Could have gone the distance...but didn't

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2005)

Spielberg had me for most of the movie. I was actually able to ignore the improbabilities presented in the plot, the obvious contradictions, and the rather choppy back and forth between touching moments of father and children, scenes of horrendous carnage, and just Tom Cruise running from one horrible thing to another. I'm normally a pain when it comes to wanting movies to only ask me to make one leap of faith, but even though this one left more questions than even Soloman could answer I was willing to let it slide because the scenes were well constructed and photogenic, even when the rational part of my brain was chuckling softly to itself at the flaws. I watched the situation grow more and more desperate, and Tom Cruise fighting to hold on to his two children as he comes to realize how much they actually mean to him. Holed up in a basement with a madman (Tim Robbins...who knew?), having just watched his son get incinerated; we still find it traumatic that he doesn't know any lullabyes to sing his daughter, and still find tears welling when he sings 'Little Deuce Coupe'. That's the magic of Spielberg.
His magic is such that I actually thought Hollywood would have the guts to leave a mixed ending, one where not everything turns out hunky-dory for everyone involved. I mean, Cruise is heading to Boston to find his ex-wife and the mother of his children. Boston. Major City. Probably destroyed with all the other major cities, right? You'd think. So we assume from the start that that won't end well. Then, as said before, the son gets incinerated, and we feel bad, but we're still pulling for Tom Cruise to somehow survive this with his daughter. (Who, by the by, is this cute little blond with femme-nazi tendencies and panic attacks...of course...Fortunately, her lines in the bulk of the movie consist of screaming in terror and looking pitiful while asking daddy what's going on.) Then the aliens are sucking blood out of people, and they grab the daughter. This looks like the end. But no. Cruise gets himself picked up with a belt of grenades that he finds conveniently just in time, and gets put into a bin where other people are being collected; again, conveniently. He gets chosen like a claw machine toy, and is sucked in, then is grabbed by a marine in the bin, and pulled out, having left the grenade inside.
Well, the thing blows up, and Cruise is saved with his daughter from almost certain disaster. Then, we cut to what must be at least 100 miles away (from somewhere in CT to Boston). This trip must have taken days for two people, one a little girl, to make on foot. Even given that they don't get harassed by aliens the whole way (which would be odd, since every minute of the trip so far has been them running from one problem to the next) It would still be a horrible trip. But this is ignored, and we cut to Boston, where the aliens are just dying all around the survivors. Now, I know that's how it went down in The H.G.Wells story, so I run with it. But still, even though Cruise and the girl survived, the son is dead, and we still haven't found the mom. Then we emerge onto a city street that looks a little windswept, but otherwise undamaged. Cruise is carrying his daughter to what we presume is the completely undamaged home of the mother, to find her waiting at the door. the little girl drops from her father's arms, and runs to her mom, and the mother silently mouths 'Thank You'. I'm already choking on the saccharine, but still know the son died, so it isn't all good. Or is it?
In one of the biggest double-take moments in a motion-picture, just as we think the credits are going to roll, the son comes out of the house and runs to his father who embraces him. We then cut to a shot at the doorway, revealing the mom's parents and the step-dad all perfectly fine. They don't even look like they've been without power and running water for at least a week. As the credits roll, we hear Morgan Freeman reading what I assume is the script from the original, saying how Earthly diseases wiped out the aliens. But while this is great for humankind, it does nothing to wash out the bad taste left in the mouth from all the sugar dumped into the movie in the last moments to make the medicine of the horror wreaked by the aliens go down into the over-stimulated, self-esteem obsessed 'minds' of the average viewing public member. So, instead of a bittersweet ending where people emerge from tragedy to new hope, we find that nothing irreplaceable has been lost to Cruise. The world may have been destroyed, but his family is all OK. I wish that just once Hollywood would actually go out on a limb and show that sometimes everything doesn't work out perfectly in the end, and you need to accept the good with the bad. Oh well...at least this one was better than A.I....
Few parting shots: Yes, the plot was problematic, but it was shot beautifully. Yes, we really have no idea what the aliens are doing (incinerating? sucking blood? why both?) but it's fun to watch. Unfortunately, the end left me with no faith in the ability of people to deal with bad things happening. Let's just hope this doesn't happen in real life; people would spend the whole time whining about how it doesn't make them feel good.