Spoilers, ho!

Last night, I saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. And, truly, it should be called “Spielberg’s” because no one else could take an apocalyptic event and make it all about a guy reconciling with his kids. Unfortunately, it’s that famous Spielberg schmaltz that once again torpedoes the movie.

Firstly, the good. The special effects in this movie are top-notch: the alien tripods are equally menacing and fascinating and they seamlessly inhabit the environment. They look believable. Paired with the visuals and equally excellent is the sound of the film. I rarely take notice of sound in a movie, but this one really gave my ears a workout: there’s some great directional sounds that caught my attention. There are some sweeping vistas of the destruction that look marvelous: glowing red fields of vines, bodies floating downriver, etc.

Unfortunately, that’s the end of the good.

I understand Spielberg’s thinking when choosing to focus on a random family: in the 50s version, the movie focused on a scientist on the front lines of the war: we were involved in decisions that were made and the thinking behind them (and, ultimately, how futile their efforts ended up being). Spielberg wants to show the other 99.9% of the people affected: those people who have no idea what’s happening or why. Unfortunately, he chooses a fairly pedestrian story of a man, Ray, (Tom Cruise) who has no idea how to deal with his children. We know this, because he doesn’t know his daughter is allergic to peanuts or that his son, uh, truthfully, the son just seems like a jerk for most of the movie.

The first time the little girl started her high-pitched whining, I knew I really wanted the aliens to win. The second time, I was ready to join them myself. If you want us to care about the characters, you really have to do a little more building up of them first. We get about 15 minutes of Hollywood shorthand telling us that Ray is a rotten father and that his kids have issues. Whee. And since it is a Spielberg movie, we all know where it’ll end.

Yes, Spielberg does toss in some dark bits, but they really don’t affect the characters at all. While holed up in a barn, Ray makes the decision to kill the character played by Tim Robbins in order to save his daughter. So he blindfolds the daughter and tells her to sing a lullaby while he does the dirty business. Then he sits on the stairs for a while and hugs his daughter and all is well. Why even bother with something like that if it makes no difference at all for the character? I guess one could argue that that’s the point where Ray decides he should engage the enemy, rather than run, but that’s really dictated by the abduction of his daughter by one of the tripods than by anything else.

And why bother having Ray meet one of his previously unseen neighbors, only to leave them behind scant seconds later? I suspect something was left on the cutting room floor.

And the explanation that the aliens buried their war machines on Earth millions of years ago just makes no sense without more context: is Earth some sort of “farm” for them? Did they bury machines on Mars, too, and millions of other planets? Talk about preparing: it’s like burying ammo underneath every tree, just in case! And while the visuals are cool, they also make little sense: is our blood fertilizer for their food supply? If so, why vaporize so many at the start of the invasion: is that some sort of pre-fertilizer?

The aliens also appear to be as stupid as the ones in Signs: they walk around without any protection from the environment, drinking water and breathing our air. It would be as if Neil Armstrong went to the moon and decided he didn’t need his helmet or spacesuit and made moon-dust Tang to drink. I’m a little tired of super-advanced alien species who mount amazing invasions only to be brought down by their own stupidity.

And, finally, the nail in the coffin for the movie. Spielberg had a chance to pull this off: as his family travels from New York to Boston to reunite with his ex-wife and her grandparents, he loses his son (who, out of the blue, decides he wants to join the army or something). As Ray and his daughter reach their goal, everyone is there and alive: his ex-wife, the grandparents, the ex-wife’s husband, and, yes, his son (who apparently survives a firebombing that destroys well-armored Army soldiers, but leaves him unharmed).

Now, had Ray gotten to Boston and seen a smoking crater, it would have been more believable and would have made the movie much, much better. But Spielberg can’t seem to give us an ending like that. For him, everything ends up happily, despite a plot and situation that cry out for something darker. The same problem plagues A.I. and Minority Report: movies that cry out for more ambiguous endings than we get.

Still, despite the plot and the characters, the movie was enjoyable, mostly because of the technical things: the special effects, the sound design, etc. I was able to suppress my need to strangle Dakota Fanning for screaming every 10 minutes, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Now, a quick review of my theater experience for this movie. We got there early and got nice seats: the theater had about 20 or so people in it (I guess everyone was seeing Fantastic Four), with no kids or babies. The trailers were forgettable (I think there was one for a new Cameron Crowe movie, and one for Peter Jackson’s Jurassic Pa…, I mean, King Kong, but neither made me want to see the movie.

For most of the movie, the experience was good, but about a third of the way through the movie, an older couple came in and sat near us. And didn’t stop talking until the end credits rolled. They didn’t talk all the time, but enough to be annoying. It certainly wasn’t as bad as my Spider-Man 2 experience (imagine two busloads of 12-16 year olds), but you’d think older folks would be better about not talking.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 at 9:42 pm and is filed under DVDs, Television, Movies, Reviews, Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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