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 Dakota Fanning as Rachel Ferrier. war of the worlds
People from another world have provided quite a few of Steven Spielberg’s Mr Nice Guys, from the tune-playing space-travellers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the cutest alien of them all, E.T., whose heart was almost literally on his sleeve. Not that the director’s films don’t have their share of evil-minded critter, both human and otherwise. From the Great White predator of Jaws to the seemingly unstoppable velociraptors of Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s native planet Earth has fielded a pretty strong team of malefactors ready to flatten, chew up or otherwise dispatch whatever crosses their path. Human beings haven’t shown themselves to be much better: think the faceless truck driver in Duel, Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, or even the more recent faceless bureaucrats of The Terminal (well, OK, they came good in the end). But, like the comic-reading teenager he has in many ways remained, the 58-year-old Spielberg has showed every sign of wanting to believe that the universe was filled with benevolent beings and that, if we kept watching the skies for long enough, our trust would be rewarded. Until now. Spielberg’s new film, due out in almost every country in the world in the last week of June, features an army of aliens with real (if somewhat limited) attitude: they want to take over the world and destroy its inhabitants - which means ‘us’. Spielberg’s latest aliens are as unpleasant a race as any he has ever shown on screen. Based on HG Wells’ classic sci-fi novel, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds - whose script is by David Koepp (who wrote the first two Jurassic Parks, not to mention Spider-Man and Mission: Impossible) - updates the story, putting the focus on an ordinary working-class guy from New Jersey called Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), as he struggles to survive the invasion with his daughter, played by Dakota Fanning, who was featured in the Spielberg-produced TV series, Taken. It’s a story that the director has been wanting to tell for the best part of a decade, but shelved briefly when Independence Day, with its similar theme, came along. 
Dakota Fanning as Rachel Ferrier with her on-screen father, Tom Cruise. |
