War of the Worlds
(Steven Spielberg, US)

By Adam Nayman

War of the Worlds brings to mind that old line about sound and fury, except that Steven Spielberg is no idiot. Rather, he remains, 30 years after Jaws (1975), commercial cinema’s canniest and most ruthless manipulator, without peer when it comes to imagining the rough intrusion of the fantastic into our workaday world. Spielberg stumbled badly with The Terminal (2004), a half-baked allegory positing America as a permeable consumer paradise, peopled by supportive bystanders and a few misguided bureaucratic meanies. It was, at its core, an unpersuasive fable of conquest from within. War of the Worlds’ conquerors come from without by way of within, their spidery vessels having apparently been buried beneath the earth for thousands of years.

It’s a detail that has led to the film being read as an allegory for terrorist sleeper cells, although a remark made late in the script that “occupations never work” (courtesy, of course, of Tim Robbins) suggests an intriguing reversal: that these unfathomably advanced yet comically short-sighted invaders are actually a stand-in for a certain imperialistic global superpower. Both readings suppose that Spielberg has some sort of sociopolitical agenda, a dicey proposition given the filmmaker’s propensity (shared with his alien antagonists) to shoot first and not bother so much with the questions.

Except that War of the Worlds is clearly trying to say something. The occasionally terrifying imagery, describing ever-swelling waves of mass destruction and the desolation left in their wake, is dotted with unmistakable allusions to 9/11, and the aforementioned discussion of invasions and occupations feels weightier than the usual summer-movie repartee of “run!”, “oh my God,” and BOOM! The problem is that it’s the run-oh-my-God-BOOM that makes people want to see the film. Even more than Deep Impact (1998) (which was produced by Spielberg), War of the Worlds is a master-class in the simultaneous having and eating of cake: pack ‘em in with promises of slaughter and then scold them for their bloodthirstiness by reminding us that death is ugly stuff.

And boy, do we ever get our noses rubbed in it. The sight of cities aflame is pretty much de rigeur in this kind of film, but there’s also no refuge to be found in the pastoral—we get a river strewn with corpses, fields infested with sinewy, blood-red extra-terrestrial vegetation and hillsides dotted with the ant-like figures of doomed, scattering humans. It’s unsettling, to be sure, but War of the Worlds is, ultimately, a cop-out, an apocalypse seen through rose-colored glasses. Our heroes—dockworker Ray (Tom Cruise) and his two kids, Rachel and Robbie (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwith)—not only survive, but it’s also none-too-subtly implied that their strained filial bonds are strengthened in the process. That the film retains the climactic deux ex machina of H.G. Wells’ novel is no problem (it’s an effective cheat, which is why M. Night Shyamalan pilfered it for his superior Dad vs. aliens thriller Signs [2003]), but Spielberg’s inability to follow through on the fatalism that dominates the proceedings is not only a problem, it’s unforgivable.

It’s also familiar: recall the intermittently stunning A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and its wet-Freudian-noodle denouement, or the stunningly intermittent Minority Report (2002), with its latter stage de-evolution into a particularly bad episode of Murder She Wrote 3000 (complete with special guest villain Max Von Sydow). Both were to some extent failures of execution, but War of the Worlds has no such deficiencies. From the magnificent opening scene, which finds Cruise’s Ray operating a cargo loader—an inhuman steel behemoth charged with visual portent—Spielberg appears to be in total control. The first thirty minutes, which economically establish the dysfunction between Ray and his kids against the palpably eerie backdrop of an increasingly weird lightning storm, are scary in a way that no proper horror film has managed in quite some time. Maybe more than any other director, Spielberg understands that special effects are only as good as the surrounding context. In Jaws, the shark’s unseen presence is so well established that the rubbery robot that eventually swallows Robert Shaw has credibility, and so it is in War of the Worlds. By the time the tripods rise out of the sidewalk, our disbelief (“What, they nestled their ships right between every water main on Earth?”) is vertiginously suspended.

And there it remains, through 45 stressful, spectacle-filled minutes (a sequence involving an overturned ferry is a doozy), until an extended set-piece in a basement housing Ray, Rachel, and a crazed survivalist, Ogilvv (Tim Robbins). At this point, two things become clear: Spielberg is plagiarizing himself, and the movie isn’t about anything at all. The self-pilfering involves the silent pursuit of some vulnerable characters by a mechanical tentacle that behaves like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park (1993), peeking stealthily around corners as its prey struggle to stay one whisper-quiet step ahead. It’s spooky and, even better, spatially coherent, but it also feels like stalling. Which, of course, it is, because the film has nowhere else to go: having spent the better part of its running time establishing that Ray and his kids are lucky to be alive, War of the World turns him into an action-movie star, a role that the otherwise fine Cruise slips into with a little bit too much square-jawed gusto. Not only does Ray succeed in being the first human being on Earth to bring down a tripod (using a trick borrowed from Men in Black [1997]), but he later has the presence of mind to notice something that a phalanx of trained military professionals manage to miss.

One might argue that Ray’s sudden transformation is borne of his desire to protect himself and his family, that trauma often spurs remarkable behavior. But really, Ray has been untouchable all along—he is, after all, a Spielberg hero, giving him the cinematic equivalent of divinely ordained immunity. The one exception, Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan (1998), dies as part of a historically plausible scenario, literally passing the hero baton to Matt Damon in the process. Spielberg has no trouble vaporizing literally millions of faceless people, but he won’t pull the trigger when it comes to his main characters, which undercuts the severity of the imagery and renders any sociological project the film might have (some have argued, unconvincingly, that it is intended to resensitize us to media images of tragedy) moot and insulting. Are we to believe that among the victims of the invasion there weren’t also resourceful people who loved their children? The film ends with the revelation that humanity shall overcome, as Ray’s brood canoodles outside their stately townhouse. Tragedy, says War of the Worlds, is inexorable, but also pretty darned thrilling. And life is fragile, unless you’re a cutie or billed above the title.

—Adam Nayman

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