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WAR OF THE WORLDS/ Malcontent's Mark: B

Though Spielberg’s career has had its fair share of popcorny fun-rides, he’s also proven himself a kind of horror auteur, with kids-in-peril his particular forte.  He’s shocked us with kids getting chomped by a great white in Jaws, stolen away by aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and attacked by velociraptors in Jurassic Park.  In War of the Worlds, he proves once again to execute scenes of genuine horror, with characters young and old faced with real terror.  Yet War also suffers from Spielberg being too overprotective, allowing too much implausible good fortune for the family members in the film.

In this contemporary retelling of H. G. Well’s 1898 War of the Worlds, adapted into a film once before in Byron Haskin’s War of the Worlds (1953), Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a New Jersey dock worker and divorced father, stuck with his daughter and son for the weekend.  The kids resent being with their neglectful dad, and Ray’s lost all hope of reconnecting with them.  After a scary lightening storm, the people in the neighborhood investigate some brand new potholes in the pavement.  You’d think Jersey residents would be used to potholes, even ones big enough to swallow a car, but then something mysterious starts moving around under the crumbled pavement.  Pretty soon, alien tripods are marching through the city streets, and Ray decides to flee with his children to Boston.

Spielberg wastes no time bringing on the scares.  War’s first 100 minutes are near-perfect sci-fi horror.  The alien attacks are brutal.  In most contemporary alien invasion movies, crowds of anonymous victims die in fiery explosions; in War, alien death rays seemingly single people out.  Placing the camera right within the fleeing crowd, the randomness of the targets escalates the terror - the person running ahead of you has as much of a chance of bursting into ashes as the person running alongside you.  Though the alien ships pay homage to 50s style science fiction, the incinerating of innocents, and vaporizing of city property, has a nightmarish post-9/11 intensity.  And with Spielberg at the helm, a master at the “less is more” theory of horror, some of the film’s scariest scenes involve nothing more than creepy sounds and colored lights.

Unfortunately, as has been the case for the last decade, Tom Cruise can’t appear in a film without being Tom Cruise.  At no point in the movie do you believe he’s a down on his luck blue collar dad from Jersey.  What’s worse, at no point do you fear for his safety; he implausibly avoids all mortal wounds.  He’s more Superman, than Everyman - an anathema in any adaptation of Wells’ novel, about an unnamed narrator, shaken with helplessness, and completely without hope.  Dakota Fanning, playing Cruise’s daughter, once again proves she’s an accomplished actress.  The problem is she’s too good.  As with most her roles, she comes across more as an adult acting occasionally like a child than vice versa.  But from Fanning, we at least get some humility and humanity in the midst of the harrowing annihilation.

And yet the scares peter out toward the end.  When we finally get a glimpse of the aliens, it’s somewhat anticlimactic.  Once out of their machines of mass destruction, they’re not so intimidating.  In fact, you get a sense that Fanning might just be able to hold her own against one of them.  This is the first Spielberg thriller where I felt he could have jeopardized the leading characters more.  Without revealing too much, there aren’t as many “characters that become familiar, yet die grisly, horrifying deaths” as you would expect from the guy who directed the ferocious creature features Jaws, Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World.  

And it’s all but guaranteed the ending will disappoint.  It made me hope that test audiences maybe vetoed what Spielberg really wanted to show us, and he was forced to provide an alternate ending.  Yet given Spielberg’s clout, it’s an unlikely scenario.

In War of the Worlds, Spielberg delivers a dark, disturbing sci-fi story, digging his deepest yet in the genre of horror.  In his cultivation of dread and realism, he even relegates the string-dominated score of longtime collaborator John Williams to only a few key scenes.  If only Spielberg had maintained the dark tone all the way to the very end.  If only he hadn’t coddled to his comfort food of choice - the family redemption.  Spielberg could have delivered the War to end all War adaptations.

Copyright (c) 2005
Bryan Stumpf.
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