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| Working in the spirit of his predecessors but with the kind of uncanny special effects they could barely dream of, Spielberg has come up with an impressive production that is disturbing in the way only provocative science fiction can be. |
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| (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) |
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| Contains all of the hallmarks of classic genre Spielberg: It shows you things you've never seen before, instills an accompanying sense of awestruck wonder, and delivers long stretches of heightened, delirious excitement that remind you why people started going to the movies in the first place. |
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| (Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald) |
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| It is, simply, the alienation-invasion movie to beat all alien-invasion movies: meticulously detailed and expertly paced and photographed, with sights so spectacular and terrible that viewers will have to consciously remind themselves to close their mouths when their jaws drop open. |
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| (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle) |
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| An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse. |
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| (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly) |
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| It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece. |
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| (David Edelstein, Slate) |
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| A gritty, intense and supremely accomplished sci-fier. |
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| (Todd McCarthy, Variety) |
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| Rivets and amazes, even if it falls just frustratingly short of the mind-expanding grandeur it could have had. |
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| (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune) |
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| It's impossible to praise too highly the verve, skill and authenticity with which Spielberg brings off his alien invasion. |
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| (William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer) |
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| Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary. |
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| (Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter) |
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| The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen. |
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| (Scott Foundas, LA Weekly) |
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| The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin. |
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| (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post) |
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| This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values. |
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| (Liam Lacey, Toronto Globe and Mail) |
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| It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic. |
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| (Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide) |
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| Spielberg's major theme here... is to scare us, not just with the obvious methods, but in darker, more subtle ways, too. There is the fear of being caught in a panicked crowd, the fear of being separated from one's children, the fear of being in situations one cannot control. The fear of hiding from something that is too big to hide from. The fear that the people you trust won't know how to help you. The panic and terror experienced by the characters in some scenes are palpably overwhelming. Technology has changed over the years, but masterful filmmaking has not. Alfred Hitchcock used quick editing and careful camera angles to make us think we'd seen the knife actually pierce Janet Leigh's flesh in Psycho's shower scene, when in fact we never did. Spielberg does the opposite: He uses long, unbroken takes to make us think we're actually seeing massive machines destroy property and obliterate humans, when in fact the humans are on a separate sound stage, and digital effects are doing most of the work, and the machines don't even exist. A lesser filmmaker would have done all this with spastic editing, cutting quickly from one shot to another to disorient us, to hide the fact that so many of the film's components aren't real. But Spielberg knows we'll be more convinced - and thus more frightened - if we see it presented coolly. He depicts the destruction matter-of-factly, without bombastic movie tricks, sometimes without even any musical score. Just as Spielberg's Jurassic Park made digital dinosaurs look like real, living beasts, War of the Worlds seems to have been made by recruiting actual alien ships, wrangling them onto a sound stage, and training them to work with actors.Where Spielberg is hamstrung, eventually, is by his source material. Wells' story has an anti-climactic resolution, and Spielberg has kept it. Maybe there is a trade-off between realism and entertainment. Wells' version is very logical; it's just not very exciting, unfortunately. But Spielberg's technical skills are second to none, and the childlike love for a good story for which he is renowned remains intact in this marvelously entertaining, 90-percent-satisfying blockbuster. |
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| (Eric D. Snider, efilmcritic.com) |
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| Thrilling, action-packed and genuinely scary – in terms of jaw-dropping special effects, War of the Worlds is the blockbuster to beat this summer... Surprisingly dark for a blockbuster and delivers handsomely in terms of thrills and special effects. Highly recommended. |
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| (Matthew Turner, ViewLondon) |
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| A superior blockbuster, a lean thrilling adventure directed with a master’s touch. |
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| (Henry Fitzherbert, Sunday Express) |
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| Quite possibly the greatest sci-fi film ever made... Spielberg’s latest beats them all hands down. |
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| (David Edwards, Daily Mirror) |
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| The film succeeeds as pure sensation, an exacting distillation of fear. |
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| (Jessica Winter, Time Out) |
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| There are three Steven Spielbergs. First up is warm, fuzzy Stevie, who makes life-affirming slush like The Terminal. Then there's Serious Steven, who makes worthy films about Important Issues. And finally, you have psycho Steve, who just wants to creep up behind you and yell ‘Boo!’ Psycho Steve is the guy who made Jaws, Jurassic Park, the best bits of Minority Report, and (yes!) War Of The Worlds. The story may be sci-fi, but the product is a horror film, plain and simple: a brilliantly constructed scaring machine. Cruise is on fiery form, exploiting the sharky side of his personality to expose Ray's frailties, and he's well matched by Fanning's panicking child, in a performance so genuinely traumatised that it's uncomfortable to watch. The only bum note is sounded by Tim Robbins, hamming it up dreadfully as a Schnapps-pickled survivalist. |
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| (Paul Arendt, BBCi) |
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, Dakota Fanning 
