director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriters
Josh Friedman
David Koepp
based on
the novel by
H.G. Wells
producers
Kathleen Kennedy
Colin Wilson
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier)
Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier)
Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier)
Tim Robbins (Ogilvy)
Miranda Otto (Mary Ann Ferrier)
Morgan Freeman (The Narrator)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 116m
u.s.
release: 6/29/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- munich
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
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Steven Spielberg, in the first
hour or so of War of the Worlds, summons the apocalypse
with all his genius for suspense and sadism. Yes, sadism. I've
long felt that Spielberg has a lot of anger to work off -- it's
come out in the oddest ways in some of his films -- and here
he gets to kill most of us off via tripod-riding aliens who squash
millions of people as if they were less than ants. Knocking over
buildings, flinging cars in the air, up-ending ferries, zapping
screaming humans into ash, Spielberg is, make no mistake, having
the time of his life. War of the Worlds differs from a
callow destruct-a-thon like Independence
Day in that the large-scale carnage, with catastrophe
building on catastrophe, thrills as much as it hurts. This is
really the first whack Spielberg has had at depicting mass destruction
since 1941 over twenty-five years ago, and he shows all
the summer-movie whippersnappers how it's done. When the aliens
emerge from the cracked asphalt of New Jersey and begin their
brutal business, you can safely strap in for some of the most
awe-inspiring work Spielberg has done in years.
The rest of War of the Worlds,
though, is hit or miss. The problems, for some, may begin with
Tom Cruise as the film's default hero -- Ray Ferrier, a divorced
dad who never grew up. Spielberg's portfolio is full of men like
Ray, and they were more believable when smaller-scale actors
like Richard Dreyfuss were playing them. In Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, Dreyfuss, playing an equally childlike
father, gave off a schlumpy Everyman vibe, but with a manic gleam
that kept you unsure what he was going to do. Certainly Spielberg
wouldn't find it in himself to give us a hero who leaves his
wife and kids behind, as Dreyfuss did; and Tom Cruise is not
the sort of actor who makes you nervous in that way, at least
not in this kind of role. Cruise hurts the film because you don't
buy for a minute that a summer movie starring Tom Cruise will
end with him or his two kids (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin)
anywhere near dead. A remake of War of the Worlds directed
by Spielberg would have sold itself; it didn't need star power,
and if Spielberg had cast someone like Paul Giamatti -- an actor
who can play someone who might fail -- the movie would
be more successfully terrifying.
As it is, we're not sure why
Ray, running with hundreds of others on the chaotic streets,
doesn't get zapped along with the dozens who get reduced to ash
constantly on either side of him, other than the fact that he's
Tom Cruise. As written and played, Ray has nothing much going
for him aside from bulldog determination. He has to protect his
kids at all times and at all costs, thwarted by one crisis or
another (sometimes it's aliens, sometimes it's panicked mobs
of people), and you get the sense that he's being punished for
being an absentee father. Millions of humans perish by fire so
that Ray the deadbeat dad can redeem himself through action --
or action-movie action.
Apparently it wouldn't be a
Spielberg film these days without a stretch of film that makes
little sense and could be deleted with no harm done, and here
we have Ray and his little daughter holing up in a basement with
a grim-faced survivalist played by Tim Robbins. The climax of
this plot thread serves no purpose other than to prove that Ray
will do anything to keep his daughter alive, except that
the proof is kept behind a closed door. For Robbins' part, playing
a gun-toting redneck, he gives the sort of crude performance
-- to paraphrase Pauline Kael -- only a very dedicated liberal
would give. His character is Bad News the second we lay eyes
on him, because he's rural and he's armed. Spielberg and Robbins
are both capable of more subtlety than this.
Some viewers have been bothered
by the film's wealth of 9/11-inspired imagery -- the missing-person
posters, the flakes of ash that used to be flesh falling everywhere.
Spielberg gets a pass there -- 9/11 showed us all what real disaster
looks like, and it would be disingenuous of the movie to go back
to the relatively clean zap-zap of something like Independence
Day or, for that matter, the original 1953 War of the
Worlds. If the destruction is unavoidably exciting, the aftermath
is by necessity sobering and chilling. A director can be of two
minds about the carnage he wreaks -- we saw it in the famous
"Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter-attack sequence
in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, equal parts invigorating
and appalling. Spielberg, following H.G. Wells' book, eschews
the ID4 formula of "Aliens attack; we hit back."
The power of our military is shown to be haplessly meaningless
against the well-shielded aliens; the aliens' downfall, as relevant
today as in Wells' day, is simply the arrogance of dominion.
Too confident in their ability to wipe out big foes, they don't
account for smaller ones.
In the end, this War of
the Worlds plays on American fears much the same way earlier
versions of the story (including Orson Welles' notorious 1938
radio hoax) did -- in this case, terrorism, with a side order
of unease about the way things are going in Iraq. (Talk about
the arrogance of dominion; if anyone finds it implausible that
aliens would invade a planet they know fatally little about,
how about a country that starts a war on bullshit pretenses with
an insufficient number of troops and threadbare equipment, hoping
that the people will greet us as liberators? We have met the
aliens, and they are us.) It's fun to analyze summer entertainment
this way, if not terribly satisfying; it doesn't make the movie
larger than it is. I still prefer Tim Burton's flamboyantly goofy
Mars
Attacks, which had no agenda other than to blow stuff
up for fun. Spielberg blows stuff up better than anyone -- he
proves himself the maestro of that by-now-degraded game. But
he does it so well that it's a hard act for even the maestro
to follow.
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