Summer’s here and the time is right, apparently, for moviegoers to be scared out of their wits. Big, noisy blockbusters about terror attacks are nothing new in the summertime, but Spielberg’s tale is scarier than anything currently out there. It pummels you into submission, as a good Spielberg action film will, and actually leaves you wanting to get off the roller coaster on occasion.
They say this is Spielberg’s return to his earlier "shock" movies–the blockbusters like Jaws and Jurassic Park that were like day trips to the Horror Amusement Park. Maybe Steven just felt like proving that he, too, can still whip out a stomach-churning horror/sci-fi flick. (All those magazines dubbing M. Night Shyamalan "the new Spielberg" when Signs came out must have rubbed Steven the wrong way; you can imagine "Mr. E.T." thinking: "I’ll show that little punk how it’s really done…")
It goes without saying, War of the Worlds is tons scarier than Signs, and it’s a thousand times scarier than the 1953 George Pal sci-fi version that it shares some visual touchstones with (like the farmhouse scene, where an alien eye snakes its way inside, exploring; or the final death rattle of an alien corpse). Relying on a huge budget and a familiar cast (Tom Cruise, a precocious Dakota Fanning), Spielberg manages to wring lots of fear and worry from a willing summer audience. It’s a bravura, seamless project– a high-tech scare-a-thon like only Spielberg can make ‘em. Sure, it doesn’t stand up to much thought or discussion, but with 80-foot tripod alien ships laying waste to Earth’s big cities, who needs to think?
Cruise is Ray Ferrier, a divorced and absentee dad who operates a crane in New Jersey when his ex-wife drops his son and daughter off for the weekend. That’s when the lightning storms begin, and Ray can hardly tear his eyes away when the bolts start touching down on nearby streets. Suddenly, all the cars, watches and power die. Everyone’s wondering what will happen next, and before you can say "extraterrestrial," the 80-foot metallic tripods are popping up out of the asphalt and incinerating the rubbernecking crowds at an alarming rate.
This is some scary shit, not least of all because it reminds everyone of 9/11. Aliens are depicted as arguably the worst terrorist cell in history, operating quietly under the streets of American cities and towns, waiting until given orders to attack.
Of course, Ray being such a selfish retard of a dad requires that he be allowed to grow up a little, and he eventually learns how, not only to fight the aliens, but also to reach out to his kids with a hug once in a while. This is all typical sentimental Spielberg spiel, but in this context, the message is blurred and buried under the sheer bludgeoning of special effects and movie terror.
Indeed, there’s something dictatorial about Spielberg’s movies: he doesn’t want the audience let out of his grip for a second. Using his patented point-of-view shots (you know: the ones where the camera zooms in on a terrified face looking slightly off or behind the camera), the director never relents in demanding our complete participation in what seems like a very convincing nightmare. The sound the tripods make is dread-inducing – a combination of the howl of Jurassic Park dinosaurs and the deafening Mothership tones from Close Encounters. The scale of the aliens is massive enough to leave you feeling powerless, overwhelmed. After a certain point, I was actually ready to throw in the towel: if it were me, I figured, I’d just request to be killed by a death ray and get it over with. No more of this pointless, futile resistance.
Yes, people like to be scared at the movies. Spielberg practically reinvented the genre with Jaws. He’s a master at manipulating emotions, and though he usually goes for the "softer" emotions these days, it’s worth remembering that he is also very good at eliciting terror. Though he’s not adding anything new to his approach here, he does up the ampage, noise and fear factor to new dimensions. There are set pieces containing images that are visually stunning: a ferry leaving hundreds of panicking Americans behind as it sets off into uncertain waters; the sight of vaporized citizens, turned to ash, their clothes left intact and floating down to Earth in eerie calm like released souls; a once-green field, covered in blood-red alien vegetation.
We may want to consider, though, whether Spielberg is exploiting our residual fear of terrorism and, specifically, our memories of 9/11 with this new concoction. H.G. Wells’ original novel was arguably a fin de siècle gaze at the future of the Industrial Age: his metallic tripods (which Spielberg renders very close to the book) were a nightmare of man being taken over by machines. The Welles’ radio broadcast of 1938 tapped into America’s fear of fascism and war. The 1953 color version echoed American Cold War paranoia. So maybe it’s no shock that Spielberg has channeled our latest fears – of terrorism – into some good old-fashioned box-office.
The only quibble about this powerful piece of fascistic movie-making, beyond the fact that no one will remember it after a few years, maybe even after a few days, is that the ending just kind of peters out. This is a flaw, if we can call it that, of Wells’ novel, which saw the aliens being defeated by "the simplest things" that mankind had long learned to successfully battle. It’s a nice literary irony, but in a big-budget production like this, we want a bit more of a showdown. At any rate, it wasn’t adequately explained to some audience members unfamiliar with War of the Worlds, and a number of people were left scratching their heads when the lights went up. Yet just a few moments earlier, they had been holding on to their seats for dear life.