Is Newark Worth Saving?

Rating: 6/10 (21 May 2006)

A few questions. Compared to the original "War of the Worlds," would you guess the monsters in this modern remake are (1) smaller than the originals, (2) about the same size, or (3) bigger? How about this? In the original we never got to see more of the monsters than a single drooping dying spidery hand. Would you guess that in this modern remake you see (1) less of the monsters, (2) about the same amount, or (3) a lot more of the Martians and man are they ugly as sin.
Okay, okay. Just one more. A simple true or false questions. The machines not only crash wildly into buildings at the climax but they open a metal maw and disject some disgusting gloppy orange mucous when they give up the ghost. True or False.
There are a couple of other differences not worth going on about. This version sticks closer to H. G. Wells' original (although, to be sure, not very close) in retaining the tripods instead of turning them into flying saucers. And this version has less in the way of initial puzzles about the spacecraft and all that bunkum and a lot more emphasis on destruction and special effects. And instead of a girl friend the hero is given a wide-eyed young girl who is already a scream queen. Dakota Fanning is a splendid natural actress too, except for her many screams, which sound like an irritating doorbell.
Both version keep the ending from the book, about how God put those little creatures on earth to save humans from aliens from outer space. It ends with a paean to humankind which ought to have been rethought, our chief enemies at the moment, after all, not being aliens from outer space but Homo sapiens that look a hell of a lot like us, if a bit more rabid.
This version is better directed that George Pal's too. Nobody knows how to grip an audience better than Steven Spielberg. The acting is an improvement too. I've never seen CGI's put to better use. And Spielberg has managed to capture the seedy residential setting of industrial New Jersey more evocatively than anyone else -- the gray-shingled housing, the wintry weather with the temperature somewhere between thirty-five and forty degrees Farenheit, the stubbly back yard enclosed by hurricane fences, the working-class neighborliness.
Not bad, overall, but predictable in it colossal stupendiferous dimensionality.