For anyone savvy enough to pick up clues about Steven Spielberg's adaptation of War of the Worlds will likely bring to the screen, you can anticipate it will have more in common with Spielberg's 2002 release Minority Report than merely having the same star, Tom Cruise.
Every indication shows that the main character of War of the Worlds will have similar issues to resolve as the plot unfolds as the Cruise character had to in Minority Report.
One of the best science fiction detective movies, Minority Report uses many classic Spielberg devices, combining the problems, characters and philosophies found in some of his earlier films: a main character struggling with some personal issue that has severed the family in a society in which technology has been misused or abuse. Because the story is based on a very sketchy early work by Phillip K. Dick, Spielberg has managed to reshape the tale leaving his heavy stylistic and moralistic fingerprint on the final product. In the short story, Phillip K. Dick pondered what it would be like if police could see a murder before it happens and thus arrest the person before the crime was committed. From that point on, Spielberg takes over, his creative staff shaping a paranoid world of anticipated evidence that comes close to violating American civil rights.
Tom Cruise plays the ace detective whose anguish over losing his son - an apparent abduction while at a public swimming pool -- which resulted in the breakup of his marriage and his obsession with making certain that other people do not suffer the way he had to.
The plot twist comes when the three psychics -- who do all predicting from a sauna-like container monitored with every electronic device known to man - predict that the Cruise character is going to murder someone he has not yet met.
Thus begins yet one more class Spielberg element - the chase - as the Cruise character flees determined to prove the psychics wrong.
During the process of seeking more information, the Cruise character discovers that the psychic effect used to uncover future murders was actually the side effect of a failed attempt to cure some deadly and crippling disorder and that the three psychics - one woman and two men - a virtual prisoners, whose lives have been co-opted by science and law enforcement to provide this service. The kind and gentle Dr. Frankenstein in yet another Spielberg retelling of the classic Mary Shelly novel has disavowed her creation, leaving it in the hands of a promoter who is seeking to take the pilot program and make it a permanent fixture in the American Justice system.
The Cruise character soon begins to understand that the system is hardly as perfect as the promoter had been telling people, and that sometimes the three psychics disagree on their predictions, and as in Supreme Court decisions in which there is a disagreement, one of the psychics issues a dissenting opinion of what he or she saw which is called "a minority report."
Because American justice often requires jurors in criminal cases to reject a conviction if there is reasonable doubt about the evidence, these minority reports are destroyed - although one can still be obtained from the source.
As in Jurassic Park and other films, Spielberg interjects the philosophy of science out of control or misused, although the creator is not the villain of this film any more than the park curator in Jurassic Park was. Instead, the promoter - who is misguided by his ambition to get this system of justice approved for widespread use - violates the very moral code his system was designed to enforce: he committed murder. But because he knew how the system worked, he was able to hide the killing.
In the back story leading up to the present action of the film, the mother of the key psychic sought to get back her daughter, keep the girl from becoming a piece of vegetable or machinery. But because this girl was a vital piece of the process, the promoter needed her, and killed the mother in a clever trick that fooled the psychics and resulted in the arrest of the wrong man for the killing, someone the promoter hired to take the fall.
While the film is not immediately clear as to why the promoter suddenly feels the need to get rid of his chief investigator, the promoter uses a similar trick against the Cruise character, paying someone to become the victim the psychics predicted Cruise would murder. Once dead, the victim's family would be compensated and the promoter would be rid of Cruise. The victim was to claim to be the abductor of Cruise's son six years earlier.
One serious fault in logic, however, involved how the promoter expected the two men to meet up. The eventual confrontation between Cruise and his victim appears to come as an accident, not as the result of the promoter's guile. And while the promoter's role becomes more and more obvious in the closing third of the film, the action sequences are so spectacular, these sweep about any momentary doubts a viewer might have.
With Cruise against playing the lead in War of the Worlds, you can see how Spielberg seems to have recast the Minority Report character and shaped him into the new situation.
As in Minority Report, the Cruise character is an anguished father seeking to make up for some imagined failing that had divided his family and forced his wife to go off with another man.
As in Minority Report, the Cruise character in War of the Worlds will be immediately injected into a situation that will require him to run, leading viewers into a dramatic chase scene that will cover a huge amount of geography from Newark to Boston and perhaps back again as the Cruise character seeks clues to his own redemption.
Because nearly all of Spielberg's previous films involve the misuse of technology, you can fully expect some similar factor to play a vital role in the upcoming film, some reason to explain what mankind did to cause the aliens to invade or to set them loose.
As with Minority Report, the Cruise character will rush through the scenes picking up clues as to what happened and eventually collect the answers he will need to resolve the situation.
Because one of the writers involved in Jurassic Park also scripted this movie, you may well expect the children in this film - particularly Dakota Fanning (the boy child may even die at some point early in the film) to play a significant role in helping heal the Cruise characters emotional wounds. And if Minority Report is an example, the film will likely close with a family reunion - Cruise returning to the arms of his wife, as well as the arrival of the stars of the 1953 War of the Worlds film appearing as loving grandparents.