Good Movie, Misses the Point

Rating: 5/10 (8 October 2008)

I was very, very excited when I heard Steven Spielberg was making a movie out of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds. The story was the first science fiction I ever read and it still sticks in my mind as one of the finest, most ahead of it's time pieces of literature. Imagine, writing about alien invasion at a time when most every other author was making a living selling cheap cowboy stories or writing plays. Even much of Jules Verne's work, a master of sci-fi himself, was comparatively terrestrial. We take aliens in fiction for granted today but back then I wonder what people made of it.
I wanted to like the movie, I really really did. The old 1953 version had it's moments, but it wasn't really War of the Worlds. The 53 version told the story of global impact of a Martian invasion, Wells told the story of how it affected one man. In that Spielberg got it right. It was a very personal story, and kudos to Tom Cruise for his portrayal of a man caught up in a world gone mad. The scene with him and the ash made everyone in the theater cringe. The way he ran from scene to scene reminded me of that footage I've seen of deer fleeing forest fires. Animals driven mad. The Martians themselves, although never named, were superb. The fighting machines were actually very close to the original descriptions. The heat ray was a neat twist... ohh neutron beams.
But where the movie fails for me isn't in the bloopers or plot holes, but rather the story itself. The Narrator in the original story is not a father, has a wife that he loves but is not a noble figure. He was simply an observer, a regular person who witnessed the most horrific event in human history and somehow managed to survive and relay his story. The movie, for me, wasn't about the Martians. It was about how this man goes from being a dead-beat dad to an good father. Which is fine, it was a story well told. But it wasn't the story I wanted to see in a $200 mil sci-fi movie. Frankly I wanted to see the battles between the army and the Martians (favorite part from the book was the iron clad Thunderchild), I wanted to see the main character absolutely on the brink of collapse, ready to just throw himself suicidally at the Martians' feet, and gosh darn it I did NOT want to see that at the end of the movie, even though millions of people had died... the main character's ENTIRE family was spared. Granted at the end of the book, the Narrator found his wife and cousin but that was within the realm of credibility, his wife managed to get on the last ship out of England.
In short this was a good movie, but it wasn't War of the Worlds. Books can be brought to the screen and remain true to the story they tell, but only if the directors want it to. This was Hollywood making one story about survival and horror and the perseverance of the human spirit and turning it into a story of personal redemption and Dakota Fanning screaming like that girl from Poltergeist. Like I said that would have been a good story, and I woulda watched it with Spielberg at the helm. But it wasn't the story I wanted to see.