Hey, remember when you watched War of the Worlds and you thought that it was pretty good, except for all the scenes with the screaming girl and the super douchey older brother, which pretty much was the entire movie? Yeah, me too. There's one scene in the movie where Robbie (the older brother) argues with his dad, Tom Cruise, and races over a hill to watch the army fighting aliens. I don't know why he does it. It makes no sense that a human person would run towards a flaming battlefield. Anyway, Robbie disappears for the rest of the movie and I think I can safely say that we all thought he was dead (or hoped he was, at least). Most of us were pretty annoyed at Spielberg when - at the end of the movie - Robbie turns up alive, when it would've been far more interesting for the director to have just let us believe that the kid had been vaporised by an alien tripod. Given that he's alive, though, I'm intrigued: what did happen when Robbie abandoned his family on that hillside? The Spin-Off: "Robbie's War" "Robbie's War" - get it? A brilliant infusion of both the character's name and the movie it was inspired by... and a title that somehow manages to be both achingly personal and relevant all at once. Basically, though, I want to see Robbie going through hell and back in the aftermath of having made such a super dumb decision going over that hill. We follow him - mostly using a shaky cam style - as he witnesses the Earth's decimation and, like, almost gets killed a bunch of times. Eventually he realises that he's a total idiot, and maybe I'll let him take down a tripod or two. Maybe. You've got to earn that, Robbie.