The New York Times recently published the results of a poll determining the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far, and the #1 slot went to Bong Joon Ho’s Best Picture winner Parasite. (It topped the paper’s subsequent readers’ poll, too.) As it happens, Bong Joon Ho also voted in the poll, and the Times made his ballot (along with many others) available online. He lists the 2005 Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise movie War of the Worlds among his 10 choices, which makes that movie his selection for the best Steven Spielberg movie of the past 25 years. It’s a bold choice. But he may be right. At very least, War of the Worlds deserves to be talked about alongside classics like Jaws and Jurassic Park.
The Spielberg movie that actually made the overall top 100 list was his other (also excellent) Tom Cruise-led sci-fi film, Minority Report, at number 94. War of the Worlds, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was a bigger but more divisive hit back in 2005, though it was overshadowed by Cruise’s talk-show antics and Scientology-stumping. In fact, it wound up as Cruise’s last big money-maker until he revived interest in the Mission: Impossible franchise six years later.
The Cruise factor is part of why War of the Worlds might seem like a counterintuitive choice for Bong’s favorite Spielberg movie. The South Korean director obviously enjoys dark-hued genre films, and he made his own movie where a family encounters a fantastical creature: The Host, released just a year after War of the Worlds. But that movie’s tone is vastly different from Spielberg’s, veering into comedy and satire to complement its heartfelt drama.
Image: Paramount Pictures
Moreover, like Parasite, it uses a family ensemble to offer different point-of-view characters. Spielberg’s WotW, by contrast, is both vastly bigger and strikingly smaller. It’s one of the most intimate large-scale disaster movies ever mounted, chronicling no less than a massacre of the global human population by invading aliens, while sticking almost exclusively to the ground-level point-of-view of Ray (Tom Cruise), a super-divorced New Jersey dock worker, and his 10-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Ray’s teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is there, too, if only to wriggle away from Ray whenever possible.
The trio of characters initially navigating this alien-ravaged landscape vaguely recalls the three men venturing into the ocean in Jaws, and the boy-girl siblings bring to mind the kids in Jurassic Park. War of the Worlds does indeed scan as the third film in a trilogy of creature features that most closely resemble Spielberg horror movies. Its way into that material, though, is arguably stranger than either of its companions. It uses the framework of a genre most popular in the respective decades of Jaws and Jurassic Park: the disaster movie.
Though the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America didn’t put a total kibosh on the neo-disaster wave of the 1990s, they did push those types of movies toward an increasingly fantastical approach to mass destruction on screen. Though a few filmmakers like Man of Steel’s Zack Snyder did lean into a more harrowing sense of realism, later-period Roland Emmerich movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 didn’t seem designed to remind people of 9/11. Their disaster-scapes were so outsized (and neutrally produced by Earth itself, rather than invaders) that they almost looked like simulations, or apocalyptic screensavers.
Spielberg’s War of the Worlds has plenty of outlandish, retro sci-fi imagery: Certain elements of the original H.G. Wells novel from 1898, like the aliens’ tripod ships, are faithfully included, and when the ships start fertilizing their own vegetation with human viscera, the wide landscape shots look like a vivid, super-saturated set out of a 1950s melodrama.
But beyond the base-level awe these sequences inspire compared to Emmerich’s SimCity destruction, the then-contemporary 9/11 references are unmistakable (and darker than the superficial building-smashing of superhero movies): After witnessing an initial attack, Ray realizes he’s covered in the dust of incinerated people. Later, a terrified Rachel makes it explicit; as they speed away from the mass devastation in a stolen car, she asks in panic, “Is it the terrorists?”
In its way, this directness is as vivid as the kid dialogue in E.T., like the faux-teenage way Elliott calls his brother “penis breath” in anger. Before Spielberg made a more intimate movie about real-life terrorism with Munich (which also came out in 2005), he brought the chaos and fear of terrorism into summer movies that were supposed to provide escapism. His gift for moving the audience through the action with fluid, longer shots takes on a frightening immediacy.
Image: Paramount Pictures
Though his two Jurassic Park movies are full of suspenseful sequences (and The Lost World is especially violent), War of the Worlds might be Spielberg’s most traditionally scary genre movie. (His depictions of war atrocities in movies like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are in another category altogether.) It’s not just the scale of the destruction, but its pitilessness; these aliens aren’t going through a list of symbolically powerful landmarks to blow up in perfectly framed wide shots. They’re open-firing into crowds and buildings, then eventually sweeping the corners to harvest human blood.
From a business perspective, it made sense to release War of the Worlds in what was essentially the Independence Day spot. The movie itself, though, where most of the anti-alien heroics are accidental or off-screen, and all-American Tom Cruise is a semi-deadbeat dad who survives mostly by luck, feels like an ID4 takedown as accidentally pointed as Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (There’s even a more gruesome equivalent of Burton’s darkly funny image of a herd of cows on fire when an Amtrak train zips past refugees, engulfed in flames.)
The fantastical touches aren’t the only scary parts, either. Rewatching a mob of people senselessly attempt to steal Ray’s car and nearly destroy it, endangering Rachel in the process, I had two simultaneous thoughts: 1) This behavior makes no sense, and 2) this is also exactly what would happen in real life. War of the Worlds feels so emotionally realistic that it’s no wonder Spielberg can’t quite find the precise note to end on, beyond a thematically appropriate but vaguely unsatisfying reversion to the basic outline of the Wells novel. (At least in terms of the aliens’ fates.) It’s a beautifully made movie that can’t offer the same reassurances as other Spielberg sci-fi; Ray’s lessons about parenthood come with a crash course in its horrors, too.
So what does Bong see in this Spielberg movie in particular? Many of his movies invert War of the Worlds’ arc of harrowing horror to unsettled respite by providing a wilder, often more “fun” ride before arriving at a tragic end. (Though sometimes those tragedies are still laced with a hint of hope.) But Bong’s films also gleefully mix genres in ways that feel informed by what’s happening in the real world. In the same way, there is something genre-warped about the Spielberg film that depicts post-9/11 anxiety by peeling back layers of disaster-movie blockbusters, 1950s sci-fi, and outright horror, right down to how it handles its most Spielbergian-seeming human relationships. There’s nothing especially predictable about War of the Worlds. It unfolds with the terrifying clarity of a nightmare.
War of the Worlds is currently streaming on Paramount Plus.
