War of the Worlds
Written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp
Directed by Steven Spielberg
DreamWorks
2005
Rating:


The best that can be said of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "War of the Worlds" is that its destruction feels real. Like "Signs" with a larger budget and aliens that aren't afraid of water, Spielberg's film shows an alien invasion from the point of view of a broken family that can only be saved by world obliteration rather than through the eyes of the soldiers, scientists and government officials organizing the fight. The emotions of Ray (Tom Cruise) and his children Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin) as tripods rise from beneath the streets of Ironbound, New Jersey, and begin incinerating people with heat rays is shared by the audience. There's initially benevolent curiosity about the storm clouds gathering overhead. Ray even smiles at the meteorological phenomenon and encourages his children to watch. As the roads buckle and a church collapses, there's panic in the streets. Then the first tripod rises, its gangly H.R. Giger-influenced design full of gawky menace, and the people are paralyzed with bewilderment and fear until the rays start firing.

"War of the Worlds" works best when it's in full disaster mode in much the same way as "The Day After Tomorrow." Janusz Kaminski's jittery camera work gives the movie a documentary feel in the midst of the destruction and is suitably filled with wonder when it captures the wonderful, horrible results of the invasion. The clothes fluttering from evaporated victims, the bodies floating by in a river, a flaming train storming by and the crimson red weed that grows from the blood of humans will assuredly become iconic.

The story, however, will not. The script, largely the work of David Koepp ("Jurassic Park," "Spider-Man"), is a muddled mess of logical inconsistencies and domestic and world politics that dilutes H.G. Wells' 1898 novel.

It seemed like a good idea to avoid the talking heads of scientists trying to rationalize the fantastic when the audience will or won't believe in an invasion with or without such enlightenment, but the scenario presented here demands explication. This time around, the aliens have planted their weapons of mass destruction millions of years in advance in preparation of this invasion. Because the invaders aren't just passing through during a universe-wide wave of mutilation, the question arises as to why the aliens have begun their extermination of the human species now instead of five, a hundred, a thousand or even a million years ago before we had a chance to evolve in the first place. And was the alien race so evolved when they planted the tripods that now, millions of years later, they still remember how to work the machines and haven't developed something more sophisticated? The aliens' bloodlust is fickle, changing from outright evaporation that somehow only dusts human tissue and leaves clothes undamaged, the mere dumping of bodies into the river, the instant drainage of victims for blood fertilizer and the harvesting of humans for future needs. On a more human level, Ray at one point kills a man for endangering his family's hiding place by taking on the aliens with an ax, only to, moments later, take on the aliens with an ax.

As film theorist Robin Wood notes in his essay "Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era," Spielberg's fantasies acknowledge the cracks in the patriarchal family, but in the end he also covers over them and re-establishes the status quo, lacking the imagination that something better could be possible. Cruise's Ray is a dockworker and deadbeat dad, the kind of father who exchanges "dicks" and "assholes" with his teenage son to determine who's the most infantile man of the house. Though the children ostensibly live with their mother Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and her new husband, she's barely seen besides dropping off the kids and voicing disapproval of Ray's drinking problem and small, messy house. When the invasion begins, Ray sets out to reunite his children with their mother, a valiant effort undermined once even Robbie realizes that Ray's just trying to dumping them off or find someone better equipped to know what to do. Ray can't possibly salvage his family through his incredible journey, and even if he makes it there there's no place for him. Meanwhile the mother is given such an ignominious position that she never even leaves Boston to search for her children.

Rachel fills Spielberg's need for a self-aware child whose knowledge of her family's problems is eventually, to paraphrase Wood, dissolved with fantasy. Rachel's childhood is sentimentalized and exploited. Fanning's terrified, tear-streaked face is often the subject of close-ups in the need to pound home the terror, and Ray feels such a strong need to keep Rachel's innocence intact that he covers her eyes and ears to keep her ignorant of what is happening.

Wells wrote "War of the Worlds" at a time when tensions were strong between England and Germany and British colonialism was coming toward an end. Orson Welles' infamous, panic-inducing 1938 radioplay came when war was raging in Europe and invasion seemed a possibility. George Pal's 1953 version served as allegory for a fear of Communism. So it's no surprise that Spielberg's version would take advantage of the current political climate, but with both Sept. 11 and the Iraq war to allegorize, he and Koepp seem at a loss as to which to choose from out of fear of alienating some of its audience. Koepp's dialogue makes it pretty blatant that he wants to take on Iraq, with Robbie having to write a paper about France's occupation of Algeria and a line about the aliens' impending doom since occupation always fails. Yet the images often recall 9/11, with survivors hanging signs and pictures of lost loved ones in hopes of finding them, not to mention the plane that crashes into a house. For some, the wounds of the World Trade Center attack are too new to be picked so carelessly. If this is an Iraq allegory, are we meant to be rooting for the human insurgents? And if this is a 9/11 allegory, what are we meant to make of Ray's discouraging exclamation to Robbie, "You don't have to fight!"?

Besides its recurring theme of 9/11 imagery, Spielberg also has a motif of filming through windows that have circular wholes in them. "War of the Worlds" has a similar hole through its worldview and Spielberg can't see for the cracks.

Posted Sunday, July 3, 2005

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