War of the Worlds

Ray Ferrier, a divorced dock worker in Bayonne, New Jersey, is saddled with a forced weekend visit from his two kids — rebellious teen Robbie and young daughter Rachel. A freakish electrical storm rolls in. Lightning strikes the same intersection over and over, knocking out every car, phone, and watch in the neighborhood.

Ray walks to the strike site. The pavement begins to buckle. A massive three-legged war machine — a tripod — erupts from the earth and begins vaporizing people with a heat ray, leaving only ash and clothes blowing through the streets. Ray races home, grabs his kids, and flees in one of the few still-working vehicles in town.

They reach his ex-wife's empty house in the suburbs; overnight, a passenger plane crashes into the home. Refugees clog the roads. Ray, Robbie, and Rachel join a panicked exodus crowding onto a ferry across the Hudson. Tripods rise from the water mid-crossing, capsize the ferry, and the family barely escapes.

On a hilltop, they watch the U.S. military mount a counterattack against advancing tripods. The tripods, protected by force fields, obliterate the army. Robbie, desperate to join the fight, runs over the ridge and is engulfed in the chaos; Ray, forced to choose between his children, shelters Rachel and lets him go. They take refuge in the basement of a farmhouse with Harlan Ogilvy, an unhinged ambulance driver hellbent on starting a resistance.

For days they hide as alien probes — and then the aliens themselves, spindly three-legged creatures with searchlight eyes — explore the house. The invaders are using human blood to fertilize an alien red weed spreading across the landscape. Ogilvy unravels, threatening to give them all away with his ranting; Ray kills him to keep Rachel safe.

Rachel wanders outside and is snatched by a tripod, dropped into a metal cage on its back. Ray lets himself be captured to follow her. Inside the tripod's basket, humans are being pulled up into a hatch and harvested for blood. Ray is drawn in but distributes hand grenades to the others, gets pulled free, and detonates the grenades inside the tripod, destroying it from within.