Why War of the Worlds is soaked in tragedy of 9/11

Turning 20 this week, Steven Spielberg's loose adaptation of the HG Wells classic channelled US panic after the fall of the Twin Towers to tell an alien invasion story, says Al Horner

- Al Horner

The threat had come from within; from “right beneath our goddamn feet”, as Tim Robbins’s paranoid patriot Harlan Ogilvy would put it. 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 11 was, after all, the first strike in what both sides would frame as a holy war).

Tom Cruise, playing divorced dad Ray, soon finds his face turned white from clouds of dust, echoing a famous photo of Marcy Borders, the New York legal assistant whose ghostly appearance after the towers fell resulted in one of that day's defining images. And perhaps most notably of all, these terrorists didn't launch their plot from afar, as is usually the case in alien invasion movies. Like the 19 al-Qaeda operatives who took control of planes on 9/11 - all of whom had been living in America, a sleeper cell waiting to strike - this destruction was wrought from upon US soil.

Two decades on, it's easy to gloss over the echoes of 9/11 in Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of HG Wells's classic novel. After all, we're now living in a time of superhero cinema domination: what are those movies forged in, if not the iconography of that day? Toppling skyscrapers, plumes of smoke, rubble-strewn streets. War of the Worlds' 9/11-isms, by comparison, might not seem that remarkable to someone watching the film for the first time in 2025.