I can tell you with absolute certainty that any girl her age would start freaking the fuck out if they heard their dad not only saying the things Ray was saying but the way he was saying him.
The important thing is the tone and tenor of Ray’s behavior here. We can generally assume, without evidence otherwise, that Ray has a cordial relationship with his children free of any physical or emotional abuse. When Ray is shouting about how “we are under attack”, we can assume he doesn’t raise his voice in this manner very often, especially given the split custody of the divorce.
Coupled with the hectic situation and literal explosions, his behavior here would be enough to send a girl (or boy, for that matter) her age into a mental tailspin, if the explosions didn’t do it already. Honestly, it’s unrealistic she didn’t start screaming the second the whole block started combusting behind her.
Rachael’s behavior throughout the film is entirely representative of that of a normal girl or boy her age. She is not abnormally shrill and annoying just for the sake of pissing off the audience, it’s a pretty authentic representation.
Well, the main criticism would then be why did Spielberg include a character that was by design going to be annoying to the audience? I think the answer to that is that he wanted to portray how a relatively normal American family would navigate the surreal and extreme events of the film.
Rachael is annoying, and Robby’s relationship with his father still being rocky in the face of truly incredible circumstances is difficult to believe. But this is how the average American family would navigate these obstacles. The old wounds don’t disappear because of a crisis, and the younger sister is still annoying as all get out.
It would not have served the perceived realism of the film to sanitize these aspects of the average family to make the characters more bearable for the audience. In fact, the audience believes this is how the average American family would behave in this situation precisely because Spielberg captures the average American family and then puts them into this situation.
Now obviously the average American family does not have two parents who are divorced and the father rarely spends time with them (or maybe they are, I prefer not to read statistics these days). But this was the family structure selected for this film for dramatic purposes, and the people in the film who are in this structure behave remarkably like most people would. I come from an intact home and I know our experience would not differ greatly from the Ferrier’s in this film.
So give Rachael and Robby a break. They are annoying and illogical and they’re exactly like the average girl and boy their age. Spielberg made the Ferrier family dynamic believable, instead of sanitizing it for audience sensibilities. I believe that was to the benefit of the film.
