War of the Worlds review

2005.07.11 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise team up again after their success with Minority Report to retell the story of an alien invasion that devastates the world in War of the Worlds. It's an old story from the Victorian era, and, despite the updating, it's showing its age.

The story is by HG Wells by way of Josh Friedman (the genius behind the Keanu Reeves flop Chain Reaction) and David Koepp. Koepp wrote Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, The Shadow, and others; here is a guy who knows how to write explosions.

For whatever reason, Friedman and Koepp decided to change the main characters to a divorced slacker stevedore and his kids, right out of my upcoming book How to Write an Action Movie Without Really Trying (chapter 3: Screwup Dad Saves the Family).

But they didn't change the ending, which feels very Victorian. We never find out very much about the aliens, and the conclusion is basically an epilog to Cruise's all-out-race-against-time to get to a location that is... also not safe.

I am always puzzled by science fiction stories that depict advanced alien species walking around Earth or any other planet without a spacesuit of some sort or even clothes. This is supposed to be a well-planned venture to conquer a planet, but these aliens don't look like soldiers. They don't even look like tourists. They have the conventional (tho interesting) look of Monsters from Another Planet.

Of course, Spielberg has never been Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick would have worked with Arthur C Clarke again to ensure that the aliens were realistic space-farers as well as realistically alien (and he would have thrown in an acid trip). Spielberg's aliens are all the same: spindly, naked, pasty-skinned, large-eyed, quiet, and slow-moving. They seem related. Perhaps this film really represents the conclusion of a trilogy that Spielberg didn't know he was making:

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (aliens come to meet us)
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (aliens come to befriend us)
• War of the Worlds (aliens come to destroy us)

In this scenario, the three aliens might be different races of a single species of intelligent being from a far-off star system who have slightly different appetites. Perhaps ET's discovery of Earthling Reese's Pieces started a galactic gold rush that Earthlings could have survived if we had only had more warehouses full of the tasty peanut-buttery treats on hand. We'll never know.

There are some terrific scenes of science horror here: the creeping tendrils, the red spray, the graphic vaporization of humans in the initial attack. It's all very well done. And a scene involving a speeding commuter train is almost haunting.

But there are a few scenes in the story that don't ring true, the bane of all disaster movies. There seems to be very little disaster relief effort or even much crowd control. And at one point, a mob stops Cruise's vehicle, and one person steals it for himself. It's hard to imagine this actually happening, especially when no one really knows where they can go to find safety. I don't recall stories like this during hurricanes, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks. But probably the least realistic thing about it is that only two people have guns. This is America we're talking about.

Spielberg has forgotten the cardinal rule of both disaster films and war films: sacrifice sells. There is not, as far as I can recall, one single instance of self-sacrifice in the movie. The one event that seems to be self-sacrifice turns out to be no sacrifice at all.

The acting is about what you'd expect at this point from Tom Cruise as well as Dakota Fanning. Cruise comes off as believable and sympathetic, even if he doesn't seem to really inhabit the role. Fanning does fear well, but mostly she is an annoying, neurotic, know-it-all, high-maintenance, pre-menstrual nuisance of the usual sort that Spielberg and much of the rest of Hollywood loves.

I'm sure they chuckle to themselves, "Isn't she darling? She's just like a little producer!"

They get support from a crew of A-listers, including Morgan Freeman as the Narrator, Miranda Otto as the Frame Story, and Tim Robbins as the Psychotic Episode. Relative newcomer Justin Chatwin does a nice job as the stunned and angry son Cruise can't quite control.

Overall, the film is a good foray into science fiction horror, but lacks much emotional punch or enduring theme (other than "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day"). It's odd. The whole planet is devastated, after all. Surely out of 5 billion stories Spielberg & Company could have found a better one to tell.

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