Why Did Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds Turn into a Cosmic Trainwreck Even Mars Would Mock?
Added on October 16, 2025 inEntertainment News Cards, Movie News Cards
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Ever wonder what happens when a timeless sci-fi classic crashes headfirst into modern Hollywood spectacle? Especially under a retrograde Mercury, where communication and interpretation might as well be alien invasions themselves? 2025 brings us a fresh — though critically infamous — “War of the Worlds,” featuring none other than Ice Cube and Eva Longoria. While the latest adaptation is making waves for all the wrong reasons, it also marks the 20th anniversary of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s blockbuster take on H.G. Wells’ apocalypse saga. The 2005 version was a force to reckon with, crushing the box office and snagging three Oscar nominations, but the real intrigue lies in just how faithful it stayed to its source material — and no, fleeting screen appearances from Tim Robbins aren’t the only plot twist here. Buckle up as we dissect everything from casting quirks to CGI wizardry, with a cosmic nod to humanity’s constant dance between chaos and survival.
It’s 2025 and apparently one of the worst movies to ever release is a version of War of the Worlds starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria. As a film trash connoisseur you better believe that I will check that movie out eventually or at least when it inevitably falls to Tyler and Jesse over at Awfully Good. 2025 also marks the 20th anniversary since one of the biggest iterations of the story ever to make it to the screen. 2005 saw another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise after the wildly successful Minority Report earlier in the decade. The movie was a smash success with audiences making over 5 times its budget and with critics landing on the very positive side of things with an eventual 3 Oscar nominations, but you know why we are here. War of the Worlds was a success by nearly every measure but how faithfully does it follow its original source material. Lets avoid Tim Robbins at all costs as we find out what happened to this adaptation.
The Movie
War of the Worlds isn’t exactly some new IP. It has been made into an astounding number of comics, video and board games, radio plays, television events, and movies. The most famous apart from today’s entry are the original 1953 George Pal produced theatrical film and the Orson Welles radio broadcast that scared the bejesus out of a huge audience. After the success of Minority Report in 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise wanted to work together again, and Tom visited Mr. Spielberg on the set of Catch Me If You Can to discuss future opportunities. They discussed three topics but landed on a new adaptation of War of the Worlds and were instantly excited to get going. Originally, the duo asked J.J. Abrams to write the script but he was busy working on his soon to be legendary show Lost, so they moved to Josh Friedman who had written the story for Keanu Reeves action movie Chain Reaction but would go on to write the screenplays for Black Dahlia from Brian De Palma, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes from 2024, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Longtime collaborator of Spielberg David Koepp said “Nah, dawg” and rewrote it after reading the original screenplay.
Joining Tom Cruise would be Miranda Otto from Lord of the Rings as Spielberg really wanted her in the movie. He even changed her character around to fit her real-life situation of being pregnant. Tim Robbins doesn’t show up for more than half the movie but steals the scene as a terrifying and disturbed individual. Robbins is probably best known for The Shawshank Redemption, but the Oscar winner has had a long and varied career. Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin were cast as Tom Cruise’s children which ended up being one of the notable Spielberg hallmarks of kids having a hard time with their parents after Spielberg himself experienced that in his own life. Filming lasted over 70 days and primarily took place on the east coast in Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York with some scenes being shot in California. The score was handled by another longtime collaborator of the director’s in John Williams and while it may not stack up with his all timers just in the category of Spielberg classics alone, it is a solid effort that fits in with what we see on screen.
Visual effects were handled by, to nobody’s surprise, Industrial Light and Magic, but this was the first time Spielberg really leaned into computer usage when making the storyboards after his good friend George Lucas showed him what he could do. There was still a fair amount of practical effects usage to go along with digital and blue screen, especially when they blended the digital with the live action and miniature shots. There ended up being a huge amount of secrecy during the shoot as well with Koepp emailing portions of the script to Spielberg who would distribute only parts of that to the pertinent parties that were shooting that day. Most of the actors had no idea what the ending would be or even what the aliens looked like and during press tours, very little was shown or given away. There was also a marketing campaign where Paramount partnered with Hitachi to create an immersive online experience which revolved around human survival against alien invaders. Unfortunately, the relationship between Spielberg and Cruise became strained during release as the director felt that Cruise’s behavior, such as the infamous Oprah couch episode, was a distraction to the movie and his ties to Scientology were under enhanced scrutiny.
The movie was released on June 29th, 2005, and even with its high budget of 132 million dollars, it pulled in an eventual 603 million in addition to its high number of home video sales. Critics were also high on it not only in reviews but in that it was nominated for 3 Academy Awards with the categories of Best Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects. While it wouldn’t win any of those nominations, the effects and sound still hold up really well 20 years later…. mostly.
The Story
Herbert George Wells, much better known as H.G., was an English writer who would become known as the father of science fiction. He wrote short stories, novellas, novels, and non-fiction that typically had messages behind them like social commentary, politics, science, and history. He was born in England in September of 1866 to a shopkeeper and housekeeper. What set him on his path to becoming an author was an accident when he was only 8 years old that forced him to be bedridden with a broken leg. He found himself getting lost in books that his father would bring him while he healed. Financial trouble would force the family to have their children work as apprentices and while H.G. would fail as both a draper and a chemist assistant, he would find even more works to read that continued his education of a different sort.
When H.G. went off to school he would finally try his hand at writing and produced the short story The Chronic Argonauts which would be a precursor to one of his most famous eventual books. He would have a long and interesting life which would include being on the cover of Time magazine as well as becoming a futurist who would predict things like airplanes, nuclear weapons, tanks, space travel, and even satellite TV. There’s a chance that we cover some of his other works but it’s cool to know that he was alive long enough to not only see the advent of films but even get to the sound era and be able to write the screenplay based on one of his own works with Things to Come from 1937, based on his own story The Shape of Things to Come, which are both minor classics.
Some of his other super notable works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man. It’s hard to say what he is most famous for, but I would wager that War of the Worlds is his biggest legacy. It was released in the UK in 1898 and has never been out of print. The book was received well by critics and audiences with critics noting the novel touching on things like colonialism, human evolution, natural selection, and social Darwinism. It has been made into dozens of properties from theatrical releases and TV events to cheap knockoffs from the likes of Asylum Pictures and continues to have adaptations as seen by the abysmal 2025 iteration.
What is the same?
War of the Worlds follows an invasion of earth from an alien race. Humans are curious at first, but it is made perfectly clear that these extraterrestrials are not here to cohabitate or make friends. They are here to conquer and kill and it is going to be a hard fight for humanity to win. We follow one man who is in search of family as he wanders past the military attempting to fight the invaders as well as people being obliterated and trying to escape. Things seem grim and the Martians seem to also be harvesting humans for one reason or another and our hero meets another person who he takes shelter with. That new friend loses it a bit and has to be dealt with and dies while the hero escapes from the Martian invaders again who pilot massive tripods that roam the land and sea. The main character then notices a series of red vines growing across the landscape before heading into a major city where military is planning to continue their attack. The narrator approaches a downed tripod, and a dying alien oozes out of the cockpit. The aliens have been killed by pathogens on Earth that they were never prepared for on their home world and our hero is reunited with his family.
What is different?
The basic story as you can see is very similar, but they are executed completely different. The book main character is “The Narrator” so that the reader can feel like the protagonist as the story progresses while the movie has fast running stunt performer Tom Cruise as Ray who is a divorced dad, another change from the book as the narrator eventually ends up finding and being with his wife, who is trying to protect his family and get them to safety. Two other obvious but big changes are that the movie takes place in the US, but we know it’s happening worldwide and in modern day 2005 while the novel takes place in England and presumably only England because that’s where the ship lands and it also takes place in contemporary mid-1890s when the book was written. This obviously changes a ton of things like population density, technology, and geography.
Interestingly enough though with all those seemingly major changes, the two versions mirror each other pretty well in terms of what happens, the movie just modernizes it and makes it a summer blockbuster. Obviously, there is the family angle as well as a much bigger focus on humanity crumbling on each other when times get tough as showcased in the car scene where the armed man takes the car and then is wiped out by the crowd, but it’s a similar path followed by both. A couple other big differences are that in the movie, humanity is powerless at first against the Martian force as nothing can stop the tripods who, it should be said, come from the ground rather than space even if that’s where they initially came from, where as the story has the military, a ship in particular, put up a hell of a fight. While Ray also ends up finding his family, he doesn’t quite suffer the same massive nervous breakdown and attempts to end things like our book narrator. Instead, he just has that general existential dread and constant anxiety that all us millennials suffer from. Finally, and I mean that as the last thing I’m going to mention as there are more nuances and scenes that differ, is how the movie treats the companion character. After Ray loses his son to fighting with the soldiers, he hides in the house of Tim Robbins Harlan character. This character is more of a religious figure representing that aspect of society in the book and is only knocked out by our narrator before being killed by the Martians whereas Ray has to kill Harlan himself after he becomes much more dangerous than his book counterpart which also leans into that humanity crumbling aspect. It’s also probably my favorite segment in the movie but I’m a sucker for Tim Robbins.
Legacy
This movie was an Oscar nominated smash hit, but I really didn’t like it as much as I used to. The special effects looked really wonky at times and even if that was just the platform or version I watched, it still took me out of it. I also didn’t find the characters particularly likable which isn’t a deal breaker either but makes the journey less fun. The noise the tripods make still haunt my dreams but while the movie is one of the big hits of 2005, the book is one of the most influential works of all time. I am mad at myself that it took until I was 40 to read it and I recommend it to everyone. There will always be new iterations and adaptations, both good and bad, but there will only ever be one H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Adaptation? can be seen below. To see the other shows we have to offer, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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