A Dark Vision of Invasion

Rating: 7/10 (6 July 2005)

This is a pretty harsh look at what an alien invasion might be like. The brutality and horror of such an event is not sugar-coated here (except maybe for the ending, which I'll touch on later). It seems that Spielberg's Holocaust influence more than 9/11 was responsible for how terrible some of the images in this film are, but it made me appreciate the fact that Spielberg was willing to take what could have been another summer popcorn movie (like, yes, Independence Day) and instead made a strong statement about what genocide really means. There may even be a connection with current events in Africa.
Maybe it's because I happen to be the divorced father of a 10-year old blond daughter myself, but I found this film to be more disturbing than some of the commenters. In fact I find some of their comments to be more glib and callous than insightful. Nothing Dakota Fanning did rang false to me, and many of the viewers (I guess because of their lack of life experiences) missed the point of a lot of the things that both the daughter and the father did. I am not a fan of Tom Cruise (his interview with Matt Lauer was one of the biggest displays of arrogant ego that I have ever seen in real life), but nothing he did in this film rang false, either. Real life is messy, folks, and in this case the film made the necessary connection with that real life in order to ground the fantastic nature of the film with true human emotions.
Yes, the film has flaws. The "Machines buried under the Earth for one million years" plot device just doesn't work for me for multiple reasons (Why was H.G. Well's original concept of their simply coming down from space unacceptable for Spielberg?), and yes, the ending undercuts the tragic elements of the film -- although personally speaking, I only laughed because I recognized some familiar actors among the characters in the final scene.
Still, this film is a worthy achievement, and by no means a failure of either film-making or vision. Although I must confess, I'll always prefer Close Encounters of the Third Kind myself.