Full of Sound and Fury

Rating: 5/10 (29 August 2009)

There are occasionally some strange coincidences in the cinema. The world had to wait sixty years after his death for a filmed biography of Oscar Wilde, and then two appeared in the same year, 1960. 1997 saw two disaster films about volcanic eruptions, "Volcano" and Dante's Peak". In the early seventies two studios, Warner Bros and Twentieth Century Fox, were independently working on films about skyscrapers on fire, to be titled "The Tower" and "The Glass Inferno"; when they discovered the coincidence they decided to join forces and produce what we now know as "The Towering Inferno". In 2005, however, there was an even more remarkable coincidence. That year saw not two but three screen versions of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", a novel which had previously only been filmed once, in 1953.
Of these three by far the best known is that made by Steven Spielberg. (I have not seen the other two). After doing friendly extraterrestrials in "Close Encounters" and "ET", Spielberg now turns his attention to the unfriendly variety. Like the 1953 film his version transposes the setting from Victorian England to contemporary America, which I think was the right decision. A modern film showing aliens attacking nineteenth-century London would probably look rather odd. Also, in this version the aliens are not explicitly referred to as Martians. When Wells wrote his novel in 1898 scientists believed that Mars might be a possible home for advanced life-forms, an opinion that was still widely held in the 1950s. Today we know that that is not the case.
The film follows the basic outlines of Wells' story. The alien invaders land on Earth in overwhelming force and begin attacking the planet's inhabitants with their advanced weaponry. Human weapons prove useless against them, and it seems that it will be only a matter of days before the world is overrun. As in the novel, the aliens' main fighting machines are three-legged tripods; in 1953 these proved too difficult to replicate on screen, and were replaced by hovercraft-like devices. The setting is New Jersey, the state which also served as the site of the invaders' landing in Orson Welles' notorious radio version. The film not only changes the setting of Wells' novel, it also alters his emphases. Wells used his story to comment on certain aspects of Victorian civilisation, notably imperialism and the class system. The 1953 film had a strong religious emphasis. This film, in Spielberg's words, shows the invasion "through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it". The family are Ray Ferrier, a Newark dock worker, and his children Rachel and Robbie, who flee from the invasion and make their way towards Boston to find Ray's ex-wife who has gone to stay with her parents (who are played by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the stars of the 1953 film).
There is a parallel here with M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" from three years earlier which also dealt with an alien invasion from the perspective of a single family, in that case living in New Jersey's neighbouring state of Pennsylvania. Spielberg and Shyamalan both follow one of the conventions of the modern disaster movie, namely that the film should first introduce us to a select group of characters with whom we can identify and then follow them through the disaster itself. At least one of the group should normally be played by a big-name star. This structure works well enough when the disaster concerns, say, a sinking ship or burning building, but it seems inadequate when the film concerns the future of the entire planet. This is one of the weaknesses of this film and also of "Signs"; the emphasis should be "can mankind survive?", but instead it becomes "Can Mel Gibson survive?" or "Can Tom Cruise survive?"
This film did little to alter my view that Spielberg is something of an overrated director. I found this version of the story inferior to the 1953 one, which dealt with the invasion from a more global perspective and, although the main action takes place in California, also showed other nations' efforts to combat the threat. One area in which a modern science fiction film ought to score over one from more than half a century ago is that of special effects, but even here the difference is not as great as one might expect. The original film's Oscar-winning special effects were notably good by the standards of the day, whereas those of the 2005 version are nothing special by modern standards. The characterisation in the original version was fairly perfunctory, but even here Tom Cruise does not make Ray stand out as an individual. Child star Dakota Fanning as Rachel does not really show why she is often quoted as an adult-star-in-the-making, and Justin Chatwin's Robbie just comes across as a brat.
Roger Ebert called the film "a big, clunky movie" and said it lacked the "zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.". There is a lot of truth in this criticism. Much of Spielberg's output consists essentially of popcorn movies writ large (the "Indiana Jones" movies are a good example), but he generally manages to bring to them a vigour and liveliness that make them an enjoyable viewing experience. There is little of this vigour about "War of the Worlds", which is full of sound and fury but ultimately unsatisfying 5/10