"War Of The Worlds" (2005)

All weekend long, I've had a cold, so, when Saturday night came along, I resisted temptation to go out, and instead stayed in, and finished surgery on AR Drone 2.0 (#1) and watched Tom Cruise in "War of the Worlds" (2005).

The story is a perfect Rorschach test of society's anxieties:

The War of the Worlds (1898), a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist's (and his brother's) adventures in London and the countryside around London as Earth is invaded by Martians. Written in 1895–97, it is one of the earliest stories that details a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race.

...The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism, and generally Victorian superstitions, fears and prejudices.

When I recently saw the 1953 film version again, what struck me most was the resigned attitude of the military to their failure to stop the Martians after nuking a portion of southern California. That resignation is so much different than today's panicked over-reaction to imagined "terrorists", and was a direct reflection of having passed through a harrowing recent test: World War II battles, barely eight years prior, where American soldiers routinely died by the tens of thousands. This version seemed to be a commentary on bad and careless parenting. It didn't have quite the same gravitas as the 1953 version, but it was OK. Nevertheless, I liked how they tried to blend H.G. Well's Martian tripods with the scarier parts of the 1953 movie, in respectful honor of both, without stinting on the possibilities of modern film magic. I was most impressed how they used the millisecond beading of lightning (a real, and very interesting phenomenon observed in natural lightning) in service of the story. Real science! Imagine!