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WAR OF THE WORLDS
DreamWorks/Paramount, 2005
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp
Based on the novel by H. G. Wells
Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Colin Wilson
Executive Produced by Paula Wagner
Music by John Williams
Cinematography by Janusz Kaminksi
Edited by Michael Kahn
Production Design by Rick Carter
Visual Effects by Industrial Light and Magic
Cast
Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier)
Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier)
Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier)
Tim Robbins (Ogilvy)
Miranda Otto (Mary Ann)
Morgan Freeman (Voice of Narrator)
Can we all put aside the publicity bliztkrieg by Tom “I love Katie Holmes more than any human can possibly understand and there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance” Cruise and actually look at the Steven Spielberg alien invasion film for the moment?
I know that takes some willpower, but we have to try. I managed to suppress it all while watching War of the Worlds and treat as exactly what it is: a movie.
And, despite some of my deeply negative feelings about the entire concept of the film (contemporary setting, rushed production), the film actually has some things to recommend it. For supposed summer movie entertainment, it has the guts to go for unpleasant images and a bleak storyline. The man sitting in the director’s chair has an immense amount of talent and rarely turns out a film that isn’t at least competent and interesting (Hook aside). And despite the contemporary setting and the invented set of characters, the new film does take most of its material directly from Wells’s classic. Spielberg’s ability to place the audience deep in the middle of Wells’s vision of human society going to shreds in the face of an awesome and inexplicable annihilation makes this a sometimes viscerally horrific piece of cinema. Watching fleeing humans disintegrate into ash before your eyes in shock close-ups is definitely something you would not expect from a July entertainment blockbuster; certainly, it supersedes anything in Independence Day, which despite its level of alien mayhem, never had much sense of real consequences of the disaster. Spielberg hones the skills he used in the combat scenes of Saving Private Ryan to create chaos and terror, and his long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s gray, monotone images help immensely in setting a realistic doomsday scenario.
The film’s strengths show best in the opening alien salvo (the aliens, by the way, are never identified specifically as Martians as in the novel, which is just as well considering the early twenty-first century setting). As the first tripod—an awesome machine that matches Wells’s description quite closely—rises from the concrete of a working-class New York neighborhood, ripping apart everything around it, including splitting a church in half, and then open fires on the fleeing crowd with disintegrating lasers, you get a true sensation of helpless devastation that matches the exact feeling of the original novel, where a crowd waiting at the edge of the first cylinder impact suddenly find themselves fried to ashes as the tripod rises up and unleashes its “heat ray” for the first time.
But in this excellent visual effects and editing set-piece also lies some of the movie’s signal troubles: logical plot holes and incorrect character focus. For example, why didn’t anybody think of running away from the tripod until it started to open fire? Why stand there and gawk at this piece of obviously malign alien machinery that has started ripping open your streets? Human nature would make everyone flee the moment the huge machine pushed up from the ground. And, even though an EMP pulse has knocked out all vehicles in the area, the unspectacular crane worker Ray Ferrier just happens to find a way to get his car working so his family can escape. Why? Because he’s Tom Cruise and he’s the star, goddammit! So when he and his family (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) start effortlessly maneuvering through the traffic jam of the century to get out of New York, you start to feel the hand of the director and the writer, and the luck of celebrity, pushing the events just a bit past the believable zone.
And here is where Wells and Spielberg find themselves at odds. Spielberg enjoys putting together movies about average suburban or working class people (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Saving Private Ryan), and customarily has a good feel for these folks. Wells, on the other hand, had scant interest in the concept of individuals. The protagonist of his novels is often humanity itself, and the point-of-view role frequently falls to a nameless or anonymous person who stands in for the reader and for the whole of the human race. (For an example of Wells carrying this to an extreme, read his astonishing novel The Last War: The World Set Free, where he predicted nuclear combat and its consequences—in 1915!) The ‘hero’ of The War of the Worlds is an unnamed journalist (I always understood him as representing Wells himself, also a journalist when he wrote the novel) separated from his wife during the invasion, and who turns into a lone wanderer through the empty wreckage of England under the power of the Martians. A major part of the story, the epic destruction
of London, comes through the viewpoint of the journalist’s brother, but mostly we watch the fall of the human race through the eyes of someone who is meant to be…us.
Spielberg’s ‘everyman’ hero would seem to match Wells’s intentions, but in practice it doesn’t. His Ferrier family feels insignificant to the overall story of the invasion and ultimately stereotypical of the Hollywood dysfunctional family. Will Ray find a way to get through to his estranged young children? Will he overcome his inadequacies as a divorced father? Will he get through to his resistant teen son, who for some reason the film never adequately explains wants to stare at the aliens? I can hear H. G. Wells’s response: “Who cares?” Humanity faces its darkest hour, the fall of its smug sense of superiority, and you want me to care about this loser deadbeat dad whose main talent is that he has unbelievable movie superstar luck?
It isn’t that Spielberg and writers Koepp and Friedman have tried to craft an emotional human story in their science fiction epic that causes the problem. Wells’s tale has an intense human story, but it is similar to the one in Roman Polanski’s The Piano: one man alone, representing us all, struggling through the worst the world has to offer. The casting of Cruise adds the final death stroke; he simply cannot carry off the everyman vibe. We can only see the sheen of movie stardom, and that makes it tough for us to project ourselves into the nightmare of this “everyday family.”
Dakota Fanning does help in balancing out the miscasting of Cruise and the silly generic family story. Fanning has shown an incredible skill as a child actress to project believability whenever directors have had the good sense to cast her as a normal child (as in Man on Fire) or a frightening sociopath (as in Hide and Seek) instead of as a cute wide-eyed moppet (as in Uptown Girls and The Cat in the Hat). The plight of constantly trying to save his daughter gives Cruise’s character his only realistic edge, and it adds significantly to his tension with the insane survivalist Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) in the latter half of the film.
This section of the movie, taken straight from Wells’s “basement siege” chapters where the journalist and a crazed curate watch through shattered windows as the tripods go about their grisly business of corralling humans and draining their blood, contains Spielberg’s other dynamite sequence. It borrows liberally from the director’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the kitchen chase 
from Jurassic Park, but it still shows what a fine crafter of genuine suspense the director continues to be. Robbins’s growing madness, as if channeling his Mystic River character, also makes for fascinating viewing. Robbins has an acting talent much different from that of Tom Cruise; Cruise projects celebrity, while Robbins hides deep inside his characters to the degree that he gets eerily under the viewer’s skin.
The movie was shot on a rushed schedule, and it shows in places. Perhaps the biggest complaint I have against Spielberg’s adaptation is that it isn’t epic enough. The tripods, when they appear, are ghastly and horrific to behold, and the destruction they coldly and impersonally wage looks like the stuff of nightmares. But we never get a sense of the world-wide mayhem and genocide that they cause: a few blurry TV images, and that’s all. Budget and time-saving techniques have reduced this invasion to a problem for New York and Boston alone. Wells, even though he used a single nameless character, managed to forge a sense of universal Armageddon and hopelessness which Spielberg fails to achieve. Given more time and thought, I’m sure he could have easily solved this problem. It seems a shame he couldn’t have spent the time on a story that obviously deserves it.
Spielberg’s forced use of allegory and analogy will bother some people, and touch others. The first half of the running time contains a constant stream of images meant to recall 9/11: ashes floating from the sky, a wall of posters from relatives begging for help finding lost loved ones, a passenger plane smashed into a house, and Dakota Fanning screaming, “Is it the terrorists?” In the second half, when the humans hunker down in hiding and the tripods start their plan to spread their sickly red vegetation across the planet (an idea straight from Wells), the Iraq quagmire analogy starts to sink in. Robbins makes a comment about how an occupier is always an occupier, and considering Robbins’s well-known anti-Iraq war stance, it’s hard not to see what these comments might mean. It feels as if Spielberg wants to have the analogy both ways: sympathy for 9/11, criticism of American Imperialism under the Bush-Cheney Doctrine. Since many critics have seen Wells’s novel as a parable attacking British Imperialism, this allegory has historical precedent.
I will put myself in the camp of people who find Spielberg’s 9/11-Iraq double-whammy somewhat exploitive (and this comes from someone who strongly opposes the Iraq conflict). Considering the classic status of the novel as a touchstone of prophetic science fiction, and Arthur C. Clarke’s statement that every generation has read the novel and seen its own world reflected in it, Spielberg didn’t need to force War of the Worlds as relevant. As long as the story is told straight, it will feel relevant, without having to shoehorn in ideas. Again I have to point out the advantages of setting the film in 1900, when Wells intended it, instead of 2005. I believe the contemporary setting was a narrative and aesthetic error…although with the production rush, perhaps they could not manage it any other way.
The movie does bravely maintain Wells’s finale, even though it will disappoint some viewers hoping for a slam-bang, humans-get-even finale. But this is not that type of story, and keeping Wells’s ironic conclusion, one that humbles both aliens and humans, is the only correct choice. Spielberg pulls it off very well (and even includes a very strange visual reference to E.T., the most opposite kind of “alien invasion” movie imaginable); but then he tags on a coda with Cruise and family that sucks a lot of the power from the ending. As narrator Moragn Freeman paraphrases from the end of the novel to close the movie, we realize how utterly trivial the Ferrier family was all along, and wonder why we spent most of the 114 minutes with them. Wells’s conception stretches farther than any one set of people, and the new movie version of his greatest novel, despite many excellent sequences and its professional execution, fails to grasp its original original author’s essential pan-humanism.
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
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