they plow through the country in a wave of mass destruction and violence, Ray must come to the defense of his children. As the world must fend for itself by a new and very advanced enemynot of this world, it's inhabitants must save humanity from a far greater force that threatens to destroy it.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

211 of 270 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ACTION MAN, July 25, 2005

By	DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The War of the Worlds is a great novel and Spielberg is a director of exceptional talent and accomplishment, so I had been hoping for a lot from this film. In the event, I have got part of what I was hoping for. Very occasionally, a novel can be 'walked' straight on to the screen (The Big Sleep, with a script by Faulkner, is a striking case), and I found myself wondering whether this novel might not have benefited from the same treatment. Some of Spielberg's changes are perfectly reasonable, others less so in my own opinion. It makes perfectly good sense to bring the action forward by a century into the present day, for instance. I suppose there's no harm either in changing the main actors from Wells's scientist with a wife and a brother to a dysfunctional American family, as this may provide enhanced 'human interest' or some such benefit for all I would know. Again, I have no real problem with the way the film combines the roles of the curate and the artilleryman in the book into the single persona of the former ambulance-driver, and I can well understand that Spielberg would have thought it prudent to tone down the socialistic elements in this aspect of the story in order to avoid setting off the wrong types of reaction in American audiences. What I do have a major problem with is the appearance of the Martians themselves. I'm sorry to report that these have far too much in common with a certain wretched TV series. The author's own description is one that stays in the memory, to say the very least, and Wells's Martians look the way they do for very clear reasons that he provides. What was gained by going downmarket in the way Spielberg chooses to do? Nothing that I can think of except perhaps better audience figures from harking back to that ghastly broadcast series.

In fact the best things in the film come directly from Wells. Even one of the best lines, where the statement that the invaders come from somewhere else is met with the question 'Where - Europe?' is a very clever adaptation of a good joke in the book comparing the attitudes of Mrs Elphinstone to the Martians on the one hand and the French on the other. The Martian tripods are simply terrific, their appearance lifted more or less exactly from the book. However The War of the Worlds is a work of political and social philosophy and speculation, not just some science-fiction yarn. I really would have liked Spielberg to be a bit more ambitious and reflect this more than he seems to have felt like doing. For one thing, the Martians are invading the earth because their own smaller planet is cooling and dying around them. Wells explicitly says that there is no reason to suppose them 'pitiless'. They have come for pressing practical reasons connected with their own very survival. We know now, as Wells did not, that all they were going to find on Venus is a searing hell under the rolling white clouds, so it would be more than likely, as Wells says again, that they would learn from the failure of their first expedition and come back to the earth better prepared the next time rather than stake everything on one throw, which is what the film seems to be suggesting. The last gesture of the Martians in the film is an expression indicative of hatred, which doesn't even make sense considering they saw us as their food source. What consumer of beef makes hostile faces at beef-herds? The Martians' purpose can't have been 'extermination' as someone is made to say in the film, only subjugation, another matter perfectly clear from the novel.

More survives of the view Wells takes of the behaviour of humanity itself, and Spielberg handles the mob-scenes rather well. However what he tones down more than I would have wished is the reflections, in the novel expressed via the persona of the artilleryman, on the likely behaviour of human beings towards one another once the Martian dominion was hypothetically established. The artilleryman's predictions are class-based like the vision of the Eloi and Morlocks in the Time-Machine, but they are far from endorsing Marxism and there is no reason to see them as any firm viewpoint held by the author himself.

Perhaps the very best things in the entire film are to be found in the voiceovers right at the start and right at the end. The words are lifted almost verbatim from the novel itself at these points, and they are simply awesome, the first page in particular of The War of the Worlds being surely one of the greatest in all English fiction with the last page not far behind it in that respect. The exquisite irony of the fact that the Martians, who might have viewed us as we view micro-organisms in a laboratory were in their turn thwarted and destroyed by just such organisms when nothing humanity could do availed in the least is obviously not lost on the director. I just wish he had raised his game more consistently to something like the level of the theme he was taking on.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not War of the Worlds, December 11, 2005

By	W. Bull "inre-" (Escondido, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is not the story "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. This is not a Sci-Fi adventure movie.

This is a movie about Tom Cruise playing his typical role of immature boy-man coming of age and taking up the responsibilities of manhood. This movie is 95% about Cruise and his 2 kids from a divorce and how messed up their relationship is. Interspersed with inane and just plain ridiculous reactions by Cruise and his teenage son you will see some shots of alien war craft death-raying pedestrians.

An extremely forgettable film. Definitely rent before you buy and I wouldn't recommend renting it at the "New Movie" price unless you happen to like Tom Cruise.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too much talking, not enough aliens!, November 11, 2005

By	Mojo Jojo - See all my reviews

This review is from: War of the Worlds (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

I hesitate to give this movie 1 star, thinking that might be a little harsh. But then I thought about it and about the film, and sometimes I think I may be being to charitable.

Bottom line: This movie is boring. It starts out promising. We meet Cruise, a likable everyman who is about to take care of his kids for the weekend. Then it all goes to hell.

To begin with, I hated these kids. A couple of spoiled brats who I wished would be disintegrated through the whole film. They keep yelling at their father, accusing him of being a bad father. Is he the greatest dad in the world? No. Does he deserve this much grief? Hell, no. And even after he saves their lives repeatedly they're still on his case. So I disliked two of the three main characters: STRIKE ONE.

Then there's the Martians. Where the hell are the Martians? They hardly show up in the movie at all. Sure, that makes sense since this family isn't actually fighting the aliens, but just trying to stay alive. But there were huge stretches of nothing happening. And terrible scenes of human cruelty and panic. It's reasonable to expect the worst in people to come out, but I don't want to watch a movie all about people turning on each other. "Independence Day" may get a bad rap, but damn it, at least I was rooting for humanity in that film. Here, I wanted the Martians to disintegrate us all. STRIKE TWO.

And worst of all for a big budget blockbuster: it's dreadfully, terribly, unbelievably boring. Watching people hide from aliens for over two hours is not very exciting. We don't get to witness one major battle. There's one scene where the military is fighting some aliens just over a hill. AND WE DON'T GET TO SEE IT! Instead, we get another endless scene of Cruise trying to save his stupid kid. BIG, BIG STRIKE THREE.

There's a whole bunch of other things that bugged me about this film. The happy ending is just tacked on. The interlude with Tim Robbins as a crazy survivalist is just horribly executed and ulitately pointless. But what bothers me the most was that they kept the original resolution.

Germs killing the Martians in the original book worked fine because it was written in a different era. But now we know better. And the Martians, who are far and away our technological superiors, don't know enough not to drink the water and breath our air? Jeez, when I go to Mexico I don't drink the water.

Steven Spielberg has lost his ability to entertain an audience. Both this and Minority Report are interesting sci fi films that take themselves way too seriously and drag on way too long.

Blech, I say. Blech!