Spielberg's Disturbing Apocalyptic Saga Sports a Mastery of the Long Take

Rating: 8/10 (4 November 2008)

Steven Spielberg's up-to-date rendition of H.G. Wells's relentless nightmare is a lot better than it is given credit for being. It follows a real family with real complications, none of which Hollywood screenwriters were to be expected to create when enlisted to construct a formula visual effects extravaganza, and because writers David Koepp and Josh Friedman took that expository time to make us care about the friction between self-centered New Jersey dock worker Tom Cruise, his 10-year-old daughter Dakota Fanning, who suffers from a panic disorder and his teenage son Justin Chatwin, who outright resents him, the cataclysmal disaster that comes down just like the wall clouds and electromagnetic pulses that unleash it is all the more harrowing.
I was glued to Spielberg's Morgan Freeman-narrated blockbuster. The fears it stimulates create an unrelenting mood of hopeless, helpless fright which we share with the people in the movie. Spielberg's mastery of marrying spectacle with tension, working with nine-figure budgets and hundreds of thousands of people, none of which deter his strength of vision, generates a dark realization in us, rather than a simple escapist entertainment. He presents strange cloud formations associated with thunder strikes, an arresting amount lower than the rain-free base of the sky. It starts to let loose poundings in the in close proximity to Tom Cruise's everyday Newark neighborhood, immobilizing all of the functioning electronic mechanisms nearby, including cars, leaving everyone trapped. A huge Tripod android surfaces from underground and commences in vaporizing people and buildings in its ample path.
There is truly a disturbing feeling of tragedy whenever there is a casualty of the least significant bystander. There is something very freaky about red weed, the ever-growing plant that, according to H.G. Wells's story, gives Mars its fuzzy blood red color. Ships sink. Cities are destroyed. Children are in peril. Blood is everywhere. Tentacles. A magnificent plane wreck. And a treacherous expedition from New York to Boston with these devastating obstacles exploding in the way.
This sci-fi action chase picture certainly has its glaring clichés here and there, but it is very observed, as films should be, especially spectacle films. The standpoint of the story is very personal. Any given human being can feel connected with the point of view, because it's about a family struggling unremittingly to survive and survive together, and they're contained by the most ambitiously dire and staggering events one could envision.
Not being particularly partial to monster-budgeted special effects blockbusters, I much prefer a director like Spielberg, whose knowledge of film language can be seen in extensive concept shots rather than in heaps of coverage. Spielberg's disturbing apocalyptic saga sports a mastery of the long take, not to mention the logistically impossible several-minute- long tracking and dollying. Many of the film's biggest effects shots are unbroken, where the audience studies its magnitude and absorbs its impact. Michael Bay, or even a fairly talented director like Tony or Ridley Scott, would create artifice with a dozen camera angles, where no shot lasts longer than a brief moment before the film cuts to another. Spielberg, no matter how layman the majority of his film's audiences are likely to be, refuses to talk down to his audience. What makes this $132 million disaster movie above average is that there is fluency, ominous pace and a sense of realistic style, all of which put us within the actual events.