War of the Worlds (2005) on Netflix
PG-1320051h 56mAdventureSci-FiThriller
Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker in New Jersey, has his children Rachel and Robbie for a weekend visit. A lightning storm strikes, and a three-legged machine rises from the street.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.6/10513,963 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes76%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ray Ferrier operates a dock crane in Brooklyn and sees his children only on weekends. His pregnant former wife Mary Ann leaves ten-year-old Rachel and teenage Robbie at his Bayonne home while she travels to Boston. A thunderstorm drives lightning into a nearby intersection, stopping clocks and cutting the power. At the hole it leaves, a machine on three legs climbs out and destroys the crowd with heat beams. Ray retrieves a pistol and gathers food, then takes the minivan his friend Manny had repaired. Mary Ann's house is empty, and a news crew says machines are attacking cities around the world.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about War of the Worlds (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steven Spielberg had Miranda Otto in mind for Mary Ann Ferrier, but when he called her she was pregnant and assumed the role would be missed; he wrote her pregnancy into the character instead.
- For the neighborhood plane crash, the production bought a retired All Nippon Airways Boeing 747 registered JA8147, paying $2 million to transport it, dismantled it into pieces and built houses around them; the wreckage stayed for the Universal Studios back-lot tour.
- Spielberg kept so much of the film secret that the cast and crew were left confused about how the aliens looked; writer David Koepp said Spielberg would not give the screenplay to anybody, emailing only the pages each person needed.
- Spielberg said War of the Worlds was the first film on which he used the computer to animate all the storyboards, a technique he adopted after a visit to his friend George Lucas.
- Spielberg ruled out any blood or gore for the Heat-Ray deaths, with effects supervisor Pablo Helman recalling it was "a horror movie for kids", so the crew vaporized the victims using live-action dust alongside CGI ray assimilation and particles because the effect was too complex and time-pressed to be fully digital.
- The destruction of the Bayonne Bridge was the Industrial Light & Magic crew's toughest shot, made on a four-week deadline so it could run in a Super Bowl trailer; the scene originally had only a gas station exploding until Spielberg suggested blowing up the bridge too.
- The scene of bodies floating down the river was shot on the Farmington River in Windsor, Connecticut by a second unit directed by Vic Armstrong, using a stand-in for Dakota Fanning filmed from behind, with the credited actors' faces cut in later.
