**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, and Tim Robbins
Directed by Steven Spielberg & written for the screen by David Koepp, from the novel by H.G. Wells
2005
116 min PG13
Let’s begin with a quote from another film critic. That’s always fun (and less work for me). It’s a prophetic interlude from Roger Ebert, not from his “War of the Worlds” review (I haven’t read it yet) or even his “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” review, but his reluctant 1993 recommendation of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” in which he compares that film to “Close Encounters:”
“Big-budget Hollywood seems to have lost its confidence that audiences can share big dreams. ‘Jurassic Park’ throws a lot of dinosaurs at us, and because they look terrific…we’re supposed to be grateful. I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made ‘Close Encounters’ today, we would have seen aliens in the first ten minutes, and by the halfway mark they’d be attacking Manhattan with death rays.”
It’s 12 years later and Ebert’s prediction is more or less accurate. We may not see the aliens in the flesh for at least an hour, but we do see their giant robots pretty soon, and Manhattan is being bombarded by death rays much earlier than the halfway mark. “War of the Worlds” is a film of small ideas and little imagination, outside of a competent re-imagining of images that are a century old. It is a film of explosions, running, xenophobia, and a general fear of leaving the house. Yet we knew that from watching the trailers and we figured that, if anyone could take these elements and give them life and excitement, it would be the man who directed “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” This envisioning of “War of the Worlds” can’t be great, but there’s nothing to keep it from being good. What’s perplexing is that we expected our man Spielberg to make a more engrossing ride than he does, yet the movie we get is unintentionally cold and uninvolving.
To describe Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” as “empty spectacle” doesn’t quite do it justice. “Empty virtuosity” seems more apropos. It’s kind of bizarre to think that hundreds of men and women fleeing from a giant robot that is vaporizing them with laser beams doesn’t mean anything to me, but there you have it. “War of the Worlds” is a film of terrific technique but no heat. It’s unsettling to watch Spielberg fail at the thing he’s always been the best at, i.e., making us care about his characters.
Movies do not necessarily need to make us feel close to the characters or part of the action. Off the top of my head, “Aguirre,” “2001,” and many films of the French New Wave intentionally keep us outside the action, at a philosophical distance. Yet Spielberg has never done this and I don’t think it is his intention to do so with “War of the Worlds.” Disaster movies are treated by filmmakers and critics alike as a “low” genre, and a “low” genre always requires audience identification with the characters. It would be interesting to see a disaster movie not take this approach, to simply observe the destruction with clinical, Kubrickian detachment, as if it is to be watched and studied with no partiality for any of the fleeing innocents. Again, I don’t think this is Spielberg’s intention.
Did I mention Kubrick? It makes sense that two directors so different would admire one another, and Spielberg has been more-or-less doing a Stanley Kubrick impersonation in all his sci-fi pictures from “Artificial Intelligence” on. The two paradigms don’t quite fit, mainly because Spielberg demands our love and devotion, while Kubrick rarely even seems interested in holding our attention.
(Maybe I just don’t like disaster movies. “Titanic” irritated me and, while I enjoyed “Independence Day” the first time I saw it, I’ve never been able to get through it again. The appeal of the disaster flick is to watch our culture being torn down, both its physical structures (the work of FX people and art directors) and its social order (the work of writers, actors, and directors). Movies like “War of the Worlds” and “Independence Day” are like cutaway models of big cities wrought by devastation. This strikes me not as dramatic, but as a mechanical appeal, like taking apart an engine block: once you’ve done it, you’ve learned what needs to be learned, and you don’t need to do it again. Those boys you know who want to take everything apart and see how it works will appreciate the way buildings fall down in “War of the Worlds,” or the routes taken by fleeing refugees from one metropolis to the next, or the appearance of the National Guard. But they are not typically a crowd that wants something left to the unknown, and will feel shortchanged by “War’s” clouding of the alien motives.)
The result is that everything feels in quotation marks, like a description of what it ought to be, but not the thing itself. As the man and his child cower behind bits of rubble in fear of the synthetic monster that’s always about to find them, we recognize intellectually that this is “suspense,” but we don’t feel it. Scenes between the man and his family are “poignant,” and we say “so what?” Even the choice by the filmmakers to leave the arrival and disappearance of the aliens as relatively unexplained—Tom Cruise never bursts in on a pack of soldiers and eggheads who tell it all—feels like an imitation of an art movie conceit.
And, of course, the virtuosity even threatens to be in quotes. Spielberg is moving us through the standard places of the disaster genre, and it’s so obvious that he’s trying to put a “different spin” on every little detail. He gets in some really great camera movements, swinging us in, out, and around things with nifty crane and tracking shots. My favorite is when Cruise has discovered that all the gadgets in his house have been mysteriously fried. We swoop up and down, follow him, lose him, then end up right back with him, at just the right angle to see him tapping his defunct wristwatch. Both Cruise’s flight on foot and in a car from columns of flame and destruction are largely accomplished in single tracking shots from the front, so that we stay on him as he weaves in and out of falling buildings and burning trees.
Page two of "War of the Worlds." Back to home.