Chase's 100 Movies/100 Scenes: 100 - War of the Worlds (2005)

Over the next few/several months, I'm going to be going through my 100 favorite films and my favorite scenes from those movies. I will be counting down from 100, but overall the order does not matter until I reach around the last fourth of the list. I hope all the readers will find this interesting. This list isn't really full of "good" or "timeless" films, but rather what I love.

To kick off the list I will be talking about Steven Spielberg's 2005 sci-fi "remake" War of the Worlds. Now, I'll be the first to say that this is not a good film. In fact, I have a lot of issues with this movie. For one it exists in too many Spielberg cliches such as broken up families, crazed righteous fathers, so on and so further. the film has a lame ending, poor casting and Dakota Fanning...you get what I'm saying. Where War of the Worlds fails on the big storytelling elements, it makes up in perfect small moments. Spielberg gets family dynamics in big bad way, most of the dialogue is fluid and natural and the special effects are really amazing and terrifying in many ways.

I like this movie, but it is bad. this is my 100 because of one scene that is one of the most amazing and compelling moments in sci-fi film history. The scene is around 15-20 minutes into the film. We've gotten to know the characters, we get the family dynamics and such. Then a massive lightening storm takes place just down the street from the main character's house. The Tom Cruise character, Ray, leaves the house and follows a massive crowd of people to a hole in the middle of an intersection caused by the lightening storm. suddenly the ground begins to crack and split open and a massive alien/tripod ship...thing comes out of the ground and starts vaporizing people.

Why this scene is so amazing is in how intense everything is. It seems like such a cliche scene, but these cliches are revitalized in such a brilliant ways where we get something that is more like Saving Private Ryan than an alien invasion film. When people are being vaporized by the alien death ray it is terrifying. The way Spielberg shoots the scene and the effects used make the moment someone is blown to dust horrifying. When I first saw this film I was shaking from fear, the scene truly unnerved me. I watched this film recently and it still holds up in a big way. Again, War of the Worlds isn't a good film, but it has a scene that holds some hope for the future of alien invasion film.