War of the Worlds: A review (massive spoilers)

War of the Worlds
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Cruise

Steven Spielberg is the quintessential American director -- no director more completely represents the technically accomplished, well-intentioned, shallowness, ineptitude, and incomprehension of the outside world that marks the true American mind, and no director more completely represents the American failure to incorporate the essential arbitrariness, banality, indifference and stupidity of our universe into our national gestalt. Like America, the Spielberg universe is a homey place, even in disaster, where broken families are made whole, catastrophe is made comprehensible, and the hero never dies.

_War of the Worlds_ follows the original storyline fairly faithfully, with a few updates for our modern era, and of course, transplantation to the US. Key story elements, such as the days spent hiding under a house, the red weed that overwhelms the earth, the tripods, and the ending, where germs kill off the aliens (whose origin is unclear in the movie), are carried over from the ground-breaking novel by H.G Wells. The result is, on its face, a fine piece of story telling, moving, stimulating and enjoyable.

In other words, this is your basic summer disaster fare, and as such, perhaps no depth should be expected. The film is technically superb. The sound effects are a joy, some of the best this reviewer has experienced. The depiction of catastrophe is overwhelming. The script often does a creditable job of capturing the cluelessness of the general population in the face of utter disaster. No one really knows what is going on, and rumor runs rampant. There is a nifty bit of foreshadowing at the beginning, where Ray's daughter gets a splinter, and is told it will get infected. But Ray is not permitted to lift it out. "When it is ready, my body will push it out," his daughter explains. Just like the aliens themselves. Even better, the film bravely fails to offer a stock brainy character to explain everything, a rare break from the Hollywood formula. Instead, the audience is simply handed the story as if to say "you figure out." From Spielberg, that is something to cheer for. But then he can count on some basic familiarity with the storyline.

Despite Hollywood's technical and narrative skills, the inability of the American movie industry to make good science fiction movies is clearly evident. The aliens in _War of the Worlds_ are typical two-eyed, insectoid types familiar to the viewer from _Alien_, _Independence Day_, and similar films. Considering that this is the third or fourth version of this story, one is moved to ask why, with the bulk of classic science fiction novels still unknown on the big screen, anyone would consider remaking _War of the Worlds_. This question is all the more urgent when one realizes that the majority of the Top 25 money-making movies of all time are science fiction and fantasy films.

The plot itself is strictly by-the-numbers Spielberg. The story opens with the kids being brought over to Ray Farrier's (Tom Cruise) home. Farrier is a totally unsympathetic character, a self-centered jerk whose children hold him in contempt. Because this is Spielberg we know that he will learn to lose that self-centeredness and value others, while his children will come to see him as their True Father. In the hands of some other director (oh, for Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino!) Ray Farrier's essential inhumanity might be the very thing that would carry him through the situation, but heroes can never stay inhuman for very long in Spielberg's hands. Even when Farrier is forced to kill another human, the audience does not see it and Spielberg ensures that it is the other man who attacks first. Similarly, when Farrier steals the only working vehicle in the area, the aliens obligingly kill the owner of the repair shop just as he steals it, removing any complications of theft or owed debt. Because this is Spielberg we also know that this broken family will be healed at the end, and because this is Spielberg, it goes without saying that the divorced wife is a blonde. She couldn't possibly be named Singh, Cheung, or Murungi; in Spielberg's world, non-whites need not apply for salvation from catastrophe, let alone marry whites -- their role is rather to die, as all little brown people must, for middle class America. It goes without saying that the woman lives in an expensive row house in Boston while her divorced husband is thoroughly working-class, thus reuniting the white upper and lower classes in one well-knit closing scene. Truly no class or racial heartstring goes unplucked.

Because this is Spielberg many things will be missing. Crowds are marvelously well-behaved. Although firearms abound in our gun-crazed nation, no one in the fleeing mobs seems to carry one, except for one fellow who evicts Ray and family from their car in a mob scene (although Ray worries repeatedly about the car being stolen, he nevertheless drives into a mob). Because this is Spielberg, the man must be punished, in this case, by another man who picks up Ray's dropped gun and madly shoots him. Because this is Spielberg, the thief could simply never sucessfully drive away with the van he stole from the hero, because in Spielberg movies, the hero is the one for whom others die. Because this is Spielberg, we can rest assured that the son, who gets separated from the father, will be waiting when Ray arrives in Boston with the daughter. Nothing as incomprehensible as an arbitrary, useless, stupid death is ever going to happen to an important character in a Steven Spielberg film.

In general, the behavior of the mobs in _War of the Worlds will remind the viewer of the scene from _Deep Impact_, where a mob politely permits needed individuals to enter an underground shelter, with only token protesting, as well as other mob scenes from that movie. In this film a surging mob, aliens furiously pressing on its rear, can be prevented from swamping a ferry by a handful of National Guardsman without a shot being fired. Despite the total destruction of all societal functions, nothing arbitrary or incomprehensible occurs. There is no looting in the movie. Nor is there rape, theft, arson, or destruction for the sake of destruction (this reviewer experienced a frisson of joy when a man is seen removing something from a downed aircraft -- with no bodies -- at last! Spielberg is showing looting! Nope -- the man is just fetching some water). Everyone, on the whole, behaves well, except for the occasional jerk. Because this is Spielberg, Americans are presented as how they would like to see themselves, not how they are. As Paul M. Fussell, one of the most perceptive critics of the imagined world of the "morally decent" West put it in discussing WWII: "If it is a jolt to realize that blitzed London generated a whole class of skillful corpse robbers, it is because, within the moral assumptions of the Allied side, that fact would be inexplicable." Similarly, one could hardly imagine all these nice, well-behaved people reducing an impoverished Middle Eastern nation to rubble. And that, at bottom, is the problem with Spielberg, and with this movie.

This disjunct between how Spielberg constructs American humans and how American humans actually are is important because _War of the Worlds itself raises the issue of our occupation of Iraq and places the movie firmly in its light. Ray's teenage son confronts us with the link between the US invasion of Iraq and the alien invasion of Earth as the movie opens: his homework assignment is the French occupation of Algeria. Later on, Ray is told by a crazed man with whom he is trapped for several days in a basement that "occupations are never successful." The fundamental problem is not that the movie refracts the affairs of its day through its obviously related storyline -- entirely expected and laudable -- but because it does so with an insight into those affairs that is tentative, crippled and inept. It is impossible to imagine the basically decent citizens of the America of _War of the Worlds_ shutting down newspapers that oppose the US occupation, looting millions of dollars from aid funds, and flattening Fallujah and then posting snipers in the ruins to kill anything that moves. Since the America of Spielberg and the America of Iraq cannot be brought into alignment, Spielberg's attempt at social commentary reduces to that of a callow youth criticizing the ambiguous morals of a rich uncle whose fortune is putting him through college. The films of Steven Spielberg are basically visual confirmations of Barbara Foley's remark that the problem of the Holocaust and similar incomprehensible evils is not that they are unknowable, but that their "full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited from the liberal era."

In _War of the Worlds_Spielberg is perfect, and perfection, as Lois McMaster Bujold reminds us, takes no risks with itself. _War of the Worlds_ fails because Spielberg's eye is incapable of capturing the evil and indifference of our complex, incoherent human universe in a powerful and convincing way. A lesser filmmaker, equipped with greater moral courage and human insight, would have produced a sustained commentary on the occupation and destruction of Iraq, the one that Spielberg, in the end, shielded his eyes from, and brought the parable that _War of the Worlds_ presents to its ultimate conclusion: that our occupation will also be laid low by a disease -- not one of germs, but one of hubris.

Michael Turton
Taichung, Taiwan
(Saving Private Ryan reviewed here)

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