An anti-Close Encounters but something good here anyway

Rating: 6/10 (5 December 2005)

In Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", he gave us aliens who arrived in spacecraft covered with clouds. They stabbed the night with blinding spotlights, communicated in tones, and hovered over Devil's Tower. Awestruck earthlings contemplated the arriving ships while bathed in heavenly, alien light just before the aliens emerged and turned out to be nice. It was a transition from a universe full of horror to a benign one.
"Independence Day" overturned that universe when it gave us aliens who arrived in clouds and hovered over buildings that seemed to vaguely resemble Devil's Tower. After a few scenes of awestruck people bathed in heavenly light, the aliens blew the daylights out of all of them. Since I never got over that sacrilege against Spielberg, I was prepared to hate his "War of the Worlds" in which he committed the same sacrilege against himself.
I should have become ill when the aliens in "Worlds" arrived in clouds, occasionally stabbed the ground with blinding spotlights, and communicated in tones all in the service of a genocidal war against humanity. But the film won me over when I realized that it is primarily about the horrors of becoming a refugee from such a merciless foe. It is no "Grave of the Fireflies", that gut churning Japanese film about the aftermath of the fire bombing, but it does poke into the territory.
We see how refugees will protect their families and sometimes help others but also sometimes sacrifice others for their own safety. They make stupid decisions out of ignorance and even kill to avoid danger. The theme is true to the novel, because H.G, Wells wanted "War of the Worlds" to show what it was like for primitive people to be overrun by advanced weaponry that they could barely understand. He expressed this by writing early on that the Tasmanians were entirely swept out of existence by European immigrants and asking "are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" Now that weaponry is more advanced than ever and sometimes used as ruthlessly as ever, the theme is timelier than ever.
Spielberg's film makes us inhabit the minds of one family and experience their terror as they flee the mounting atrocities. Because it grabs us with the emotion of their danger, it is a good movie. However, it is not a great one because it missed too many chances to drive home what "Worlds" is supposed to be about. Wells' book contains the above quote; the movie does not. Although it has been criticized for various logical flaws (how did that kid survive the big fireball, anyway?), its main problem is in not following its theme through to the end. "Fireflies" was mainly about hunger after someone destroys a society; "Worlds" barely touches hunger. Probably Spielberg thought he was making a movie to warn us about terrorism rather than the one I saw.
But it grabbed me anyway, and many of the logical criticisms can be avoided. The camera might have been shielded from the EMP behind some cars. I suppose the machines rose from an impossible million-year underground hideout to exploit our fear of sleeper cells. But how, in the movie itself, do we know they were there that long? We have only the word of half-crazed people, and they had no way of knowing anyway. We saw the machines rise but not how or when they were buried. Part of the horror is that one day life goes on, and another day brings unexplained terror. People on the run would probably concoct explanations by the bucketful.
Where could the machines have come from? Maybe all the lightning was a Star Trek-like transporter that beamed them in only moments before they arose. The ground could have provided protection for powering them up and raising the shields.
The final family reunion does break the spell, but after all, Wells ended his book with one and the film would not do much business otherwise. I am, at least, not surprised that the aliens missed the microbes. They were probably so obsessed with their invasion, that they even thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.