War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
It’s sort of amazing, really, that Steven Spielberg is still top of the Hollywood tree. Given the constant upping of the ante since his Jaws (along with Star Wars) basically invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster, you would think he might have fallen by the wayside. Yet with War of the Worlds he once again steps up to the plate and shows just why he continues to lead the pack of A-list directors. War of the Worlds is his take on familiar material: not only has H.G. Wells’ novel been filmed before (in a George Pal-produced 1953 version), but it was the source material for Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast that spooked America in 1938. And, of course, it was the unofficial jumping off point for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day in 1996. It is a perfect choice of project for Spielberg, forming as it does a companion piece with his classic tale of benevolent aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If that film was kind of a sixties hangover, with its stirring finale of intergalactic peace, love, and harmony, then War of the Worlds is the grim, bitter and bleak counterpoint. It’s an extremely well made and effective film, but a feel-good thrill ride it certainly is not.
The story is simple: aliens land on Earth and start to slaughter its inhabitants. Spielberg’s approach to the story is distinguished from Emmerich’s by its grounded viewpoint, focussing on dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his two children (Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning). Ferrier has just taken custody of the children for the weekend from his ex-wife when the carnage erupts: ill-equipped to deal with any crisis, his only thought is to reach her and return the children to responsible hands. Where Emmerich showed (unconvincingly) how the President of the United States and other high level figures responded to the threat, Spielberg’s story is told through the eyes of this unremarkable family unit. So instead of Emmerich’s grand-scale hopping between all the key points and big players in the story, this is the view of average people on the ground, who don’t know exactly what is happening or what to do. It’s a much more effective approach, making the film much more believable and absorbing. Hollywood now has the cinematic technology to realise Wells’ apocalyptic visions with realism, and Spielberg’s approach honours this by treating the material as if it were really happening, and exploring how the scenario might unfold. What would you do in this situation? How would people behave? How quickly does society break down?
The answers are convincing, and chillingly depicted. The threat is not always the aliens, as Spielberg (from a script by Josh Friedman and David Koepp) shows how people who have been shaken out of the structures of everyday society can turn on each other in their fight to survive. Possibly the film’s most frightening sequence shows Ferrier and the children at the mercy of a mob who want his car, and the imagery of group hysteria in this and other such moments feels chillingly authentic. This is, as several reviewers have noted, a distinctly post-September 11 take on the tale, but it’s not so much the iconography as the mindset that betrays this. The film recognises that the kind of scenes featured in pre-September 11 movies (The Empire State Building exploding in Independence Day, the Chrysler Building falling into the street in Armageddon) now feel obscene; its sombre mood recognises that this kind of destruction now demands to be treated seriously. Where Independence Day took the approach that the alien threat could be defeated by sheer bloody-minded jingoism, War of the Worlds is suspicious of such impulses. Militarism isn’t the solution in this film – it’s the threat.
Spielberg has once again used Tom Cruise, after their pairing in Minority Report. Cruise is not a terribly convincing blue-collar hero, but it’s interesting to see the way Spielberg uses him: after featuring Cruise as the cop who was completely wrong about pre-crime in Minority Report, here he is the clueless dad who is buffeted around by forces beyond his control. His “bad dad” role here is another interesting contrast with Close Encounters, in which the much-younger Spielberg all but celebrated his protagonist’s urge to leave his children. Back then, Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary was a sympathetic character who fought all film to leave his family behind and join the benevolent aliens: in this case, Cruise’s Ferrier is similarly neglectful, but the alien threat forces him to take on the parental role that he had previously palmed off to others. The family unit is convincingly and sparingly portrayed (the sparseness of narrative of which some have complained is a good thing), with Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning the latest in a long line of extremely able juvenile performers in Spielberg films.
The invasion begins with a textbook display of Spielberg’s facility with suspense filmmaking. The film marks the return of the neo-Hitchcock Spielberg you saw back in Duel, Jaws, and for fleeting moments in Jurassic Park and The Lost World. There are big effects here, but it is the sureness of Spielberg’s framing, editing and camera-work that impresses as the film builds to its first big reveal of the Tripods. (The special effects by Industrial Light and Magic are extremely impressive, particularly in these early scenes, but not in a dazzling Star Wars way – what I was struck by was the photorealistic sense that someone had just put a camera down in the street and filmed the events unfolding). Shortly after, watch for a scene between the family as they flee down a freeway in a stolen car, where Spielberg pulls off an extremely long, mobile take that seems, upon close examination, completely impossible. It’s the kind of bravura technical flourish that Spielberg’s former protégé Robert Zemeckis would try, but where Zemeckis would draw attention to it, for Spielberg it is a means to an end. The shot is amazing if you notice it, but most won’t because it is discreetly done and always leaves the focus firmly on the events unfolding in the car.
The first half of the film follows the flight of the family, and is unrelentingly suspenseful. The cinematography by Janusz Kaminski is grey and foreboding throughout, and the tone is remorseless. Spielberg doesn’t over-romanticise the heroism of people in extreme situations, but nor is he condemnatory of either his characters or wider society. We see many different responses to the invasion, all of which ring true, and this is the film’s real subject. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is an apocalyptic film, about what it feels like to be the victim of a senseless war, and to be hunted down and exterminated for no apparent reason. It draws not only on anxieties about terrorism, but also on Spielberg’s several previous films about World War 2. With one major exception – which I won’t discuss, but which you’ll know when you see it – Spielberg is unflinching and faces up to the consequences of the scenario he depicts and the choices his characters make.
It’s not a flawless film. The later portions, involving Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), a half-crazed survivalist hiding in a basement, are a notch down from the first half. The climax to the basement sequence, for example, is handled with confidence, but suffers from its similarity to the kids-in-the-kitchen scene in Jurassic Park. Spielberg is extremely good at this kind of thing, but this is one sequence where you can really feel him falling back into his comfort zone. The abrupt ending, too, will be widely criticised, and the fact that it is inherited from the source material is merely a mitigating factor, rather than an excuse. Yet the difficulty of finishing the film arises from exactly those factors that make it effective. If the film ended with Tom Cruise downloading a virus into the tripods to disable them, or shooting a proton torpedo into their exhaust vent, it would completely betray the structuring principle of the film, which is that these fantastic events are treated as real and are beyond the control of the central characters. Just as real wars or natural disasters can’t be averted by those who suffer them, the tripods can’t simply be stopped by a musclebound jock with an automatic weapon. It’s not typical Hollywood narrative, but that’s not entirely a bad thing.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t wish that a better way could have been found to wrap the film up. As is so often is the case, however, the interesting and flawed things about a movie are inextricably intertwined.