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. 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.

But make no mistake, Spielberg’s movie is one of the ultimate pieces of pop culture born of September 11. “I’d even suggest that it’s a key film in the evolution of how America processed [that day],” says Terrence McSweeney, senior lecturer in film and television studies at Southampton Solent University and the editor of a book of essays titled American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11. He argues that, in War of the Worlds’ acknowledgement of the horrors of that bright Tuesday morning in September, America found much-needed catharsis. More than half a billion dollars’ worth of catharsis, to be precise. Spielberg’s summer blockbuster was a commercial smash, exceeding the box-office takings of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, released a few weeks prior. It had been a long road to this tale of mankind versus Martians for the director, as War of the Worlds executive producer Damian Collier explains. Back in the 1970s, Jeff Wayne — creator of the famous rock-opera version of Wells’s book, and Collier’s long-time business partner – “sent a copy of the album to Spielberg with the hope that he’d turn it into a movie,” explains Collier. “Spielberg sent a letter back saying: ‘I’ve received your album and I found it absolutely incredible. But my schedule for 1981 to 1982 is far too crammed to take on a movie of this size.’ It’s quite an interesting kind of artifact, that letter, because it was sort of prophetic. Steven of course would end up making War of the Worlds. Just in his own way... when the time was right.”

The right time was a troubled time. Spielberg is thought to have been in Los Angeles working on the edit for his Philip K Dick adaptation Minority Report when attacks on America’s eastern seaboard claimed 2,977 lives. One image from that day stuck with him: “Everybody in Manhattan fleeing across the George Washington Bridge,” he told a press conference in 2005. The sight of “Americans fleeing for their lives, being attacked for no reason, having no idea why they’re being attacked and who is attacking them” would form the basis for his movie.

“There has been a conscious emotional shift in this country,” Spielberg explained further, in a later interview with USA Today. The aftermath of the attacks saw warm, comforting entertainment — ideally with a streak of patriotism — become the de facto form of media in US homes, as Americans sought distraction from terror. Spielberg’s movie, though, would press into the bruise, with imagery that confronted that painful memory. A crashed plane fuselage, evocative of the United 93 flight that came down in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Walls of photos of missing loved ones. Shots of distraught, shell-shocked Americans crossing a bridge, just like Spielberg had seen on the George Washington. These weren’t just flourishes added to a film to give it real-world relevance; they were the film. Would Spielberg have made War of the Worlds without 9/11, one reporter for German magazine Die Spiegel asked in 2005? “Probably not,” came his blunt reply.

The director had made films before that “repackaged cultural trauma for the consumption of mainstream audiences”, McSweeney points out, “whether it’s the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, the D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan or slavery in Amistad”. Never before, though, had he tackled a trauma as recent as this one, and the jury was out among America’s critical community as to whether it had arrived too soon. Stephanie Zacharek — now chief film critic at Time Magazine, then a writer for Salon – complained that Spielberg had lost “his sense of decency” as well as his “faith in the decency of his audience”. Timothy Noah, meanwhile, let his feelings be known in a piece for Slate reminding filmmakers that “9/11 was not a summer movie” to be mined for ideas. War of the Worlds, he wrote, appropriated the imagery of that day “in a way that can only be described as pornographic”.