Movie review: War of the Worlds

Steven Spielberg's retelling of this classic science-fiction tale is distilled down to an account of one family's fight for survival | Andrew Coffin

Most summer blockbusters are like concert films. They're not so much unified stories as a collection of crowd-pleasing crescendos. It's as though the filmmakers don't trust themselves to really sell the action, so they rely on a series of small payoffs—a Will Smith one-liner or the creative annihilation of a villain—to keep the audience engaged.

War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg's $150 million answer to the blockbuster as concert film, relying on gritty realism and sustained intensity in a story dependent on wild leaps of imagination. For the most part, Mr. Spielberg succeeds—although he's tripped up by some usual Spielbergian pitfalls.

War of the Worlds is a new adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel, which was famously adapted as a radio play by Orson Welles and later as a 1953 movie. The PG-13-rated film (for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images) is far too intense for young kids and contains some bad language, but it's clearly a cut above standard summer fare.