Spielberg's "eye" of terror.

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2005)

James Cameron and Stephen Spielberg famously ushered forward the CGI revolution in the early 90's with films like "Terminator 2" and "Jurassic Park". They set a trend, and since the late 90's we've been hit with one CGI adventure movie after the other.
But Spielberg had his fun with his CGI dinosaurs, and soon moved on. While lesser directors scrambled onto the CGI bandwagon, churning out soulless nonsense like "Resident Evil" and "Tomb Raider", Spielberg changed gears and directed "Saving Private Ryan", "Minority Report", "The Terminal", "AI" etc. Argue about the quality of those movies all you want, but what I'm trying to get at is that this guy tries his best to stay ahead of the game. Ahead of the trends.
"Saving Private Ryan" broke new ground. I think it's a bad film, but nevertheless, it now serves as a template for all future war movies. Look at "Black Hawk Down". Can you imagine it shot with the static feel of, say, "Platoon"?
So here we have "War of the Worlds", and again we see Spielberg developing a new "eye". And that is what fascinates me most about this film. The camera stays fixed on Cruise and his family. We catch fleeting glimpses of the alien invaders and their war machines. The destruction and special effects whir by in the background, ominous and looming but never dominating the screen.
Spielberg's camera is always running away, frantic, afraid to look at the destruction, panning away from the effects, terrified! And what's terrific is that this new eye suits the story.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before a director decided to consciously play down special effects for dramatic purposes. Spielberg treats his CGI as though it isn't special. It doesn't hog the limelight. Instead we catch fleeting glimpses, too scared to look at the horror. Of course this filming style is not new. But like "Ryan", no other movie has ever used this technique from start to finish with such intensity.
Aisde from this "eye", the movie is actually pretty standard. Instead of children hiding from Raptors in cupboards, we have Cruise hiding from invaders in basements. Spielberg handles the tension well, but its all stuff you've seen him and others do before.
Like "Jurassic Park", the human drama is slight and the characters are never believable, but this is a popcorn movie and so we don't demand such things. That Spielberg quickly sketches relatively three dimensional characters in such brisk time is admirable. And of course there are numerous iconic set pieces. The night sequences in particular have a nightmarish quality and the first hour is very engaging.
The film's big flaw, however, is it's final act. Tom Cruise battles a Tripod in silly a 1 on 1 showdown, before the plot slowly fizzles into nothingness. Spielberg also misfires by choosing to show the alien invaders. His aliens are unimaginative and badly designed. But what do you expect? Here's the guy who couldn't resist showing us inside the UFO in "Close Encounters". Sometimes too much imagination denotes a lack of imagination.
The choice to "show" so much during the last act also goes against the aesthetic rules of the film. Early in the film, Robby runs up a hill yelling that he "wants to see!" the battle on the other side. "I need to see this!" he screams. His father holds him down and says "I know it seems like you have to see this, but you don't!" Meanwhile all around them, extras run about chanting "turn around!". Spielberg acknowledges that his camera is always "turned around", running from the creatures. The irony is that Spielberg, like Robby, isn't strong enough to hold himself back. By the final act, he loses strength and undoes all the brilliance he set up.
Still, the camera work here is worthy of De Palma. I suspect within the next few years, everybody will be copying the style of this film. It will be interesting to see how Spielberg chooses to shoot his next movie.
8/10 - Worth multiple viewings. Despite it's flaws, this is excellent popcorn fun. In the wake of 9/11 the film can also be read as another propagandistic Spielberg movie, America under attack by technologically advanced "sleeper cell terrorists" buried within the homeland and waiting to strike. Thank God Spielberg didn't put beards on his aliens.
Note: People complain that the "red blood" sets at the end of the film are fake, but this is a homage to Menzies' expressionistic work on "Invaders from Mars". Those who hate the fact that Cruise's son lives, should see "The Mist", Frank Darabond's brilliant re-imagining of Spielberg's film.