WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005) | FIRST TIME WATCHING | MOVIE REACTION 

The foghorn-sounding noise that the tripods make before they go on a killing spree is honestly one of the creepiest sounds I've ever heard in a movie. Also, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the two stars from the 1953 movie, made a cameo at the very end as the kid's grandparents.

This must be the first movie that Cassie spent more time hiding than Carly did

The original novel by H.G. Wells is amazing. Consider that he wrote it between 1895 and 1897, before cars, airplanes, and very few homes had electricity, he wrote about aliens coming to earth in spaceships and using laser beams instead of solid projectiles. His imagination was insane.

28:45 Ladies and Gentlemen. We have our first nomination for "Best Jump Scare" for the Poppies 2025!

I remember seeing this in theaters and thinking to myself "When was the last time I saw Tom Cruise playing a character who is simply a working man and father." He's not a navy pilot; not a Superspy; not a Vampire; not a Hotshot Lawyer getting paid 6 figures a year; he's just a hard working every man. This was a role that was just simple yet very grounded and real.

The older couple on the porch at the end were the original actors from the 1953 "War of the Worlds"

“From the moment the invaders arrived they were doomed, mankind had earned its immunity” what a line that tells so much. Amazing movie. Amazing reactions👏🏼

"You don't head to the city." There's a reason this saying exists: "Head for the hills!"

Lmao. Cassie would be the one to defeat the aliens with firm but polite words. "Can you leave already!"

I remember when this movie came out some criticism was that "no way humans would behave like that, they would come together and help each other in times of need and blah blah blah". Well, after seeing people fighting over toilet paper during the pandemic, I guess it's not that weird the way they behaved in this movie...

Cassie during an alien invasion “ can you just leave already?!” Aliens “well sheesh, you don’t have to be rude about it!” 😤

When Dakota throws her head down onto the car seat as they're frantically racing to safety of some kind, with the camera whipping down with her, Dakota crying and conveying absolute terror, then delivers the most chilling line in a movie: 'Is it the terrorists?' When I saw this opening day in the theatre, the collective audience gasped on this moment. We were only four years out from 9-11 and it was still fresh in our minds. Hearing it now, almost twenty years out, it takes me right back to the atmosphere of the times and unease still in the air. But, Dakota. I just saw her in an Episode of Friends where she guest stars as a little girl Joey has a scene with and she is freakin' all timer hilarious in it. And here she makes you tear up from her uncertainty and horror. The range on her at such a young age. She was a prodigy. Legend.

Independence Day had humans defeating the aliens with a computer "virus" which was a homage to war of the worlds.

Cassie's scream at the Martian face was absolutely priceless

I wanted to see this movie for my birthday with friends in high school, but I waited and waited and no one was showing up. I had resigned myself to seeing the movie all alone, when two of my less-closer friends showed up together. They were the last two I expected to show up, but they came with a present and a card, and we all watched War of the Worlds. It made all the difference. I'll always associate this movie with friendship, how people can always surprise you and the difference even a small gesture can make to someone, even if they aren't your best friend.

Dakota Fanning always was an uncannily good actor as a kid. Her performance in this is quite amazing.

No one mentions the cast, while not “Star studded” there are some well known ones. My favorite of which, is Miranda Otto who plays Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings plays the mom. ❤️

War of the Worlds is a novel first published in the late 1800s. The radio broad cast of the story in 1938 was narrated by Orson Wells (if you don't know who he is he is worth looking up). The story was presented as radio news reports causing many to believe they were true and not fiction send many people into panic . Some news papers said that the panic was exaggerated.

The original story is a simple premise. Aliens come to earth, start destroying everything, but are killed by common viruses that humans are resistant to. But its a classic.

In case you have not noticed, this movie was a reunion for two TOP GUN actors: Tom Cruise & Tim Robbins. A lot of people had forgotten Tim Robbins played Merlin, the radar interceptor officer (RIO) or the back seater who was initially paired with Cougar. Upon Maverick's return to the carrier just before the massive dogfight with the Mig-28s, Merlin became his RIO. TOP GUN forever!!!

Ever want a night of entertainment without the screen, Jeff Waynes musical the War of the Worlds is the best version of this story. Narrated by Richard Burton, absolutely incredible.

Everyone take a drink every time someone mentions the 1938 radio broadcast.

War of the Worlds is a surprisingly dark film. The 9/11 imagery (less than four years after the attacks), the human ash covering Ray, Rachel’s terror and anxiety during the first attack (amazing acting from Dakota btw), Ray being forced to kill Harlan, and the extremely uncomfortable family dynamics due to Ray’s poor parenting…it can be a rough watch for those thinking it’s just eacapist blockbuster fare from Spielberg.

24:31 This part too. The entire sequence in the basement was so nerve-wracking and tense. What happens at the end of it is understandable but so unsettling at the same time.

When you realize the two characters in the basement fighting over the shotgun were in the same plane in Top Gun 20 years earlier 👍

One of the best parts about reaction channels, is that they can give new "life" to a movie you thought you didn't like. I remember being _so_ disappointed when seeing this in theaters that i've never watched it again. But watching this, there are so many pieces of this movie that have been stuck in my mind for almost two decades now. And the ending was suitably epic and quite a bit more satisfying than i remember: "for neither do men live or die in vain." It's a powerful statement, when you're in the right mind to hear it.

H.G Wells wrote the original book in 1897. At the time of its publication, the British Empire was at its largest. The British conquered the land of the Zulus and was soon to be at war with the Boers in South Africa. H.G. Wells wrote his book with a message of anti-imperialism and colonialism. From perspective of the reader of what its like to be invaded by a peoples with advanced technology. A very, "How would you like it if this happened to you?" perspective. H.G Wells was mostly inspired by the Black War in the early 1800s. Where British colonists pretty much wiped out the aboriginal Tasmanians. Before the British colonists arrived, it was estimated that there were 5,000-7,000 aboriginal Tasmanians living on the Island. By the time of the end the war, there was about 100 left.

Small fun fact: immediately after the ferry scene there should have been one where Rey, Rechel and Robby find themselves the next day in a neighborhood of a city invaded by a battalion of tripods; immediately afterwards they are forced to hide behind an SUV as a tripod reaches their position and begins to capture dozens and dozens of people from their homes. It would have been a scene that would have made it even clearer that there is no hope ANYWHERE and also this explains why Robby wants to join the fight and why in the scene with the army it is evening again.

Someone else has probably said this, but what the aliens were trying to do was to “teraform” the Earth. Change it so they can live on it comfortably. It’s the same thing that Zod and the Kryptonians were trying to do to Earth in “Man of Steel”. It’s what some scientists are proposing that we do to Mars if we ever get there…

The scene where they are driving on the "turnpike" and stop at the farm house was filmed next to my house. when they started filming, they asked for locals to be extras....it was a "big deal" in my tiny farm town lol. The school even told students and teachers to go be extras and don't worry about missing school lol. Only downside was they would shut down the road to my house when filming and I couldn't get home in the afternoons. Literally had the road blocked with cops and I could see my house but was forced to sit in my truck and wait. That was super annoying. Tom Cruise apparently left large tips (money) for waitstaff at restaurants...and also left money for a local kid that was trying to raise money for medical treatment. I think there was like a jar/sign at our local Dairy Queen and he left a bunch of money.

When women ask men what we are thinking about and we say nothing, but really we are running scenes like this thru our minds all the time. We just never tell y'all. You are welcome.

"We'll build our own tripods. Ours will have four legs." -Michael Madsen (Scary Movie 4)

I found out a while back that the grandparents at the end were the cast of the original War of the Worlds

This is easily one of my top 10 favorite movies. I saw it as a kid, and it just stuck with me. I think no other alien invasion movie, has had this sense of hopelessness and despair. The conflict is almost entirely out of the hands of the main characters, and the best they can do is just survive. No big military planning in the pentagon, no famous landmarks getting blown up, just a very small scale and desperate survival story, in the face of hopeless odds.

“Carly is tired” Damn I wish I looked that refreshed when I was tired

I know the original is fantastic, but I have to give it to Spielberg here. I always forget how great he is at horror films 🎥 This is the guy that began his career with Jaws.

One of Spielbergs most underrated movies.

I really love the sound design and the sense of scale in this movie. You really buy how helpless humanity feels against these giant, seemingly-unstoppable invasion machines.

19:49 All aboard the Inferno Express! Destination: Hell!

"I might just want to call it." So real. So funny.

Fantastic reaction. That scream slo-mo recap is definitely gonna win the Poppie award. 😅 I saw this when it came out and walked around the corner to my favorite pub, sat down at the bar and Becky the bartender said, How ya doun'? And I said, I feel like I just got hit by a bus.

I have never wanted a kid to die in a movie as much as I did Robbie. The opening and closing monologues by Morgan Freeman are directly from the original novel.

I'd forgotten how intense this movie is. What a thriller!

Classic Cassie 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 8:19 "Try changing the solenoid." 12:33 "He's the only one that's got a new "solerator" or whatever." 28:44 "OK. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake...Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie...!@#%&@#$@#!!!!" 29:11 *(Lamaze breathing)* "Ho! Ho! Ho!...Nope! Nope!! NNNOOO!!!! *(Puts up crucifix fingers)* 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 29:16 *(Jazz Hands Finger Fence)* + *(Safe-Place Babbling)* 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

That jumpscare was one of a kind

The scene where the tripod comes out of the ground in the town was amazing no CGI they built that whole area with the buildings breaking in half just love non-CGI effort put into movies

The original War of The Worlds Movie from 1953 Still holds up and should not be overlooked.

That is what a mob in panic does. I've been near one. Most frightening thing I've ever seen.

This movie had some flaws, but it captured the tone of existential dread and hopelessness perfectly. Fight back, get slaughtered. Run away, get hunted down. Hide somewhere, they will find you eventually. Unless, of course, you're Ray with two little hand grenades that can level a house somehow. Lol

28:50 Now that's a foot pop lol

The grandparents at the end of the movie are the original stars (Gene Barry and Ann Robinson) from the 1953 War of the Worlds movie.

You may wish to someday try the original from 1953. It's quite good.

The reveal of the alien tripods with the vaporizing hit very hard in theatres. It was 4 years after 9/11 and the images of people covered in grey dust running through the streets of NYC was still kind of fresh.

39:56 Mark! 8K Thumbs Up + Mine! 👍 You're welcome, and thanks! 😊 Notes: They want Planet Earth just like we want to colonize too! At the movie theater, the audience helped me endure Dakota's screaming! At home, it took a lot of effort, and with CC on, I can mute her screams! Now I can enjoy the movie despite the bad behavior of the people and her fear and screaming. I think someone is trying to scam me! Why would you want me to text you? 😒

18:41 Hearing Cassie say *“hell,”* you know it’s bad.

1938 radio version of this story caused a panic

This is one of my favorite Spielberg movies, I'll never forget seeing it in theaters back in '05. Such an incredible film

You saying the moving was traumatizing was so real. So many people hated this movie and I actually was disturbed and in awe by it when I saw it. I was like 16 when I saw it and was literally on the edge of my seat the whole movie. I thought it was very well done.

Others have already mentioned the connections people made with this movie and the 9/11 attacks due to their close proximity, time-wise. There's a little more to it. There's a reason why there are very few sweeping, overhead shots in this film. It's producers were inspired by all of the camcorder footage of the 9/11 attacks, and filmed it with primarily eye-level shots to replicate that sensation of being on the ground and looking up at a major disaster.

Considering that there are thousands of species of bacteria on our skin and in our guts and probably elsewhere. Even eating/pulverizing humans without heat treatment(let alone if you let them decompose prior) could be dangerous for those not having appropriate immunity or medical treatment.

Tim Robbin’s from Shawshank Redemption was the crazy guy in the house. I think he did an excellent job

When he stops to look when running at the beginning he's checking its direction & speed btw

Dakota fanning is such an awesome actor ❤ she actually upstaged Tom cruise in this movie and he was so generous to be one of the few major actors to make that happen for her ❤

The bits that made me most tense watching this movie was when Tom's character kept leaving his daughter on her own.

In the original movie all churches survived so Spielberg made sure the first building destroyed in his version was a church. 😮😂

I remember when I first saw this, in the movie theater, there was an electrical storm outside when we left. It was creepy as hell.

The foghorn warning by the Aliens was a classic chilling addition. Very frightening. When Cassie disappeared under the covers, I thought she had spilled a beverage all over herself 😂

"You don't go to the city. You go to the country." And eat a lot of peaches.

I know that few catch that, but the last words, about the mankind "right to survive in this universe", because of all those we have lost over the time, and that ultimately "nobody lives or dies in vain" are among the most powerful, wholesome and uplifting words ever written about mankind.

I love "The War of the Worlds", it was one of the first classic novels I read when I was a kid in school, and I was utterly thrilled and horrified. It is about reverse colonisation, the same way the British Empire did during the height of the Victorian era and before, when it had founded land that was already occupied and exterminated anything that was there before. In the book, H. G. Wells says "Remember what ruthless and utter destruction we have wrought on other animals, the bison and the dodo, and the Tazmanians; who are we to complain if the Martians warred in a similar fashion?" And in the book it is an invasion from Mars rather than from deep space. And in the book, Victorian England is rocked by these machines that have fallen from the stars, these cylinders that come from Mars and contain their war machines, tripod fighting machines and their heat rays, and when the later cylinders fall, it is gathering machines, "squat, metallic spiders with huge articulated claws" as the Jeff Wayne musical version of the story calls them. That is an adaptation that I highly recommend watching! The music is amazing, the story is thrilling, and the staging is phenomenal. It also has a lot of high points from the novel, the destruction of Weybridge by the Fighting Machines and their heat ray; the exodus from London which contains the most famous lines in the novel: "Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together...this was no disciplined march, it was a stampede, a stampede gigantic and terrible, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind." It also has the epic battle between a Fighting Machine and the grey ironclad battle vessel Thunderchild, which is meant to be mankind's desperate attempt to fight the Martians and fails. That ends the first act of the story. It is so intense and so wonderfully done!! The book is a book I highly recommend reading! I am glad that you were thrilled by this movie, it isn't the best by a long shot but it does capture the horrific elements of the story!

I remember seeing this in theaters. I was wide alert the entire time after the first attack. Great movie.

I’m constantly asking myself why I keep watching this channel, and I think I finally figured it out. It’s just … wholesome fun. Thanks.

6:19 "Cassie, Cassie....oh no Cassie..."😂😂😂

It actually caused no panic. Look it up

I love how it specifically targets everything, BUT your clothes. That is a very specific laser.

"I might just want to call it." The single greatest moment in channel history. That was epic.

Tom Cruise's character is just one of the best heroes ever. Half-ass looser and failed father who steps up like no one else and gives every last thing he's got to save his children. When the shit hit the interstellar fan his true colors shone like a blinding supernova.

When I first read the book around the age of 13, I thought the ending was amazing. The smallest living earth organisms saved the planet, and humanity!

It’s that new solorater that does the trick. Stock up on spares at AutoZone, O’Reilly, NAPA. 🤣🤣🤣

I love at the beginning that you both were so tired. I thought, "they're gonna be wide awake in about 10 minutes." 😅 Saw this movie in theaters on my 16th birthday. One of my all time faves!

Oh no! The sweet lamb that is Carly being thrown to the wolves by an unsuspecting sister. Sounds like Old Testament drama to me. My prayers go out to them both.😅

The original alien invasion story, I believe. All the other films basically used this as a template.

This was made famous by a radio broadcast by Orson Wells of this like it was a real event. It put the nation into a panic.

12:55 This was parodied in one of the Scary Movie movies where the alien rays were only disintegrating people’s clothes - the opposite lol

*No one would have believed* *In the last years of the nineteenth century* *That human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space* - The Narrator Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds would be something Cassie would adore. But album reactions would be something new to the channel so I have no idea if that would work. Free time though I highly recommend the album to everyone.

Grampa & Grandma were the stars of the original 1953 "War of the Worlds"

A very underrated movie, people expected a sci-fi action like indepence day, but it is actually a movie of how incomprehensible mass murder, and genocide is for the normal people. There are some references to 9/11 and the holocaust

When you both wanted to jump under the covers…Classic sister move..

I lived through the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Now for me, it was no big deal. I had lived through others and while this one was bigger than normal, Not a big deal. As far as I could see, there was no major damage. But as there was no power, there was no way to find out exactly. I found out through my car radio, that part of a bridge collapsed. And there was some other things that happened. As I drove a friend home from work (who was from New York and never experienced an earthquake and in partial shock) through the City, I would find out much more. When I got him home deep in San Francisco, we found his wife on their doorsteps in shock and crying. The chaos of no power and many many people in shock. Wandering around aimlessly. But I also saw SO MANY people comforting the people in shock. There were people directing traffic. There were people guarding stores in the big shopping area downtown to prevent looting. People going through the rubble to find survivors of a highway that collapsed on itself. Yes, bad things happened. But an amazing number of people came together and did what was needed and helped. It reinforced in me the goodness of humanity. I'll never forget that.

20:52… “I might just wanna call it…” 😂😅🤣😳

''When it's ready, my body will just push it out'' When Tom Cruise's daughter says that about her splinter, it's obviously a foretaste of what Earth is going to do to the evil aliens at the end... When it has enough, our big old planet will simply push them out. .. As an apprentice-not-so-good screenplay writer my self, I love trying to find that kind of foretaste of the conclusion in every film. This is one of my great pleasures when working on a screenplay: hiding information about the conclusion at the beginning. This means that at the end, if it's done well, we have an unconscious impression that it's logical. I always use the example of this film to talk about this little scriptwriting thing. Now that you know, try and find those clues in every film you watch. It's fun.

Funny, but I thought Carly would be the main scaredy-cat and not Cassie so much. Carly is more braver than we thought, who knew.

The prologue and the epilogue are the first and last paragraphs from the novel. H.G. Wells commenced writing War Of The Worlds in 1895. It was first featured as a magazine serial in 1897 and the first edition of the novel was released on the 1st of January 1898.

"I'm better at aliens, I guess?" Lol

"I wonder why theyre picking up the people?" .... OOhhh Dear I love when you ask these foreshadowing questions 🤣

One thing to keep in mind is that the original novel was written in the late 1800s, when germ theory was still relatively new. So having communicable disease be the solution was a pretty groundbreaking idea. And really, how often do you see an alien invasion story where the aliens are defeated by a non-human earth life-form?

one thing i appreciate about your reactions is you have both earbuds in instead of just in one ear. there's so many reactors who just stick it in one ear and prioritize talking the whole time. it's just not how movies are meant to be experienced

I hope we get Crocodile Dundee 2 and Beverly hills cop 2 soon.

You must listen to the original radio broadcast, from 1938. It was broadcast live as if it was a news cast and actually happening, it's insane and caused mass panic before the first commercial break. Because of this most missed that it wasn't real due to fleeing homes and trying to find cover from the invasion they believed was real.

23:12 Mark! In the 1953 movie, a nuclear attack was how the Earthlings learned about the Martians having force fields to protect them! Decades later, "Independence Day" would repeat that tactic, but with updated technology. 😮