War of the Worlds: more like Apocalypse Now than Independence Day- COLONIZATION.

Rating: 9/10 (8 July 2005)

"...French colonization of Algeria..."
These four simple words spoken at the beginning of the movie gave away the meaning of this film and the tension between devising a blockbuster movie from a sci-fi novel with a political message.
This message is: COLONIZATION IS BAD. Thank you Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, among them, for showing us this through history, and thank you the United States for not learning from this history ("Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana).
This movie was NOT about finding the tricky way to defeat the aliens (a la Independence Day and most other alien invasion films). So please don't compare it to Independence Day! These movies aren't trying to accomplish the same goals.
This movie is an allegory to colonization in general. What happened when European nations and Japan colonized/attempted to colonize Africa, India, China, Korea, etc.? Similar things as happened when the Aliens tried to colonize our world. Mass murder of the native population in the service of gaining control (i.e. what first happened when the Aliens started invading), followed by slavery of the native population as a resource (i.e. when the Alien vessels would hold the people captive in cages to feed their ships), followed by the difficulties of colonization that are not a direct consequence of the native population (i.e. not being acclimated to the native environment: bacterial evolution).
Of course, all of these aspects do not map on to every case of colonization. In some cases, the people ousted the colonizers (South Africa, India for instance). In other cases, it may have been disease and hardship. Let's not sweat the details on the allegory because it's sure to bottom out at point (this is Sci-Fi after all).
What I appreciated was setting up the allegory with some degree of accuracy to actual colonization, and then showing how an ordinary guy (should have been someone more ordinary-looking than Tom Cruise, but that's where you draw the line I suppose in making a blockbuster film) would go about trying to keep his children alive.
The brilliance is in seeing what colonization does to a population. We end up having to kill each other over resources and self/familial-protection. We have to endure the lack of food, electricity, safety, sleep, walking for miles on end, and the horrible uncertainty of not knowing whether you will ever, as a parent, be able to provide for your children. The trauma makes us emotional wrecks. This is all crucially important because to those aliens who are colonizing us, we become "unreasonable" and "uncivilized" barbarians which justifies their superiority (an sad but useful irony to the colonizers). This point, that the process of colonization MAKES the native population barbaric (rather than the native population being barbaric) is made clearer in books like Heart of Darkness and the related movie Apocalypse Now.
I loved the movie overall- but there is a compromise in trying to make a blockbuster movie out of a political Sci-Fi novel. Basically, some of the aforementioned aspects of colonization have to be ignored in order to promote flashy scenes and cheap thrills that make it blockbuster worthy. I don't mean that with disdain though- I loved the special effects- though I wish they didn't water down the horrors of colonization so much.
A few things that could have made this film stronger politically:
1. Expose the irony of people becoming barbaric as a consequence of colonization more, and how this fuels the motive of colonization (a contemporary example of this would be our invasion of Iraq).
2. The whole scene with Harlan Ogilvy (the crazy guy Ray and Rachel have to share the house with)- perhaps make him a little less menacing so killing him is harder on a humanistic level, but still necessary.
3. Cast Ray's character as someone more ordinary-looking such that we have the that-could- be-me feel. Tom Cruise is too superhuman in this film from how he looks to how he drives. His consequent breakdown in the coffee shop after losing the van seems fake. A more everyday Joe kinda guy would have brought this home more- but then loses out on the blockbuster potential.
Overall, probably about the best you can do with the book to make it have blockbuster appeal in our time. Three cheers to Spielberg and Friedman!