Best and worst of Spielberg

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2005)

Spielberg's War of the Worlds is half of a good film.
The early stages of the movie show Spielberg at something close to his best, creating the sense (as he did years ago in classics like Jaws and Duel) of the rhythms of everyday life being disrupted by an unknown force. There is a convincingly down-to-earth feel about these early scenes, with Spielberg eschewing his usual weakness for portentous dialogue or glamourized cinematography, if not his weakness for special-effects gore. The first appearance of the alien tripods is genuinely shocking, and the mood of mounting panic in the crowd is palpable.
It is clear that Spielberg intends the film to be an allegory for America's experience of terrorism. At first the point seems to be powerfully made. Tom Cruise comes across initially as an inspired piece of casting, playing a character who is cocksure and immature and complacent, yet resourceful and basically decent -- the image of America itself. There are some striking images, some of which explicitly evoke 9/11. But as the film wears on, these images seem to be opportunistically repeated rather than being thematically developed in any way. The first sign of trouble is the gratuitous appearance of a crashed airliner in the front yard of a house. The wreckage conveniently misses the parked car in the driveway which will be the family's means of escape. Comically, the car then manages to wind speedily through stalled traffic most of the way from New York to Boston with barely a toot of the horn. In a piece of perhaps unconscious irony, the car comes to seem as important a symbol as any in the film -- a symbol, in this case, of the accustomed American way of life.
The film goes nowhere in its second half. Most of it is set in a basement where suspense is built up as routinely and pointlessly as in any teen horror film. There is no plot development to speak of. Spielberg makes little attempt to find a cinematic way of explaining the aliens' eventual downfall, lamely relegating the explanation to a voice-over at the end.
There is another allegory here waiting to be explored. It is the story of an invading power that uses its overwhelming technological advantage ruthlessly to crush everything in its path, and still fails in the end because of inadequate preparation and the inability to adapt to local conditions. Apart from one throwaway line uttered by a minor character ("occupations always fail, right?"), the film does not come within a lunging tentacle of such discomfiting thoughts.