Bong Joon Ho’s nominee for Spielberg’s best movie of the last 25 years is underrated, but should stand in the canon with Jaws and Jurassic Park.
The New York Times recently published the results of a poll determining the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far, and the #1 slot went to Bong Joon Ho’s Best Picture winner Parasite. (It topped the paper’s subsequent readers’ poll, too.) As it happens, Bong Joon Ho also voted in the poll, and the Times made his ballot (along with many others) available online. He lists the 2005 Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise movie War of the Worlds among his 10 choices, which makes that movie his selection for the best Steven Spielberg movie of the past 25 years. It’s a bold choice. But he may be right. At very least, War of the Worlds deserves to be talked about alongside classics like Jaws and Jurassic Park.
The Spielberg movie that actually made the overall top 100 list was his other (also excellent) Tom Cruise-led sci-fi film, Minority Report, at number 94. War of the Worlds, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was a bigger but more divisive hit back in 2005, though it was overshadowed by Cruise’s talk-show antics and Scientology-stumping. In fact, it wound up as Cruise’s last big money-maker until he revived interest in the Mission: Impossible franchise six years later.
The Cruise factor is part of why War of the Worlds might seem like a counterintuitive choice for Bong’s favorite Spielberg movie. The South Korean director obviously enjoys dark-hued genre films, and he made his own movie where a family encounters a fantastical creature: The Host, released just a year after War of the Worlds. But that movie’s tone is vastly different from Spielberg’s, veering into comedy and satire to complement its heartfelt drama.
Moreover, like Parasite, it uses a family ensemble to offer different point-of-view characters. Spielberg’s WotW, by contrast, is both vastly bigger and strikingly smaller. It’s one of the most intimate large-scale disaster movies ever mounted, chronicling no less than a massacre of the global human population by invading aliens, while sticking almost exclusively to the ground-level point-of-view of Ray (Tom Cruise), a super-divorced New Jersey dock worker, and his 10-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Ray’s teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is there, too, if only to wriggle away from Ray whenever possible.
The trio of characters initially navigating this alien-ravaged landscape vaguely recalls the three men venturing into the ocean in Jaws, and the boy-girl siblings bring to mind the kids in Jurassic Park.
