How War of the Worlds became most controversial movie

The threat had come from within; from “right beneath our goddamn feet”, as Tim Robbins’s paranoid patriot Harlan Ogilvy would put it.

- Al Horner, The Independent

Twenty years ago this week, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds opened in British cinemas, offering us a big-budget replay of a trauma from which many of us were still recovering. The film wasn't subtle in its nods to 9/11. After an opening shot that lingers on the Manhattan skyline, a deadly attack unfolds, glimpsed at one point through a grainy home camcorder. Citizens sprint from collapsing buildings, a church being one of the first structures to fall (September II was, after all, the first strike in what both sides would frame as a holy war).