War of the Worlds
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Paramount Pictures
Evil can't be understood, only pictured.
Which I don't believe for one split second, but in Steven Spielberg's deeply serious, relentlessly glum and pessimistic version of H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, War of the Worlds (from a screenplay credited to Jon Friedman and David Koepp), the faceless force that comes to harvest humanity, is never explained. (And they're vanquished with the same alacrity of logic as in Wells' original.) Canny entertainer, player and financier that he is, Spielberg allows that his slew of signifiers and references are meant to be contain multitudes. "There are politics underneath some of the scares, and some of the adventure and some of the fear," he's quoted by Reuters, "but I really wanted to make it suggestive enough so everybody could have their own opinion." (Or their own memory of Hitchcock's The Birds.)
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own," Wells writes on the opening page of his slim novel. After changing the words to "the first years of the twenty-first century," Morgan Freeman's opening narration intones tonily, that we are at the indulgence of "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic."
The first sensation of what's been composed by the "intellects" behind War of the Worlds is that they have been generous with their paranoia and a portrait of rampaging homo sapiencide, of the mortal ecstasy and adrenaline purge of escape from inexplicable forces that do not need to know your name to erase you from the face of history. Ideal summertime viewing! The marketers at Paramount went to uncommon lengths to prevent either early reviews (other than, strangely, from Austinite glad-bag Harry Knowles) or the bootlegging of War of the Worlds, down to disallowing anything other than notebooks into previews, with even Spielberg having to check his cell phone at the New York premiere.
Once past the perfunctory set-up of Tom Cruise as our callow New Jersey working man everyman, a deadbeat dad who's tending his two children for the weekend, are an angry teenage son and superhuman little Dakota Fanning, the blonde, screen gravitational equivalent of a black hole. (She doesn't eat scenery, but as always, easily holds the camera's love with the preternatural fierceness of a rat in a drain.) Lightning strikes twenty-nine times in the same spot. Electricity fails, computers fail, cars with computerized parts fail. Cue: primal fear.
Janusz Kaminski's seldom less-than-cruddy exposures are rattily gorgeous, and he and Spielberg's brash, effortless overlapping camera technique, as assembled by Spielberg's editor since Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Michael Kahn, bestows several breathtaking setpieces. (There's a sustained take, likely aided by digital stitching, swooping around a car on a freeway that combines all manner of cleverness, for the most sophisticated use of space within the confines of a car since Fred Schepisi's underrated Last Orders.)
The form of the aliens' attack vessels and the aliens themselves are impressively drawn, but not that fear-inducing. And while the familial emotional gambits are mostly rote, the prickly sensation of being alive today is what makes this film memorable, and for several pulsing stretches, perhaps even great. Spielberg's movie whirls with suggestive bits from this decade's paranoia and the bloodstained century past. Words like "refugee" and "extermination" come readily and regularly in War, and could there be contemporary resonance in a line like "Occupations always fail-History's told us that a thousand times"?
Spielberg goes where dreams live and nightmares breed, whistling darkly over many graveyards, in images, explicit images drawn from the tenderest spots of collective consciousness. (Any other director would have gotten an NC-17 MPAA rating for the "sustained intensity" of this cut.) For some viewers and reviewers, imagery of the Holocaust and 9/11 may be sacrosanct, that popular culture should not traffic in the deepest and darkest and deadliest of our shared fears. To allude, to incorporate, to reference, is wrong.
This movie will offend them: as one colleague said afterward, he'd checked out late in the movie when a sequence evokes the terror of being among humans heaped into the cattle cars of the Nazi empire, body over body, into cattle cars on the way to the camps, the ovens, the showers, inevitable death. (Too bad the Jews, Gypsies and other victims weren't equipped with hand grenades, as War allows its piled-deep objects of slaughter.) The improvised cardboard walls of "Have you seen?" posters, fleeting to moosh in the rain, are unmistakable tatters of the weeks after 9/11, as is when Cruise emerges dusted white, dusted gray, shouldering the remains of atomized people from his exclamation-point thatch of hair. Near the end, the aliens' aim (if not their true goals) is illustrated with vile precision: the Bosch-worthy tableau of a countryside as ruby-tainted and glutinous with blood and flesh and viscera as first-hand reports and suppressed photos describe the plazas beneath the World Trade Center.
Unmoor the metaphors and many images pulse with ghastly beauty. Spielberg, as always, marshals American flag iconography with acuity; the compacted shot of Cruise's block, each house with its own Stars and Stripes in close formation and the Bayonne Bridge, a lengthy, elegant arc to the left of the frame. Consider, too: At a crossing, a runway train that is a blur of reflective silver stripes and marauding flame; a single corpse, heavy in a river, followed by a community of floaters; a post-Titanic drowning of hundreds on a toppling Hudson River ferry, with cars bounding at bodies and the camera; a crashed plane in a cul-de-sac is one of the central images of Donnie Darko built out to the size of twenty football fields; retreating solider-filled Humvees swathed in incandescent orange, as if napalmed at Fallujah; strips of clothes of the dead ribboning to the ground in a soft float like office paper commuting into Brooklyn and the other borughs, and the sea, on that particular, severe clear Tuesday morning.
It'd make some double feature with George A. Romero's Land of the Dead: despite the ostensible "happy ending," the survivors of the rampage of destruction across the planet will be left with the kinds of moral issues art (and society) have not yet begun to address. It's optimistic only in suggesting that some humans will live to suffer another day, an open-ended horror like that described in James Howard Kunstler's compelling but relentless and ultimately despairing "The Long Emergency," a nonfiction polemic that projects what will come twenty to fifty years from now, when the efforts necessary to continue our suburban and oil-driven lifestyle will clash with development in other countries and the finite resources of nature and how nature will inevitably strike back.
Like movies made by Spielberg's pal Robert Zemeckis, movies like Forrest Gump and Castaway, any abiding value in War of the Worlds may lie in its allusions, and its reluctance to make its metaphors crystalline. Read several reviews of War of the Worlds, and in the hurtling deadline of a few hours that critics faced, and you will get an intriguing picture of instant reactions, the sort of snap judgment the average intelligent moviegoer has after a movie over a burger or a beer, ranging from the atypical lack of certitude in A. O. Scott's New York Times' notice, or Roger Ebert's pique at the Erector-set character of the invaders and the illogic of their tactics, taking on neither metaphor nor Spielberg's disturbing and potentially inflammatory imagery. In the hands of a shrewd filmmaker, we sometimes take away more of ourselves than we do of wisps of narrative logic.
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