Forget the little saucers

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2006)

"Independence Day" wasn't good. Not bad, but not good neither. There were some exciting and entertaining moments with an eye-popping presentation and self-parodying characters whose only good point was to be funny. But these characters were frankly ridiculous, the story wasn't any better and the quotes seemed to be prefabricated. Roland Emmerich tried the best way he could to revive the alien invasion genre, but his lack of seriousness resulted in a mixed bag of a movie.
That was in 1996.
Nearly ten years later, it was mythic filmmaker Steven Spielberg's turn to bring us his vision of the extra-terrestrial invaders who came to Earth with the one and only goal of destroying us, in this new version of the H.G. Wells novel. Obviously, because it was Spielberg, the stakes were very high. It must be said that the astronomical budget of the movie ($132 million) and the casting of Tom Cruise made the stakes climbing even higher. The final result is an exciting and terrifying adventure that really acts as a resurrection of the genre.
"War of the Worlds" starts with a narration from Morgan Freeman taken almost word by word from the novel, then Cruise takes the command and never lets it go until the movie is over. Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced father who is rather selfish and unable of assuming his parent responsibilities. We see that he's rather distant from his daughter Rachel (another extraordinary performance from Dakota Fanning), but especially from his son Robbie (Justin Chatwin). This confrontation is even reflected in their baseball caps (Yankees vs. Red Sox).
And if trying to get care of his children wasn't difficult enough, deathly alien tripods have just emerged from every part of the world, including from Ray's neighborhood.
What comes next is an incredible thrill ride for Ray and his children while he tries to bring everybody to a safe place even if he doesn't have any precise plan and is not sure of what he's doing.
"War of the Worlds" is one of Spielberg's most exciting and thrilling films. We're beginning to get used to adrenaline-upping flicks and human dramas in the famed director's work, but he rarely mixed both elements as well as in "War of the Worlds". And it's the human drama part that puts Spielberg's film above Emmerich's one, but the special effects are also better in "War" than in "Independence Day".
I say better because the special FX of "War" does own a characteristic that "ID4" doesn't: FEAR. It's the main difference between both movies and it's useless to say that it's a winning hand for "War".
"ID4" special FX were only made for presentation use and spectacle and the viewers didn't have to care about the thousands of people that were getting "killed". These were good special effects, but there wasn't any substance.
"War of the Worlds" owns the great advantage of coming at the right moment, that is after the 9/11 events. The movie characters and the viewers (especially the American ones) are now fully aware that disaster film-styled scenes can really happen and this fact is well echoed in the images of the film. The social context becomes crucial. And Spielberg uses it very well.
"War" also avoids from falling in the landmark cliché. There's no Empire State Building, no Statue of Liberty, no White House and no Capitol in "War". Only typical suburbs, which proves that nobody is protected from the aliens' attack. Not only the people from great centers...
So fear is the primary emotion of the movie. The second one is undoubtedly selfishness. We just have to look Cruise's character to be sure. People can say what they want on Tom Cruise, but it remains that he's a great actor and his Ray role is one of his career best. The other representation of selfishness is that famous sequence where the crowd turns against each other only to get Ray's vehicle (because it's the only one that works). In a moment where unity and cooperation become vital, these scenes are upsetting. It's a rare example of pessimism in a Spielberg action picture but it's impossible to ignore it.
Many viewers coldly reacted to the movie's ending, but I personally found it satisfying, logical and full of sense. You just have to listen to the narrator. We see the annihilated tripods, then Spielberg zooms on bacteria in a drop of water. Why? Because they are responsible for the invaders' defeat. Because they come from "somewhere else", we could think that they're not immune to the particles that we don't care about because they don't have any effect on us. Yet, everything lies on exoticism. Just take the difference between people from temperated regions and people from tropical regions. A person from Canada could easily be infected by some tropical disease while locals won't care too much about it. But in my hometown, a cold would only disturb me for a short week while it could be lethal for somebody from Central America. It's this concept that inspired Wells and was taken over by Spielberg. I have the impression that what disturbed the viewers is that the conclusion comes too quickly...
Aside from these little shortcomings, "War of the Worlds" really is the movie that makes the alien invasion genre living again. And as a Spielberg film, it's another gem in his filmography and it shows pretty well that the great filmmaker doesn't slow as the years pass by.