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War of the Worlds: Final Thoughts

by Ryan Stewart Jul 5th 2005 // 10:50AM

Filed under: Action, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg

I always liked Watch the Skies, the original title of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sadly, that wouldn't have been an appropriate title for this movie. Instead of raining ruin from above, the aliens in War of the Worlds come barrelling up from underneath our feet. It's a good gimmick, suggesting the commencement of a well-laid plan, instead of the whim of space-bullies on holiday. Still, as many critics have noted, it's perplexing. They planned this surprise thousands of years ago and they chose Newark and Osaka as launching points? Did Ur or Babylonia make the cut?

There are a few things that Spielberg got exactly right, such as the opening of the film. It works on a gut-level because the aliens simply appear and start thwonking people with lasers, without a song and dance. They are, in fact, disturbingly utilitarian. They disorient their game with cacophonous foghorns and use spotlights to track anyone scurrying along the ground. Much like the shark in Jaws, these aliens are simply a problem to be solved, not anything that can be communicated with.

 

As a conception, the alien jalopies are the natural outgrowth of a 19th century futurist’s imagination. Their stilted but forceful locomotion suggests a writer who was trying to imagine what lever and pulley technology would be like for a more advanced civilization. The spindly, creaky spider-legs also seem laughably ill-suited for a seek and destroy mission, which it makes it more interesting on a visual level.

Tom Cruise plays Ray, an almost-middle-aged father who happens to be in the wrong intersection when one of these knobby-kneed jellyfish rise from under the city streets. He finds himself part of a mob rushing to safety, while people to his left and right are turned into standing suits of clothes. One woman is disintegrated directly in front of him, and he charges through her silhouette, becoming covered in people-patina. From then on, it’s an escape movie, which it clearly should be.

Spielberg also nails the fact that guns would come into play immediately, and anything that wasn’t nailed down would be up for grabs. I wasn’t expecting this from the man who actually went back and replaced the shotguns in E.T. with flashlights. He underlines how unhelpful the general public would be to anyone who was trying to make headway in this situation. In fact, he probably underestimates the on-spot organization that might spring up to commandeer public utilities. There would probably be a ground war to get on every ferry, and a war to take over every airport, and so on.

As someone who is afflicted with a mild phobia of crowds, I found the scenes of post-invasion panic more disturbing than the alien tripods themselves. It wouldn't take much for this society to wave toodle-oo to civil order in the event of even a significant natural disaster, so it's impossible to estimate the aftermath of an uber-event such as the arrival of alien death squads. That’s why I think the ferry sequence is probably the film’s best. It’s just a barrage of grasping hands, gun butts, screaming and bad decisions.

The military is noticeably out to lunch in this movie too, which sounds about right. There would surely be mass desertion and chaos in the ranks, even if a counter-offensive could be realized. But why do the army battalions roam the countryside with Abrams tanks and shoulder-launchers? I don’t think it takes a Napoleon-level military genius to see that this is going to be a different kind of war. Here’s a tip: if you are the President and the world is suddenly invaded by an interstellar Einstatzgruppen, you better start pushing those big red buttons like Fred Savage in The Wizard.

My biggest complaint with the film involves an extended hide-and-seek sequence, in which a gaggle of survivors try to evade an alien probe that is searching for them in the cellar of a farmhouse. The transfer of perspective is too abrupt here. We’ve just seen cities being stomped by thousand foot-high oysters on stilts. It’s impossible to believe that the same invaders would employ tiny, prowling search drones to play games in basements. It implies that their plan will not be realized unless every single human is wiped out in this attack. If that’s the case, they are going to be here a while.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Tim Robbins’ performance as a survivalist fruit-loop who invites Cruise and company into his dilapidated farmhouse and then reveals that he plans to escape the aliens by digging a tunnel through his basement floor with a shovel. Robbins has a knack for playing crazies, as evidenced by his stellar work in that George Lucas masterpiece, Howard the Duck. He should do this kind of work more often.

Critics have lambasted the film’s ending, which is faithful to the original novel. It implies spectacularly bad planning on the part of the aliens, but I think it works fine. The novel was written during a period when Victorian women were swooning and retreating en masse into their boudoirs with unexplainable psychosomatic illness, and disease itself was not something that could be "fought" in any meaningful way. Taking the source material a hundred years forward might have been the wrong-headed idea. I don’t see why we couldn’t have a straight rendition of the novel.

I think we all know by now that the glory days of Spielberg are behind him. There will never be another Jaws, no matter how much you may wish it so. And he’s not going to go away. He will go on making so-so adventure movies in between his so-so prestige projects, because we have invested him with movie immortality. It will be much like with Alfred Hitchcock, who was granted the license to make mediocre films for the last twenty years of his life. Oh well. At least we have the next Indiana Jones movie to look forward to. That’s going to be great, right? Right?

 

 

 

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