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July 09, 2005
Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005)
by Grouchy
War of the Worlds
Steven Spielberg, 2005
This review is pretty frigging far from spoiler-safe. Read at your own risk.
As anyone who has ever seen me post on an anticipation thread for this movie knows, I was scared shitless about Spielberg directing it. Wells is one of my favorite writers, and this (along with The Invisible Man) my very favorite of his, and what interested me the more about the book was something that would've been totally lost had this movie gone through the usual Hollywoodization. It's the fact that Wells refuses to show us any heroes, or any big battles, and focuses on a normal person and his regular, flawed attempt to save himself and the people he cares for from a menace that's death incarnated for his world. It's a desperate, gritty and intelligent novel, with an ending that's pure genius.
I'd like to prove myself totally fucking wrong in the "they screwed it up" department. The route Spielberg takes with this movie is a big nod to the genius of Wells. In my opinion, Kubrick is the one director that has the right approach to adaptations from literary sources. His films don't respect the plot or the details of the works he adapts, or even sometimes the themes and intentions, but anyone who has read them can feel that he preserved the spirit and the feel which drove him to working on it on the first place. And Spielberg follows his example, with this War of the Worlds just bursting with the Wells touch.
For one thing, we also have the large, universal drama told through the perspective of the small rabbit-hole (which is something of a preference for me - one of the reasons why I think The Pianist is the best movie so far about the Holocaust victims), luckily preventing the movie from becoming just a better directed version of that Day After Tomorrow shitfest. We have the exact reproduction of that feeling of awe you get from the man's written depiction of the tripods, partly because Spielberg doesn't film the attack scenes like typical blood-pumping attack action scenes, but more like something from the editing floor of Close Encounters. It's scary, it's big, but it's not loud and Michael Bay-ish, it's more like an eerie futuristic painting.
The thing just goes face into the ground when it reveals Spielberg's agenda, though. Just like Welles (I mean Orson this time) did his radio adaptation to depict through a metaphor the uneasy atmosphere of the time and the rampant, buried social fears in United States (and dude, did he make his point), Spielberg does this film as a parable of 9/11 paranoia. But his points are muddy and uncertain, like Donald Duck's genitalia. It's not a movie on the terrorist attack, but on the American attitude towards the terrorist attack. And, frankly, it's a poorly constructed metaphor and a mixed message, unless I got it all wrong. For one thing, the bad, Republican humans on the movie are not so bad when you consider that they're trapped in a rathole, about to get whacked by the invaders. For the kind of thing that Spielberg is trying to tell us here, he should've pulled a Dawn of the Dead and set this so that the humans manage to control the situation and then show off their paws. Right now, the Tim Robbins character is only puke-inducing because he's written to be so, saying things like "if the Japanese could do it, the greatest nation in the world can too". If you consider his actual actions, he's just grabbing for his life like everyone else. It's not backlash, it's survival.
These underlying themes get annoying because they're poorly written, like something made up in a rush and thrown out there without enough thinking. And so is the guy Cruise is playing, whom we're supposed to feel sympathetic for. His character arc is pathetic if you want to put it mercifully. "Look at me, I'm Tom Cruise. I'm also an irresponsible parent but I learn to care for a family and assume my role in life when someone puts a weird ray gun to Dakota Fanning's forehead". I think David Koepp gets a lot of unfair bashing on this site, but if you had to judge only by this script, he deserves to be fucking impaled. His characterization is so visible it comes off as totally amateurish. The only instance where Spielberg, Koepp and (let's put him in the pack because I'm sure he had creative input) Cruise manage to elevate the movie into something substantial is when the family is trapped in the only working car and the people on the streets try to steal it from them. That scene is very human, very intense and, if definitively not subtle, at least poignant in its bashing/analysis of the American way of life with a vengeance.
Then we have things that someone could discard as nit-picking, but that genuinely bother me. Why don't we see Tom Cruise killing the man he has to kill? What's this, the '40s? Big star can't put a shovel through some throat to save the little girl on screen? If it's a rating issue, it could've been done subtly and cleanly. As it stands, it's as if Spielberg is fighting himself. On one hand, the scene is written to be a meditation on the prize the character has to pay, with all of its 9/11 connections. On the other hand, since the actual act is told eliptically, it's an artificial and unnecessary gimmick so that the more emotionally obtuse members of the audience don't completely give up rooting for the Cruiser. Oh, and the resurrection of that annoying brat is laughable. Sorry, it is.
This movie, with all of its flaws, is a brave attempt at bringing something different and quality to the screens in the form of a summer blockbuster. If nothing else, it's better than The Terminal. I'd put my hands together and clap, but Bin Laden ate them.
P.S.: The people complaining about the way the aliens are killed are not exactly pop-culture savant, are they?
Posted by astor at July 9, 2005 10:23 PM