Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film War of the Worlds.
Ray is a New Jersey dockworker and divorced father who tries to protect his two children after extraterrestrial machines emerge from beneath the ground. The film follows the family’s desperate journey through a society collapsing under a sudden invasion.
Dakota Fanning plays Ray’s daughter Rachel, and Justin Chatwin plays his teenage son Robbie. Spielberg’s adaptation is based on H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel, but it relocates the action from Victorian England to the contemporary United States.
The film uses tripods, one of Wells’s most famous inventions, as the aliens’ main war machines. Unlike some science-fiction invasion stories, the threat is ultimately defeated by Earth’s microscopic organisms rather than by human military strength. Ray’s role is personal and protective rather than that of a conventional action hero.