Spielberg's Alien Fright-Flick

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 2005)

Steven Spielberg has the talent and command to do pretty much whatever he wants with an audience. If he wants to move you he can move you, if he wants to make you laugh he can make you laugh, if he wants to wring sloppy sentiments out of you, well, he can do that too. All through his career he's demonstrated this facility for supreme manipulation, and with it the willingness to deploy said talent in the name of projects both noble (Schindler's List) and not-so-noble (Jurassic Park). He has shown himself to be shameless in the best way possible: shameless in that he allows no thought of offending anyone's sensibilities to get in the way of his objectives. Is there a moment in the whole history of cinema more brazen than the one in Jaws where the boy is slaughtered by the shark, his blood gushing like a crimson fountain? Such a scene would seem profoundly tasteless, even amoral, if executed by a director of lesser skill than Spielberg, but the master gets away with it because the master knows just how far to go (how close to put the camera, how quick to cut away). With War of the Worlds Spielberg shows that his talent for pushing audiences to the edge of their tolerance is as sharp as it's ever been, maybe sharper. With this movie he proves that when he wants to scare the pants off you he can scare the pants off you, even if the story he's working from is a bit on the wobbly side.
The story is well-known to anyone who's read H.G. Wells or seen the serviceable old George Pal movie: a blissfully heedless earth is attacked by Martians driving indestructible, death-ray-shooting machines; human beings race around like helpless ants until the seemingly invincible aliens are ironically done-in by the microbes they neglected to inoculate themselves against (Who planned the invasion? Donald Rumsfeld?). The earlier incarnations of the story were characterized by, in the case of the Wells novel, a Victorian floweriness and sense of dread; and in the Pal version a vague Cold War paranoia suffusing the general '50s sci-fi quaintness. In Spielberg's version there is only cold terror, accomplished not only through cinematic virtuosity but deliberate referencing of modern-day catastrophe. It should be no surprise to see the man who turned the Holocaust and D-Day into box-office gold openly calling forth the ghosts of 9/11 to help add extra zing to his melodrama. There are moments that are staged to recall the chaos of that day - people running down streets to escape the carnage; improvised bulletin boards plastered with Polaroids of lost loved-ones; dazed survivors coated in dust. Spielberg calls forth these horrible memories in direct service of his narrative, and there's no doubt that it works. The cinematic carnage is lent an extra layer of emotional resonance by its awful familiarity. Whether this is tasteful or not is a matter of little concern to Spielberg, who knows his job and isn't afraid to do it.
The film is often stunning in its you-are-there shiveriness. Spielberg does a great job keeping us always in the shoes of his heroes, determined Tom Cruise and plucky Dakota Fanning, the alien machines being seen always as they see them, as towering monstrosities. The initial invasion is one of the better set-pieces in recent memory, a brilliantly executed progression from wonderment to fear to stark raving horror, and there are other scenes so chock-full of detail that they become physically overwhelming (the aftermath of a plane crash has never before been rendered with such a staggering volume of debris; one hopes the set-dressers got paid overtime). The movie is at its best when it's overpowering us, when the details of the plot fall away and all that's left is the spectacle of the alien machines vaporizing people, laying waste to whole cities. Unfortunately the details of the plot are not always so readily ignored. The problem with this story is simple: the aliens seem so ridiculously powerful that you have a hard time believing anyone could survive their onslaught even for a few hours. In order to achieve a dimension worthy of a summer blockbuster, Spielberg has taken Wells' powerful-but-vulnerable invaders and turned them into such mighty beings that the only way his protagonist can remain living long enough to see the end of the story is by sheer luck. Predictably, the human-sized elements of the story are the ones that let-down. There's so much straining for dynamic between Cruise's character, Ray, and his rebellious son Robbie that it's almost a relief when Robbie finally tells the old man to shove it and rushes blindly into the fray. Maybe it's the sheer power of the images that does it, but the human conflict, both inner and inter-personal, that plays out in front of the action seems hopelessly dopey.
It's a measure of Spielberg's virtuosity as a pure player of the audience that we so readily suspend, if not quite overlook, whatever objections we might have to his story both logically and character-wise, and simply let ourselves be carried along. What the movie demonstrates above all else is that beautifully-mounted, highly-detailed action can cover up for a lot of inadequacies in the writing department. And it shows too that Spielberg at the top of his game is still the best since Hitchcock at making us squirm in our seats.