A slightly smarmy review of an over-reviewed spectacle

Rating: 8/10 (6 July 2005)

The night before I saw "Batman Begins" I had begun gorging on summer blockbusters. I went to see the Wells/Welles/Spielberg/Cruise classic "War of the Worlds" How do you talk about a film like this? Like this: "Gee I thought the best part of the movie was when the giant bloodthirsty machine monsters attack with giant cyber arm things and grab people and stab 'em and spray their guts everywhere while people in human nets scream for mercy and Tom Cruise and that little girl go flying into the air and you think they're gonna get chomped up but then they save themselves at the last second. But I could be wrong. I did learn one important lesson however - that it sometimes takes an invasion of giant man eating aliens to really bring a family together."
What on more earth can you possibly ask for ten bucks? Have the stuff come right into the theater??? You could ask for relevance and meaning, but Spielberg's got that covered, too. Just as Orson Welles craftily positioned his 1938 radio broadcast to draw the country's attention and imagination to the devastation in Europe, which U.S. isolationist policy effectively ignored, this version alludes to terrorist panic. The 9/11 images are stark and graphic. We've got gray ash covering panicked crowds, a mass exodus across bridges from Manhattan, Tim Robbins as a survivalist gone nutty. It even starts with a reading of the first passage of the book, as did the original dramatization. Back then we got the sonorous tones of Orson himself; Morgan Freeman provides a far more chilling reading of that beautiful prose, while on screen amoebas morph into water drops, then into stop lights, finally into the setting sun, and then to a Macro overhead shot of New York City teeming with human organisms. It is a stunning opening.
But Spielberg doesn't really push the meaningfulness. That is, I suppose, an understatement. Like most of his popcorn movies there are not a lot of layers here beyond the visual extravaganza. That gets back to my initial reaction. What you see is state of the art visual storytelling. If much of the country believes that "Cats" is great theater, this is what they deserve for their hard earned money. I don't mean that to be entirely sarcastic. Hollywood's master storyteller is on display in all his glory. He pushes the possibilities of integrated computer generated images by embracing a rough looking, almost hand-held camera style, which belie the complex technical fireworks. Every frame is a stunner. In a way, this a Hollywood wet dream. And Tom Cruise gets to shill Scientology on the side. How appropriate. Thank you to the Academy; now I think I'll relax with some Richard Linklater, PT Anderson, Alexander Payne, or better yet  how about something with subtitles!