“War of the Worlds” is perhaps worth seeing on the big screen just because of the giant three-legged robots stomping on everything. Spielberg has wisely abandoned the look-down-at-the-action-from-above technique of “Lord of the Ring’s” Peter Jackson and so many other big budget action directors. Instead, he mostly grounds his camera at eye level, then pulls back, as if we’re craning our own necks, to see the monster looming above us, dwarfing buildings, and poised against mad skies.
Anyway, a summary of the movie is that a man (Tom Cruise) and his two children (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) flee from one alien attack to another, starting in New York and trying to get to the children’s mother in Boston. They steal the only working car, they pass soldiers, the end up on foot, they watch crowds vaporized again and again, they try a boat, the boat is flipped, they end up in the water, and so on and so forth. Because I have quick eyes I noticed that the credits for “War’s” TV previews only cite actors Cruise, Fanning, and Tim Robbins, so I kept waiting for something to happen to Cruise’s son. Once you accept that humongous three-legged robots are terrorizing the world, the movie is about as plausible and grounded in the real as it needs to be.
I like that we never learn anything Cruise would not actually know. Except for one chance encounter with a TV news crew, our fleeing protagonists never hear about what’s happening in the rest of the world, what the military’s plans are, or if Washington still stands. And of course he does not learn why the aliens are here. Spielberg is not above obligatory episodes about how disasters make us focus on what’s important in life (the point of every disaster flick). The movie avoids other standards, like lots of exposition, romance, a big battle, or excessive bit characters. But, like everything else, these are “different spins” that feel more “clever” than clever. What went into “War of the Worlds” sometimes feels more reactive that creative; the absence of the big battle is just a response to too many big screen big battles.
Speaking of Tim Robbins—who has a relatively small part as a shotgun-wielding whacko—he alone waxes on the original book’s themes. The novel “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells is a piece of colonialist guilt. The Victorian writer, ensconced in the material luxuries wrought from an empire that invaded, raped, and exterminated “lesser” peoples, imagined with lip-smacking delight what it would be like for the colonial powers to get a taste of their own medicine: a superhuman, destructive intelligence that sees us as nothing more than maggots. Robbins alludes to this smiting of human arrogance as he mentions how “they’ve defeated the greatest power on the Earth in a few days.”
What we get is like a “greatest hits” compilation from Spielberg. We have the spindly, silvery, and strangely organic hardware from “A.I.” We have that Cruise guy from “Minority Report.” From “Poltergeist,” we have a screaming little blonde girl. From “Schindler’s List,” we have the wandering hordes of bedraggled refugees and the leafy downpour of human ashes. From “Jurassic Park” we get figures in the foreground, cowering with their backs to the creatures in the middleground who appear suddenly and almost, but don’t quite, find them. We revisit the ravaged countryside of “Saving Private Ryan” and meet hardened, professional soldiers in action. From “Jaws” we see something scary go under the boat. And there’s plenty from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” specifically, the mysterious alien motives and the way they talk with tubas.
Finished Sunday, July 3rd, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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