Steven Spielberg made a 9/11 movie without calling it a 9/11 movie. Released in the summer of 2005, War of the Worlds was overshadowed by its tent-pole release date and the personal drama surrounding star Tom Cruise (this was around the time of the couch thing on Oprah). The film was still a hit grossing $603 million worldwide, but it was also a film that was at turns deeply disturbing and further toyed with the audience in its controversial third act when Ray Ferrier (Cruise) and his daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) run into the unstable Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). War of the Worlds is now available on 4K, and I hope that its new home release tempts people to give it a critical reevaluation and see that even the film's weakest elements are thoughtfully constructed.

For those that need a refresher, the film follows self-centered dad Ray Ferrier taking his kids Rachel and Robbie (Justin Chatwin) for a weekend. That also happens to be the weekend that aliens invade Earth. As tripods descend on the world and use their technology to turn humans into dust and later blood mulch, the Ferrier family must try to survive not only the alien menace, but the far more immediate foe: humanity. The aliens serve as more of a backdrop to a story about how humanity can easily tear itself apart and the lengths we'll go for the survival of our loved ones.

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War of the Worlds is a movie constantly grappling between order and chaos. As every ordered system gives way to chaos, life is constantly threatened by sheer confusion. In one of the film's more disturbing scenes, Rachel is almost kidnapped by a couple that only sees a stranded little girl and wants to help her. In the fog of this confusion, they almost end up separating Rachel from Ray even though their intentions are just to help a child. At the same time (and in admittedly one of the film's weaker moments), Robbie is eager to join the military and go fight the aliens. These conflicting impulses—keeping family safe while also defending against a real enemy—swarm at the center of War of the Worlds with an everyman like Ray uncertain at how best to protect his family.

The further we get from 9/11, the harder it is for some audiences to really understand what that day was about. It's been filtered through so much personal loss and political propaganda and conspiracy theories that the feeling of terror on that day and not understanding what was happening has been somewhat lost. War of the Worlds snaps you right back to it, not by recreating the events of September 11th, but by creating a scenario reminiscent of blind terror and immediate death. Spielberg isn't interested so much in the political ramifications of 9/11 (that would come with his follow-up, Munich) as much as the emotional impact and the fear we feel when we're shaken from our certainty.

It's not like the Ferriers start out in a good place in War of the Worlds. Ray is distant and selfish, his kids resent him, and that's their normal. An idyllic life isn't shattered when the aliens come along, and that's a realistic appraisal of how trauma happens. While typical dramas follow a pattern where harmony is disrupted, War of the Worlds is about understanding levels of chaos and order, and while the Ferrier family isn't "happy", this is a typical custody weekend for them that's then disrupted by the tripods. From there, everything falls apart, not because of the Ferriers, but because of humanity's response to catastrophe.

And in these moments of terror, we look to some force of stability, which is why Robbie's plan to join the military or the third act where a random assortment of people works together to turn Ray into quasi-suicide bomber, may seem off to our modern eyes, but snap up back to 9/11 where the sense was, "We need to do something," even if that thing was vague and undefined, much like Robbie's reasons for running off to fight aliens. War of the Worlds is constantly looking at how people will behave when they don't have time to think but feel like they have to act because their perceived survival depends on it.

The fact that this all got laundered through as a Tom Cruise summer blockbuster is kind of unbelievable in hindsight, and because of its unrelenting darkness, I can understand why people aren't necessarily eager to revisit a Spielberg movie like War of the Worlds when they could chill with Jaws, Jurassic Park, or Indiana Jones. But the grim ideas that Spielberg typically reserved for his dramas are in full effect in War of the Worlds, and now that it has a pristine 4K re-release that's the best version of the film available, you owe it to yourself to add it to your collection.