![]() Dick, whose works have inspired other sci-fi tentpoles like Blade Runner and Total Recall. However, it's the mash-up of Spielberg and Cruise, along with the chrome steel cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, which transforms the story into a Maltese Falcon for the 21st century. ![]() That's partly due to the source material, a 1956 novella called The Minority Report and written by Philip K. Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg had been in talks to collaborate for years before Minority Report, but few could have imagined that their first film together would be as moody and haunted as Minority Report. Filmed long before 9/11, the film's depiction of societal paranoia and surveillance, where futuristic cops can arrest people just for knowing they're going to commit a murder, hit the zeitgeist in a chilling and downright uncanny way. Without a doubt, this is one of the best action movies of the decade and certainly one of Cruise's best outings in the sci-fi genre. ![]() Cruise has forever been one of the action genre's most outstanding performers, but it's arguable none of his blockbuster offerings have ever felt as surprising, as fresh, and as flat-out fun as Edge of Tomorrow. Their chemistry is rock solid, the screenplay feels consistently fresh and genuinely funny, and Liman's direction keeps things moving with a refreshing dynamism that never lets the film's inherent repetition grow stale. Cruise is phenomenal, but the big surprise here is that he's kind of playing a big old scaredy-cat, ceding scene-stealing status to Blunt, who comes into her own as a full-blown, blockbuster-leading movie star here. Instantly one of the most pleasant surprises of popular filmmaking in the 21st century, this Doug Liman-helmed actioner didn't just have the smarts to mash up the genre with Groundhog Day, it also formed a remarkably electric pairing with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Cruise's shocking ease at slipping into the shoes of a single dad everyman gives a grounding center to this blockbuster portrait of sheer terror. This is a movie filled with nightmarish and horror movie imagery, from a sea of floating corpses to the terrifying nature of the Tripods. While the former is more heartwarming and the latter more awards-focused, War of the Worlds transcends both, and the "trilogy" moniker, to become one of the most harrowing and definitive American films about that terrible day 20 years ago. ![]() In fact, many Spielberg fans and critics have lumped this film, along with 2004's The Terminal and 2005's Munich, into an unofficial trilogy focused on America's mood post-9/11. War of the Worlds may remain Cruise's highest-grossing domestic hit, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is one of the director's and star's bleakest, most deeply terrifying films. It's an early harbinger that Spielberg isn't interested in making just another popcorn movie. Wells' War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise has a full-on panic attack realizing that the dust that's covering him is actually the ashes of people vaporized by the invading, underrated, and horrific Spielbergian Tripod aliens. Early on in Spielberg's 2005 update of H.G.
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