Horrors Unreal Made Palpable

Rating: 8/10 (11 August 2006)

War of the Worlds is the story of an alien invasion told from the perspective of a flea. The flea doesn't expect to see the long arm of the dog reach out and scratch it off its back, nor does the dog care as the flea winces in horror before its marked off the map. Nor do we see the invasion from the point of view of a wide spectrum of people, we're given a survivor and we stick with him till the end. The film's been criticized for narrowing its focus on the troubles of one adult and his two children; somehow neglecting the millions of people who won't survive till the credits roll, and whose names won't be listed until after its top stars. But this is something the film gets absolutely right. During a tragedy such as the kind depicted in this film, your own personal tragedy comes before the millions of other dramas surrounding you. Some people objected to the clichÃ© of the father who tries to win back the respect of his daughter. But this the film gets right also. In a tragedy that threatens to consume human civilization, what do you look forward to? His daughter is the next generation, the Earth is her inheritance, and if she perishes, then that means they inherit the Earth.
War of the Worlds is grim. Leave it to the man who reenacted Nazi war atrocities in Schindler's List, when other Holocaust filmmakers said that was going too far. People are vaporized by blasts of fire so quickly that instead of hearing their fateful screams, we only hear a puff of smoke. And this is all in one shot. Like the Left Behind series, those killed in the first wave of attacks leave only their clothing behind, leaving the real terror to those who have the time to ask "Why?"
Spielberg never offers us an explanation as to why the aliens attack; we suppose they have some selfish agenda in mind, that can only be achieved by annihilating the Human race. Humans thrive on information, knowledge is power, and being left without the faintest idea of why we are running is the most fearful thing imaginable. The government never offers a formal response to the Martian attack, except by force, but a declaration of resistance is never uttered, and one has to assume that there's no one left in control to comfort the public with a simple speech. When an alien device knocks out the electricity (and all the devices we've adapted our survival to), people get out of their cars, they abandon their television sets, the city streets immediately begin to remind us of the ghettos in Schindler's List, where the holocaust is a murmur and a whisper between two frightened strangers. People subsist on rumours of success against the enemy, but mostly they are entertained by the preservation of hope. People plaster images and photographs of their family members to the wall; holding back their grief so long as their friends and relatives are labeled missing and not proclaimed dead.
"How can Spielberg do this to us?" you ask, after bringing us Encounters of the Third Kind (a film that gloried in the possibility of alien encounters), and after warming our hearts with E.T. the lovable extraterrestrial. I have to assume that in the world of Spielberg's mind, that life is both unimaginably cruel, and yet only a diversion from the riches and rewards coming to us. Anyone who survives War of the Worlds knows who wins in the end; the little guy. The little, little guy. I'm talking about germs. What do you think the significance is of having the most menacing force in the universe, after it has already defeated the United States Army (the most powerful military force we've ever known), be defeated by the bacteria that swarms in our bodies and occasionally makes us flemmy? Only after we witness the destruction of everything that we rely on to keep us safe: our families, our homes, our weapons, and the government that has sworn to protect us, does Spielberg pull back the curtain, and tell us that we won before it even started. Single celled organisms, the very building blocks of life that "God in his wisdom put there," spare us from total devastation. Spielberg turns us into the world's biggest cynic, before he turns us into the world's biggest sap. But only when we've given in to doubt is their room left for us to improve our outlook. Spielberg hasn't made me a believer, but he's spent allot of time studying what frightens me, and I thank him for the revelation.