Spielberg's "War Of the Worlds" -- Ugh!

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went to the movies yesterday and saw Stephen Spielberg’s version of “War of the Worlds.” Her reaction – “Ugh!” The sound was too loud and percussive and it gave her a headache. The much touted special effects left her cold. They weren’t “pretty” or “elegant” or even “pretty in an ugly way.” They were just plain ugly. As far as the story, it just didn’t make any sense. She stopped enjoying the movie about the time that Miranda Otto left the scene, about ten minutes into it. From then on it was just one unpleasant experience after another. She did admit, though, that Dakota Fanning was pretty good and wishes the media would quit picking on Tom Cruise. She’s actually a pretty good gauge of public sentiment and I suppose that her reaction is mirrored by lots of women whose male partners dragged them to this gorefest. My reaction was in some ways a bit more positive and in others a lot more negative.

One of Spielberg’s great strengths as a movie-maker has been his ability to craft lean, mean tales of terror. Remember “Duel” and “Jaws”? Of course you do. They are unforgettable. Those were superbly crafted engines driving the audience toward horrific confrontations with implacable evil. Spielberg’s other great storytelling talent has been his ability to depict in sometimes heartrending detail familial relationships. Think of the slow, awful disintegration of Richard Dreyfuss’ family in “Close Encounters” or the aching yearning for family completeness in A. I. Most often he has meditated on the meaning and responsibilities of fatherhood. Think of “Catch Me If You Can”, “Hook”, “The Last Crusade”, or “Jurassic Park.”

Sometimes, as in “Jurassic Park” or “Close Encounters”, Spielberg’s two great narrative tropes comfortably mesh and the result can be literally wonder-full, but sometimes they conflict and the result is a brilliant catastrophe. “War of the Worlds” is an example of the latter.

This is not to say that there are no strong elements in the movie; there certainly are. There is an immense amount of virtuosity on display here. The sound effects are stunning. The cinematography [by Janusz Kaminski] is perfect – not a missed beat. The composition and pacing of shots, the camera movement and placement could not be improved upon. Special effects are integrated into the action of the scenes more effectively than I have ever seen before. I particularly liked the way the camera does not linger on the effects, but shies away from them – an entirely appropriate mode for a story in which the main characters are desperately fleeing catastrophe. Many individual scenes are quite simply amazing. They will haunt me for a long, long time. In a technical sense this is movie-making at its best.

The problem is not with the parts; it is with the whole. The story and its characters are badly misconceived.

Let’s take the story first.

There are really two stories here, reflecting Spielberg’s two great narrative themes – the horror of Wells’ implacable apocalypse and the self-affirmation of a man growing into the role of fatherhood. They don’t mesh well. Wells’ theme is that of abject powerlessness and humility in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. His people have absolutely no control over their ultimate fates. Spielberg’s fatherhood story, however, requires that his main character grow into a position of responsibility through active personal choices. The two themes are thus diametrically opposed – powerlessness and empowerment. The result is a storyline filled with holes so large that you could drive a train from hell through them.

SPOILERS:

This disjuncture leads to three of the absurdities that make the last third of the film an utter mess. Spielberg desperately wants to transform Cruise’s character into a heroic figure worthy of his children’s adoration so he concocts two perfectly meaningless episodes in which the “STAR!” can demonstrate his heroism. The first comes when Cruise’s daughter is captured and he first challenges, then takes down one of the alien death machines. But, as we soon learn, the aliens were already beginning to expire and it is only through a movie miracle that Cruise and his daughter were not killed in the collapse. The second time is when he makes a canny observation regarding birds that enables an army unit to attack another death machine. But, as we learn immediately afterward, the operators of the machine were already in their death throes and Cruise’s contribution counted for next to nothing. The two episodes exist only for the purpose of demonstrating to the audience that Cruise is capable of heroic action, thus redeeming the worthless, and often despicable, character he was earlier in the film [It can’t be for the benefit of his alienated son, who has by this time been removed from the movie. I might add that the absence of the son is dictated by Spielberg’s fatherhood theme which requires that at some point Cruise’s character “learn to let go” of his son so that he can live his life, or seek his death on his own.]

Then there is the ending, which elicited loud groans from the audience. The city of Boston has been devastated. Everyone is dead, everything is destroyed… except for one family -- Cruise’s ex-wife and the mother of his children [Miranda Otto, in a thankless performance], her new husband, and her parents. Once again, through the magic of movie miracles, absurdity prevails and the family survives with their home intact so that the “STAR!” can complete his mission and the movie can have a happy ending, but more importantly, so Spielberg can satisfy his yearning for familial completeness.

But this ending is undercut both by the absurdity of the situation and by the nature of Cruise’s character. Here we come to the second great failure of Spielberg’s vision. He and Cruise have constructed as their hero, a monster of a man.

As first presented to us Cruise’s character is simply irresponsible and self-absorbed. He seems to be popular in his neighborhood, but he lacks ambition, is comfortable in a proletarian job, has failed as a husband and father, and lacks any refined sense of style or cuisine. He doesn’t even eat healthy, for Ghod’s sake! Overall pretty prosaic, but clearly in Spielberg’s mind a character in need of redemption. By contrast his ex-wife and children live a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in suburbia [and we are to presume from the ending that she is of Beacon-Hill Brahmin stock]. One might find this characterization a bit patronizing and insulting, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever his failings, Cruise’s character is at first no monster, simply the object of upper-middle class disdain.

In the course of his adventures Cruise’s character develops into a horrific monster, but in Spielberg’s vision that apparently doesn’t matter because it’s “for the children.” In fact, psychopathic behavior in the service of family is to be applauded. Two instances in point:

At the ferry crossing Cruise and his family encounter one of his neighbors from the old neighborhood with her daughter. For a few minutes it looked as though the core cast was about to expand into a surrogate family, but then as the ferry begins to abandon his friend and her child, Cruise does nothing more than protest feebly while it his son takes heroic but ultimately ineffective action trying to save people on the dock. There is no looking back, no regret, nothing. The characters are simply erased from the film, apparently from memory, and a promising plot-line is simply dropped. One is left wondering why they were even introduced at all -- perhaps they were created and destroyed simply to make the point that the son is morally superior to the father.

Later, a man (Tim Robbins) offers Cruise and his daughter sanctuary in his basement [a nice thing to do, I would think], but when Cruise fears that Robbins' hysteria will reveal their location he simply kills the poor guy. Spielberg seems to justify this brutality by indicating that the guy is a bit creepy, that he and Cruise are not “on the same page,” and making it clear that Cruise is thinking of his daughter’s safety when he takes another human life. Apparently in Spielberg’s world anything can be justified if it’s “for the children.” What is worse, in the point of the killing is rendered meaningless because Cruise's daughter is immediately after discovered and captured. This is a terrifying glimpse into the mind of a person for whom the horrifying death of millions can serve as nothing more than a backdrop to an individual’s quest for personal fulfillment. The lack of proportion is staggering and reminds us that the moral imbecile that is Spielberg once declared that the high point of his life was meeting Fidel Castro.

Finally, Spielberg vision reflects a profound immersion in movie history, and it shows. Not only does he quote extensively from his own past work and George Pal’s 1953 version, but key scenes resonate with other unforgettable moments from great movies of the past. The final scene, for all its absurdity, is a case in point. It drips with movie nostalgia, both obviously [among the family members present are Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, who starred in George Pal’s earlier version of “WOTW”] and subtly.

After enduring incredible hardships, Tom Cruise’s character walks with his daughter up an abandoned street in Boston to be welcomed by his ex-wife, her new husband, her parents and his magically reappearing son. This is the completion of Cruise’s quest – the reunification of his family and his final assumption of the mantle of fatherhood. To hammer the point home he has both the son and daughter acknowledge Cruise as their “Dad.”

But is this a real reunification? His ex-wife, her new husband, the children and the grandparents are a classic American family – one in which there is no real place for Cruise’s character, the “ex”. Miranda Otto emphasizes the fact by simply saying “thank you” as she gathers her family to her and away from Cruise. As the family stands in the doorway of the magically untouched home, Cruise is left standing outside on the street, in exactly the same situation as that occupied by John Wayne’s character in “The Searchers.”

In John Ford’s great film, Wayne was a heroic figure, but also a man who had done terrible things in an attempt to reunify his family. At the end the family was reunited, but Wayne’s “Uncle Ethan” was an ambiguous figure who could never really fit into the reconstituted family. Ford’s last image was of a door closing, shutting out Wayne’s figure forever. Spielberg does not replicate that image precisely, but the emotional content of the scene is the same. Cruise can never really be an integral part of the family unit he has preserved. He will always be the guy they visit on weekends and holidays. Ford was making a profound point in the searchers – that the autonomous American hero was a borderline psychopath. Here there is no such deep meaning, just a filmic reference.

Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” is brilliant, exciting, dazzling in places, and a triumphal display of movie-making techniques. But in moral, thematic, and dramatic terms it is incoherent, derivative, and soulless. George Pal, for all his technical inferiority, made a better movie. In the end I find I have to agree with “She Who Shall Not Be Named”. Spielberg’s latest work fully deserves a resounding “UGH!”