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Every generation gets the War of the Worlds it deserves. H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel could be read as a warning about sprawling industrialization. Orson Welles’s 1938 radio version panicked a nation anticipating attacks by the Axis powers. George Pal’s 1953 movie touched on Cold War nuclear fears. And now, in the post–September 11 era, the newest War of the Worlds gives us aliens who arise from sleeper cells to attack without warning, motive, explanation, or mercy. Not that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise and screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) seem interested in making a political parable. They just want to tell a story of a broken family tested by extraordinary events. Oh and to scare the pants off us. Of course, after so many retellings, scary is hard to come by. Fortunately, the director of Jaws is an old pro at frightening us with what we don’t see. The aliens don’t show up for quite a while (Spielberg spends the first 20 minutes on character development — remember that?), and even when they do, they reveal themselves gradually. We see and learn only what Cruise’s character, a New Jersey prole named Ray Ferrier, sees and learns. There are no presidents, generals, or scientists, no scenes of world landmarks being destroyed, and no scenes that take place outside the Northeast Corridor journey of Ray and his two kids, nervous little Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and rebellious teen Robbie (Justin Chatwin). They’re headed to Boston, where they hope to find Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), the kids’ mother and Ray’s ex-wife, still alive. True, that microcosmic approach would be more novel if M. Night Shyamalan hadn’t used it in Signs, but Spielberg’s terrifying aliens won’t succumb to a baseball bat and a glass of water. Cruise has a history of playing immature men who fear they’re a disappointment to their distant or absent fathers. Here he’s an absentee father who fears disappointing his children. His job isn’t to save the planet or the country, just his own family. Ray may be Cruise’s most challenging role; his character faces not just extreme physical and emotional tests but some unthinkable moral ones as well. Ray needn’t say much; his struggles are always apparent on Cruise’s face. Similarly convincing are Fanning, eerily mature and self-possessed as ever, and Tim Robbins as a samaritan whose increasingly desperate behavior makes it clear to Ray that friends can be as dangerous as enemies. As always, Spielberg creates some indelible and poetic images: the wreckage of a jetliner strewn across a block of flattened suburban homes; a silent regatta of human bodies floating down a river; a train of blazing freight cars hurtling down the railroad tracks; the clothes of the vaporized dead drifting down over a forest like snow. For the fanboys and scholars, there are some visual nods to previous versions of the story. There are also the inevitable echoes of September 11 — the downed plane, the fleeing crowd, the mural-sized collages of pictures of the missing. For some viewers, these scenes may smack of exploitation, but maybe the images are just a function of the time we live in and the visual vocabulary we’ve created to express our state of anxiety, a vocabulary that seems to have borrowed, in turn, from disaster movies. Witness the ferry-boat sequence, which plays like a mini-Titanic. Spielberg has marred most of his recent movies with weak endings. The films go on one sequence too long, with codas that soften the impact of all that’s gone before. War of the Worlds ends too abruptly, running out of juice just as the aliens do. Even on summer popcorn terms, it’s a tepid finish to a movie that, for its first hour or so, taps so expertly into our fears. |
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Issue Date: July 1 - 7, 2005 Back to the Movies table of contents |
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