War of the Worlds seems to be the film that most people thought, or even wanted, Signs to be. People wanted to see the aliens wreck havoc and kill masses of people. Now they have their wish. War of the Worlds presents us with aliens wrecking massive havoc. Unfortunately, that’s about it.

The first fifteen minutes of War of the Worlds introduces us to Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and tells us little more about him than that he’s a jerk. Divorced from his wife (Miranda Otto), he now has the kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning) for the weekend. One can understand why he’s divorced – he still hasn’t managed to grow up and he treats his own kids like a rascally older brother.

Enter the aliens. They have come to destroy the world and instead of dropping nukes, have chosen to build little machines that go around killing people individually – thus allowing for a movie where three characters can go about barely managing to escape their grasp from beginning to end. Ray and the kids run, hide, run, argue, and run.

It would all be an utter bore if it weren’t for the constantly engaging imagery. The aliens, in their robotic machines, go about destroying New York, then ravishing the countryside, looking under every nook and cranny for signs of human life. They even spray the blood of their victims about them for unknown reasons but that it’s gross and scary. And Dakota Fanning does a great job of looking scared, really.

But isn't War of the Worlds really about family? That’s what Spielberg said. If it’s supposed to be a story about family, it’s a terrible one. Ray does struggle to preserve the life of his two children throughout the film, but who wouldn’t? At the very end, Ray and Robbie hug, though they’d been at each other’s throats before. Are we really supposed to believe that just because they fought to preserve each others’ lives, that they’re really any different? I suppose one’s likely to be a bit humbled and introspective after such a traumatic experience, but the story that War of the Worlds is trying to tell is one where no real change of character occurs within the story. It's a story about a family, but it's a story that bland, stale and static.

But the story of a massive alien invasion is just too good a one to mess up too bad. War of the Worlds does succeed at the story it’s really trying to tell – one that scares and entertains us with the realized day dream of hostile aliens. Though it’s the humans who come up victorious in War of the Worlds, it’s really the aliens who save the day.

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