The years after the September 11th terrorist attack were strange and difficult for basically every American. The sense of safety that so many had grown accustomed to was utterly decimated, and the country reacted to the revelation of its own vulnerability in a way that left lasting scars.
In the world of feature filmmaking, dozens of directors attempted 9/11 allegories, and most of them failed to meet the moment. Steven Spielberg, though, took his time and then made not one but two movies that seemed to address the tragedy, albeit obliquely. 2004’s Munich is a story about cycles of violence. Set in the aftermath of the Munich Olympics, it follows Mossad agents as they assassinate the men whom Israel holds responsible for the crime.
The next year, Spielberg directed Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, a movie that is ostensibly about an alien invasion but one that nonetheless evokes the feelings many Americans felt in the wake of 9/11.
War of the Worlds is about domesticity disrupted
In addition to being an apparent 9/11 allegory, War of the Worlds is also one of the last movies that asked Cruise to play a regular person. Here, he’s playing a dockworker who struggles to build a positive relationship with his two children. During one fateful weekend visit, though, the kids find themselves stuck with dad as aliens invade and threaten to destroy the planet.
Crucially, the movie has almost no interest in what the aliens want or in humanity’s attempts to stop them. This is not Independence Day. It’s a movie about one regular guy working as hard as possible to make sure his family survives.
War of the Worlds is not a perfect movie, but the immediacy of its first act, in particular, is unmatched in Spielberg’s career. The moments after the alien’s initial attack are frenetic, terrifying, and a reminder of just how quickly the normal course of a day can be turned on its head by external events. All they can do is turn and run, and Cruise spends the entire movie trying to find a safe place for his family to land.
To his immense credit, Cruise plays the balance between his own personal panic and his desire to put on a brave face for his kids beautifully. This version of Cruise is not an action star, and there are no hidden talents buried beneath this dockworker. He’s just a regular guy trying to survive, in basically the last moment in Cruise’s career where he could play a regular guy.
Spielberg weaponizes his skill for spectacle
The list of directors who are better at conveying a sense of spectacle than Steven Spielberg is vanishingly short. Usually, Spielberg’s skill for wonder and awe is used to amaze both his characters and the audience. When you see the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you’re as amazed as the characters at just how beautiful and real they look.
In War of the Worlds, Spielberg uses his skill for spectacle and immediacy to more nefarious ends. During the film’s most memorable sequence, we see an entire neighborhood reduced to rubble after a plane crashed right in the middle of it. It’s a credit to the film’s production designer that the set is as impressive as it is, but Spielberg understands almost intuitively how to make this scene of disaster feel personal and immediate, craning out from Cruise and his family until we can see a broader view of the wreckage.
That’s just one example of how Spielberg uses his intuitive understanding of how to make things feel big and important to make the devastation in War of the Worlds feel so profound. He’s turned his ability to awe you into a weapon.
It’s that sense of scale, combined with his total focus on one family’s experience of this world-shattering event, that makes War of the Worlds into one of the definitive movies of the 9/11 era. This is not a movie about politics, and it’s not even clear whether 9/11 has happened in this world.
Instead, War of the Worlds is a movie about what it feels like to have your life upended. To be living one way one minute and be fighting for nothing more than your own survival the next. It’s a film about the feeling of realizing that life is more fragile than you thought.
The movie’s ending may feel, at least to some, to be a cheat, and it’s certainly the most hopeful part of the movie. Crucially, it’s also a return to domesticity and a reminder that, when all else fails, all we really have are the people we’ve chosen to make family with.
Stream War of the Worlds on Paramount+.
