Summer Movie Round-Up Part 4: War Of The Worlds
Posted by 7th on November 15, 2005

There comes a point (insofar as movies are concerned) where sheer spectacle fails to be enough. In the 80's, the public grew indifferent to superstar action films because they all blended into the same blurry mess: car chases, shoot outs, quippy one-liners, and horrid, horrid accents. It led to the current view of action films, where if one lone, seemingly superhuman hero does hold the camera hostage, it's with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek (see any of the Rock's films, short of Be Cool, as good examples of a dying breed.)

In the 21st century, the Popcorn Blockbuster is the new Action Movie, the over-hyped, under-plotted, CGI-infested behemoths that audiences are clearly growing tired of.War of the Worlds is the newest of this soon-to-be endangered dinosaur, a Steven Spielberg film that somehow manages to play out like a Michael Bay explode-a-thon.

In the last couple of years, films like Spider-man, Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins, Minority Report (a vastly superior Spielberg/Cruise effort) have shown that American audiences are growing tired of the Big Budget Megaflick, the Hollywood equivalent of a high dollar call girl: lots to see, really flashy, fun for a few hours, but with zero substance or meaning in the greater scheme of things. This is why films like Spider-man 2 are revered, while War of The Worlds became the unthinkable: a Spielberg movie that failed to find its usual audience compared to previous efforts. It's a lesson Hollywood's been trying to learn since Godzilla failed to become a hit in 1998, despite it having lots of gags, CGI monsters, and exploding national landmarks.

Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, the typical Hollywood deadbeat dad, who through unbelievable circumstances, redeems himself in the eyes of his children and his ex-wife. he's a completely unlikable hero who insults his own children while playing catch in the back yard, the kind of guy who is so blue collar that he views his kitchen as the perfect place to work on his engine block. he's a father who never wanted to be a father, who seems to care more about his classic Mustang than his own kids. In short, he's a man who never grew past the age of seventeen, and still sees no reason why he should, the kind of "father" who treats his son more like a drinking buddy than a progeny.

Cruise comes home from work to find that he's being given the kids for the weekend while his ex-wife goes to see her new in-laws, a fact she informed him of, but he apparently missed (probably while he was working on his engine.)

So far, so good (though heavily cliched.) Then a storm starts brewing. Bolts of lightning strike all across the globe and knock out power in every major city (though we only see the immediate effects in Ray's house, when the resulting electromagnetic pulse even stops his wind-up watch.)

He abandons his daughter and runs to one of the spots where lightning stuck, which just so happens to be right down the street. Just as he arrives, a humungous three-legged robot tears its way up from the asphalt and begins incinerating humans with its death ray. Ferrier turns and hightails it back to the house, his concerns all of a sudden focused on his kids, when just moments before, he couldn't give a shit about them (short of his son, who'd stolen his car.) As he runs through the street, people all around him are being instantly incinerated, their ashes getting in his hair and all over his clothes. He passes by a man filming the entire scene with a camcorder just as he gets zapped, the camera falling to the ground as it continues to document the horrors (despite the fact that the movie, at this point, has gone to great lengths to show that ALL electronic/mechanical devices were rendered useless by the electromagnetic pulse.) From here on out, the movie goes into chase mode, where the aliens seem to chase Ray and his kids across country in an effort to wipe his family line from the face of the earth, until at last, the movie stumbles to a halt with the ending everyone knows is coming before they even walk into the theater: the aliens succumbing to earthly bacteria and dying of disease.

The first problem is in the way Spielberg handles the story. War of the Worlds is the title of the film, but that isn't the film that Spielberg filmed. He filmed War of The Aliens Who Want To Kill Tom Cruise. Instead of giving us the global effects of an alien invasion, Spielberg borrows a page from M. Night Imasham's Signs and focuses on one family, a family just as disfunctional, but for different reasons. When the aliens attack, what we see is in the background, our vision of the devastation limited by what Cruise's character can see.

We get snibits of the alien invasion by way of Ferrier's peripheral vision. He spends most of the film with his back to the invaders as he heads for higher ground, hence we see little more than an occasional ray blast or steel leg in the background.

The effects of the tri-pods themselves are impressive, but seem outdated. This is most likely because they are inspired by the actual descriptions from Welles's book, so it gives the effects an almost 18th century sci-fi feel. One expects the tri-pods that venture into American waters to be attacked by a sub fleet that looks more like the Nautilus than the U.S.S. California. And through it all, here comes Ray, the same shocked, terrified look on his face, running through the crowds, yelling at his kids, and giving us only glimpses of the one apsect of the film that is supposed to be the most intriguing, but is given the least screen time.

This was done, we're told, to give the film a more personal feel. By limiting the film's scope to one person's view point, we're supposed to empathaize with him, and feel what it's like to be in his shoes, hence we only see what he sees, and only feel what he feels. But to pull this off, you have to have an interesting character, and a likable character, someone whose shoes the audience will WANT to wear. Ferrier is not that character. He is a walking cliche, extremely boring and uninteresting in every possible way. So when you take a character who no one short of assholes like himself will like, and place him in a situation where you only sees brief glimpses of what is going on, what is there to keep you in your seat? The ultimate insult comes when the U.S. launches its counter attack (which we know ahead of time will be useless.) We see our boys fly over the hillside. We see the flashes of explosions, hear the roar of the jets, but Ferrier stays away. He never climbs the hill, hence we never see the war going on.

Let me ask you a question. Would you want to see a movie about the battle of Armageddon that focuses on a lonely private who sits in an underground bunker peeling potatoes while he listens to atom bombs hitting high overhead?

Me neither.

But even this I was willing to forgive. After all, I was willing to forgive the fact that, in ID4, Jeff Goldblum hacked into an alien computer system with an Apple Powerbook. But with War of the Worlds, the film generates questions it doesn't even bother to answer. At least with ID4, when generally knew how the aliens planned their invasion, what the motivation was (to rob the planet bare of its resources and move on.) We know that their methods beggar logic (why destroy cities with death rays when something the size of the mothership coming into earth's orbit would destroy all life by way of massive floods and earthquakes?) but when we ignore the laws of physics, it makes sense from a tactical/logic standpoint.

Not so with War of the Worlds. Much of what is going on is assumed, or told to us in very brief bits of news exposition, since it's impossible for someone as out of the loop as Ray to figure it out on his own. Essentially (SPOILER ALERT) the aliens buried these tri-pod machines millions of years ago. The bolts of lightning were actually alien pilots being beamed into the cockpits of these ancient machines. They rise from the ground and begin their assult. Humans that are caught by the machines are placed in steel cages hanging from the machine's underside, where they're eventually sucked inside and ground to a pulp. The soggy remains are then sprayed all over the landscape, we assume in some effort to terraform the planet. (I'm assuming the putrefaction of liquified human guts the world over would cause some kind of atmospheric change?)

So let's look at the logic of this and work our way backwards. If the aliens can control the weather to send themselves to earth in lightning bolts, why do they need to ground up humans? Why can't they manipulate the weather to terraform the earth? If they need human bodies, why do they spend the first good chunk of the film wasting "fuel" by vaporizing unarmed civilians? If they've been around for millions of years, why didn't they terraform the earth then when (according to curent scientific theory) there were no humans to get in the way? And if they could foresee the eventual "evolution" of humans millions of years later, and and hence, the eventual need to wipe them out by way of the tri-pods they buried, why didn't they foresee the need to vaccinate themselves against earth's "evolving" bacteria? And if they're so much more advanced than us, capable of interstellar travel and the like, why did they base their design on a failed premise: that of the tri-pod? Why would they put their war machines on three spindly, fragile legs? (Because four legs would make them look too much like the robot from the Incredibles and Pixar would sue Spielberg's ass off.) In fact, if they foresaw the coming humans, and hence the needs to wipe them out, and hence the need to use their bodies as terraforming juice, and assumingly the dangers of earthly bacteria, why even come planetside at all? Why not destroy them from the safety of space and nuke every last bit of life from orbit, bacteria and all?

Because the alien menace wasn't written to make any sense, only to shock. But the film fails to accomplish this goal because we can't always be shocked by what we can't see. This is not the case with jaws, but then again, we're allowed to see more of the end results in that film. Here, even our understanding of the destruction is limit by what Ray drives/runs through. We don't grasp the devastation on a global scale, because we see it all through Ray, which SPielberg gleefully uses as a pair of cinematic horse blinders. It's so limiting that even when Spielberg steals a page from his own book, in a scene where an alien probe searching through a basement for humans plays the exact same role as a certain velociraptor searching for humans in a darkened kitchen, we (or at least, most of us) fail to pick up on the self-plaigarism because we're so focused on trying to find something compelling to keep us watching.

Don't get me wrong, there have been much worse alien invasion films than this one (Battlefield Earth anyone, ironically also starring a Scientologist?) But even an admittedly dumb film like ID4 trumps War of the Worlds in spades, because at least its a dumb film that gives up the goods. Watching ID4 versus War of the Worlds is like going to a nudie bar and getting a lap dance, then going home and watching a porno where all the naughty bits are covered in black bars. It's a film that teases, but never gives the happy ending. Or at least, not a satisfying one.

-=7th=-