War of the Worlds (2005)

Most people think so. 78% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 74%.

Ray Ferrier is a divorced dockworker and less-than-perfect father. Soon after his ex-wife and her new husband drop off his teenage son and young daughter for a rare weekend visit, a strange and powerful lightning storm touches down. Wikipedia ↗

War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science fiction disaster film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on H.G. Wells's 1898 novel. Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a working-class divorced father in New Jersey who must protect his two children — teenage son Robbie played by Justin Chatwin and young daughter Rachel played by Dakota Fanning — when massive alien tripods emerge from beneath the Earth's surface and begin systematically exterminating humanity with heat rays and harvesting human blood.

Spielberg conceived the film explicitly as a post-9/11 story, and the imagery — people fleeing through ash-covered streets, fliers posted for missing loved ones, the casual brutality of an overwhelming force against a helpless civilian population — deliberately evoked the September 11th attacks with visceral directness. The tripod emergence sequence, in which the ground cracks open on a suburban street and a machine rises amid screaming crowds, was one of the most terrifying scenes in modern science fiction. Dakota Fanning, just 10 years old, delivered a remarkably intense performance — her screams of genuine terror were so convincing that they became the film's emotional barometer.

The film earned $591 million worldwide. Tim Robbins's unhinged basement survivor Ogilvy provided the film's most disturbing human element.