Steven Spielberg’s new, heavily
publicized version of H.G. Wells’s War of
the Worlds seems, in a great many ways, a virtually inevitable event in the
director’s career. His work displays a professional and personal fascination
with the subjects of those Wells novels that have inspired so much exciting
cinema, including such classics as The
Shape of Things to Come, The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. His own
explorations of the confrontation with extraterrestrials of a benign sort in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. may have led him to attempt a film
on a more hostile gang of creatures from outer space.
For a filmmaker powerfully addicted
to special effects of all kinds, the attraction of the subject may have been
irresistible, providing an opportunity to surpass the highly regarded 1953
incarnation of Wells’s novel. Considered something of a boy genius himself in
his younger days, Spielberg in addition may also have been tempted to match or
even outdo the work of the great cinema Wunderkind,
Orson Welles, whose notorious radio adaptation of the book back in 1938 not
only fooled a considerable portion of the American public (not always a
difficult achievement), but also demonstrated for perhaps the first time the
grand potential of a relatively young medium.
In Spielberg’s hands, surprisingly,
that familiar story of powerful and malevolent invaders from Mars follows a
quite different path and acquires a rather unusual, if typically Spielbergian,
subtext. Although he exploits the opportunity for some impressive cinematic
wizardry, the director, oddly, almost entirely neglects any violent
confrontation between the inhabitants of Earth and the space aliens — it’s
supposed to be a war of the worlds, after all — and focuses instead on the
abject helplessness of mere humanity against the superior technology and, well,
inhuman cruelty of the invaders.
As a result, the picture deals not
with battles but with flight, showing repeated scenes of mass panic, with
thousands of people fleeing in terror from some giant three-legged pods
striding across the countryside, disintegrating everything they see with that
favorite science fiction weapon: our old friend, the death ray.
His protagonist, a divorced,
exaggeratedly lumpish working-class guy named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) — no
brilliant scientists allowed in Bush country — with custody of his two
children for the weekend, flees his New York City neighborhood, which looks
like Queens, when the aliens descend on lightning bolts and begin their
systematic destruction. The invaders awaken their tripods, planted hundreds or
thousands of years before, which they then use to stalk people and dine on
their blood. Believing that he should bring his sullen teenage son and his
terrified daughter to Boston to join up with his ex-wife and desperate to
escape, Ray steals a van and attempts to negotiate the nightmare of the panicky
multitudes, all fleeing the devastating tripods.
As soon as the flight begins, the
movie settles into an odyssey of chaos, with Cruise and the two kids encountering
hundreds of other terrified people, all of them, in the time-honored manner,
out for themselves, and therefore quite willing to kill Cruise for his vehicle.
The unimaginably dangerous journey allows Spielberg to examine one of his
persistent subjects, the fractured family and the consequently suffering child,
played by Dakota Fanning, who constantly freezes, shivers, and pops her eyes, a
most tiresome interpretation of abject fright.
Although it now and then successfully
exploits its potential for suspense and shock, even repeating a tense scene
from the 1953 movie, Spielberg’s War of
the Worlds generally retreats from the chance to show some terrific battles
or ingenious ploys and neglects the almost obligatory political subtext. The
picture pays lip service to 9/11 in its many shots of disintegrating skylines,
its rainstorm of clothes and domestic objects falling on the New York City
area, and a few easy allusions to the mendacity that currently tyrannizes the
nation, but otherwise never reaches for any meaning beyond its banal domestic
melodrama.
Although often exciting, the movie,
which seems exactly the right work for the director at this moment, still
disappoints, a text that never reaches its potential for action or meaning. It
suggests that Spielberg, for all his accomplishments, is no Orson Welles and
nor even a George Pal.
War of the Worlds (PG-13), starring
Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto; Steven
Spielberg, director. Culver Ridge, Eastview 13, Greece Ridge 12, Henrietta 18,
Pittsford Plaza Cinema, Tinseltown USA, Webster
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2005.
