War of the Worlds

I was going to start off by saying that you you’ve got to hand it to Steven Spielberg for yet again turning in a clean audience winner, but I’d like to preemptively take that back. You don’t have to hand it to him. Just about everyone already has at some point and, if one of them wasn’t you, you just go ahead and stick to your anti-cute-kid, anti-Semitic, anti-fun-loving guns. What I’m about to hand it to him for is War of the Worlds and its wall-to-wall action. The latest offering is a descendent of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind rather than an earnest sibling of The Terminal and Saving Private Ryan, so wire your jaw shut and get to the closest large-screen theater. While this movie has really no redeeming personal value, don’t wait to rent it if you’re going to see it. Its size is what it has to offer and its hyper-realistic effects are best experienced on as massive a screen as possible. In an hour and forty-nine minutes, the first fifteen are set-up – divorced, irresponsible machinist dad, Ray, gets resentful teen son and precocious ten-year-old daughter for the weekend at his dingy Bayonne, New Jersey home – and the rest is non-stop aliens, near escapes and exhaustion.

Thank God for that, come to think of it. After his recent small-screen performances, it’s hard to watch Tom Cruise engage with other human beings without thinking about what a total nut he’s turned out to be. (If you’ve been attending to some sort of blind-deaf emergency, you can find the outtakes succinctly highlighted at the aptly titled Tom Cruise Is Nuts.com .) Fortunately for the movie, he’s only allowed to smile that smile a couple of times at the beginning and spends the rest of the movie running from New Jersey to Boston to get the kids back to their mother (Miranda Otto, looking luminous) who’s remarried a wealthy yuppie several steps up the evolutionary ladder from Cruise’s Ray. Speaking of which, little sideways props go out to Spielberg for not making the new husband a jerk and playing the “we never should have gotten divorced/broken up/not gotten married and I’ve only just realized how much I love you when I’m about to die” card so common to action flicks (see Die Hard, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, etc.). In fact, the only personal development preoccupation here is the usual Spielberg flawed dad/kids are cool theme (see Catch Me If You Can, A.I., Indiana Jones 3, Hook, etc.) and even that isn’t given much room to roam in War of the Worlds.

In this movie as in all of his previous ones, the interpersonal track takes a backseat to the story. Forward movement, not restless but inexorable, is a Spielberg hallmark that sweeps his characters along with its good nature. Characters are written to imply who they are using highly accessible markers and smart (but not too smart) dialogue. We sympathize with them immediately: as archetypes, we can project onto them anyone we like and, as a result, we are immediately comfortable with these consistent, likable protagonists. They are us or our friends or our Uncle Mort except they have a clear plot and better lines. They (and we, as a consequence) face no challenges that cannot be met successfully with the bringing to bear of our good character. There are no pregnant silences, no in-depth conversations, no isolation that is not occupied with planning for this action. (I suspect in looking at his CV that the same is likely true of Spielberg himself. You have to go all the way back to 1978 to find a year in which he does not have either a producing or directing credit, due in no small part I’m sure to the marketability of this clean breed of technologically advanced filmmaking. He does not appear to be any more tortured than his characters’ aren’t.)

This appealing emotional brevity is as part of the Spielberg’s formula as the insistent action. The third spoke of the wheel is the spotless special effects. A stand-up comic recently noted that the next step in video game reality is to just go over to your friend’s house and hit him over the head with a sword. That’s where we’re at with War of the Worlds which presents a reality so real it circles back very close to feeling unreal. (Again here, Tom Cruise is not his ally, synthetic self-righteous Michael Jackson freak that he’s turning out to be, but how was Spielberg to know Cruise would saunter around the bend during the publicity tour?) With the exception of one strange scene where something seems to have gone very plastically wrong on some farmland covered with red roots, War of the Worlds is an impressive re-imagining of the original story and the details of the disastrous alien invasion are flawless.

Remember that time you met a celebrity or saw a tiger when you were a kid or you got to the Eiffel Tower for the first time and you thought, “Shit. She/he/it looks exactly the way she/he/it looks in the picture. Only more so. How odd!”? That’s what this movie is like: everything except the aliens (the neighborhoods, the people, the disaster scenes) is entirely, crystal-clear recognizable from your life or CNN. That context makes the aliens seem all the more real. That convergence of imagination and reality leaves my eyes crossed a bit, which is exactly what Spielberg intends, as did Orson Welles with his panic-inducing radio broadcast in 1938 (played as a newscast) and H.G. Wells with his book (written as if by a scientist). (What saves War of the Worlds from the fate of recent Scorcese?s dull as dirt accuracy fests is the aforementioned action.) It’s the Spielberg three-prong attack.

As A.O. Scott has pointed out, War of the Worlds and The Terminal are clearly Spielberg’s alternate responses to 9/11 and, in broad terms, that’s clear (most notably that death is represented by gray dust reminiscent of downtown Manhattan during those dark days of 2001). There are a couple of missed opportunities in that vein. First, there is no mention in Wells’ text of the alien ships having been buried and, in the course of the story, activated rather than just landing here. Spielberg adds this bit to the plot, seeming to imply that we have been building and living on top of our own destruction since human time began. It’s a clever aside, particularly in light of recent history which has cracked the American optimism that we are so happy and advanced that we are impervious to harm. Unfortunately, Spielberg takes this no further than a quick footnote in the script. An even more baffling example is Spielberg’s reluctance to fully commit to a point of view is his handling of the story’s ending. Without going into spoiling detail, the source of the aliens? eventual demise (yes, there is a demise – this is Spielberg) is sudden and unsatisfying in the book. In the movie, Spielberg has keep this perfunctory close wholly intact. I feel that he’s missed a golden opportunity to do better by both the story and his film, particularly in the modern world, shadowed by the threat bio-terrorism as Wells’ was not. I’m at risk of ruining the end, so I’ll leave it there. You’ll notice it when you see it. It’s that large, unattended Mac truck lurking right before the end credits.

Sometime in the last few years, I picked up the phrase, “It is what it is,” to describe situations in which the given factors ought to be accepted with a shrug. It is not intended as a dismissal of the subject but a dismissal of the tiring and irrational expectation that something unpredicted will happen. This attitude frees up a lot of time I used to spend on fruitless frustration that more perfect things did not happen. (“You ruined my sweater/forgot to call the cleaner/didn’t feed the dog? All right.”) Progress is generally glacially slow, no matter how sudden the realization of its necessity, so you may as well take pleasure in the details and their variety. The truly surprising and new is rare and there’s a real pleasure in knowing what you’ll get, like a favorite ice cream. So I say about War of the Worlds, “It is what it is. Enjoy it.” It’s clean Spielberg, another step in his progress which is safely, comfortably slow and continues to follow our own steady pace into the future. There’s a happy, Zen quality to these movies: even if it’s candy with a largely hollow center, it’s really, really high quality candy and, to borrow A.O. Scott’s take on another recent blockbuster, “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”