War of the Worlds, described as “simultaneously Spielburg’s best and worst movie”, I found suffered from thematic deficiency, containing only the too simple “survive”. Other ideas were never fully developed and were chaotically contradictory to one another; I was particularly disappointed that the “heroic” rejection of xenia/regression to barbarism was lost. The ending felt especially anticlimactic

I would have liked to have seen it remade as a TV miniseries, perhaps narrated through news broadcasts, to update the this-could-really-happen theme which made the radio version so powerful.