War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science-fiction action horror/thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp and jointly produced and released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. It stars Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto and Tim Robbins, with narration by Morgan Freeman. In the film, an American dock worker is forced to look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he struggles to protect them and reunite them with their mother when extraterrestrials invade the Earth and devastate cities with towering war machines.

Plot
Ray Ferrier is a charming but self-absorbed crane operator longshoreman who works at a dock in Brooklyn, New York and lives in Bayonne, New Jersey. Ray is estranged from his children. His ex-wife, Mary Ann, later drops off the children, 10-year-old daughter Rachel and teenage son Robbie, at Ray's house on her way to visit her parents in Boston. Unexplained changes in the weather occur, with lightning that strikes multiple times in the middle of an intersection and disrupts all electricity.

Ray joins the crowd at the scene of the lightning strikes, where a massive "tripod" war machine emerges from the ground and uses powerful weaponry to destroy the area, disintegrating most of the witnesses into a grey dust and leaving only their empty clothes behind. Ray collects his children, steals a car that had just been repaired, and drives to Mary Ann's empty home in suburban New Jersey to take refuge. The next morning, he finds that a Boeing 747 has crashed in the street. A news team scavenging for food and surveying the wreckage explain that there are multiple tripods that have attacked major cities including New York City, Paris, Washington, D.C., and London, and have force shields to protect them from human weapons. They also explain the tripods' pilots traveled to Earth within the lightning as a way to enter their war machines, which had been buried here millions of years before. Ray decides to take the kids to Boston to be with their mother. The three are forced to abandon their car after a mob sees that it's working and swarms the vehicle. They later survive a Tripod attack which causes a Hudson River ferry to sink.

As Ray, Rachel, and Robbie are walking along in a rural farm area with many other people, they notice a hilltop that appears to have smoke and distant explosions coming from the other side of the hill. As Robbie walks at a faster pace than Ray and Rachel, the explosions on the other side of the hill begin to seem as if they are getting closer, and then a convoy of military humvees are seen approaching on a nearby road. Robbie shows an interest in getting closer to the explosions, as do many of the other people that are walking around him. Ray and Rachel insist that Robbie slow his pace down, and remain together, but Robbie ignores this and his fast-paced walk becomes a run up the hill. Several of the other people in the crowd join Robbie in running up the hill.

During the ensuing chaos, Ray and Rachel are screaming for Robbie to come back to them. Soon after, military fighter jets zoom above them and fire missiles at targets on the other side of the hill and the convoy of humvees proceed to drive upwards on the hill towards the climax of the hill to establish a defensive line. Several other armored vehicles, including M1 Abrams tanks and LAVs, join the defensive line on the hilltop. The soldiers on the hill prevent Robbie from getting past the line, which gives Ray a chance to convince Robbie to not join the fight. As the battle rages on, the soldiers talk with each other and realize that their weapons are not having any effect on the alien tripods due to their shields. They realize it is merely a desperate effort to delay the tripods advancement to buy time for the civilians to get to safety. Nonetheless, the military will continue to fire at the aliens to stall them as much as possible. Ray tries to reason with Robbie as much as he possibly can to stop him from joining the soldiers, at the same time AH-64 Apache helicopters are seen flying overhead firing several missiles at the aliens.

As Rachel waits for Ray under the tree in which he left her, a concerned woman attempts to take Rachel along with her husband, thinking she is alone. Ray's efforts to convince Robbie to not join the fight are fruitless, as Robbie is adamant about joining the fight against the aliens. It's at this point that Ray is forced to choose between being separated from Rachel and preventing Robbie from joining the fight, or staying with Rachel and letting Robbie join the fight: he lets Robbie go with the soldiers, to what appears to be certain death. At this point, the alien tripods are closing in, and the military forces fighting them are left with no choice but to advance and fight to their death. Ray frantically rushes over to the woman who took Rachel away from the tree and gets Rachel back, and calls out Robbie's name. It is too late, however, as some of the humvees are seen driving downwards on the hill covered in flames. The military forces fought valiantly, but explosions are seen coming from the other side of the hill where the vehicles had previously gone. Presumably, the military forces have been overwhelmed, and defeated by the alien tripods, unfortunately. Now, as nothing stands in between the alien tripods and the crowds of people, Ray and Rachel attempt to make an escape from the hilltop. While escaping, Ray and Rachel are offered shelter in the basement of a farmhouse by a man named Harlan Ogilvy.

The three remain undetected for two days, even as a probe and a group of aliens themselves explore the basement. They discover that the aliens are cultivating a strange red-colored growth (known as "Red weed") across the landscape and it is quickly spreading, covering trees and making its way into the basement: the group deduces the aliens are modifying Earth to make it more like their home planet. The next morning, Ogilvy suffers a mental breakdown after witnessing a tripod harvesting human blood and tissue to fertilize the alien vegetation. Convinced that Ogilvy's mad shouting will alert the alien creatures to their location, Ray reluctantly kills him. The basement hideout is eventually exposed when a second probe catches the Ferriers sleeping. Rachel is abducted by a nearby tripod and Ray allows himself to be abducted as well, after picking up a belt of grenades from an abandoned military vehicle. Ray and a number of other abductees use the grenades to destroy the tripod from within, freeing them all.

Ray and Rachel arrive in a devastated Boston, where they discover the alien vegetation is shriveling up and most of the tripods have collapsed. When an active tripod appears, Ray notices birds landing on it, indicating that its shields are offline. Ray alerts the soldiers escorting the fleeing crowd, and they shoot it down with anti-tank missiles. As the soldiers advance on the downed tripod, a hatch opens and a sickly alien struggles halfway out before dying. Ray and Rachel reach Mary Ann's parents' house, where they are reunited with Mary Ann and Robbie, who is alive after all.

A closing narration explains that the aliens' immune systems could not handle the countless billions of microbes that inhabit the Earth, and that humanity has "earned" the right to the planet by virtue of naturally coexisting with the rest of its biosphere.

Cast

 * Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier
 * Dakota Fanning as Rachel Ferrier
 * Justin Chatwin as Robbie Ferrier
 * Miranda Otto as Mary Ann Ferrier
 * Tim Robbins as Harlan Ogilvy
 * Rick Gonzalez as Vincent
 * Yul Vázquez as Julio
 * Lenny Venito as Manny the Mechanic
 * Lisa Ann Walter as Cheryl
 * Ann Robinson as Grandmother
 * Gene Barry as Grandfather
 * David Alan Basche as Tim
 * Roz Abrams as Herself