Becky and I just got back from seeing War of the Worlds, and I gotta say, I was quite disappointed. But before I explain why, I have to ask… after all the talk about supposed political allegories in Star Wars Episode III, why haven’t I heard more about the line in this movie where Tim Robbins’s character says, “Occupations never work, ten thousand years of history has taught us that!“ Nothing in Star Wars was that blatant! (Of course, Tim Robbins’s character is kind of crazy, so I don’t know if his saying that line conveys an anti-war or pro-war message. I’m sure Robbins enjoyed saying it, though, loony liberal that he is. :)
Anyway… like I said, the movie was disappointing. [WARNING: Spoilers ahead!] There were definitely a number of absolutely brilliant scenes, some of which were big CGI spectacles (like the burning train) while others were more intimate (like Dakota Fanning’s character stumbling upon dozens of bodies floating down the river). Steven Spielberg really knows how to shoot a movie, and there are many moments — sweeping, epic scenes and fleeting camera angles alike — where it definitely shows. But ultimately, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t make myself like War of the Worlds. In addition to a number of bothersome plot holes (why did that one guy’s video camera still work?!?) and a massively anticlimactic ending, what this movie suffers from most is a failure of the human element: War of the Worlds does not adequately or accurately portray how people would actually act in a situation like this.
An awful lot of the human reactions to the unfolding crisis are just totally unrealistic, IMHO. For example, is there really anyone on Earth stupid enough to stand out in the yard while what looks like a super-cell thunderstorm that could produce a tornado at any moment spins in the sky almost directly overhead? Even I’m not that crazy, yet in the movie, everybody just stands there and stares at the storm (which, of course, turns out to be even more sinister than a super-cell). Similarly, when the alien-induced “earthquake” devastates the intersection where “lightning” had struck 26 times a few minutes earlier, people keep inexplicably standing around and watching, in some cases backing up a few feet and then turning around and watching some more, when anybody in their right mind would, oh I don’t know, RUN FOR THEIR LIVES!
Fly, you fools!!!
Later, as people realize what is happening and actually do start fleeing from the horror, Spielberg fails to capture the nuanced emotional state that tends to take hold in a situation like that. I’d call it “controlled panic”: when the world is falling apart, e.g. on 9/11, yes there are some people who totally lose it, and yes there are some who become totally numb, but many, many people fall in between these two extremes, barely holding themselves together, looking wild-eyed and panicky but doing what they think they have to do to survive. In Spielberg’s world, however, everyone seems to toggle back and forth between total numbness and total panic. When nothing bad is happening, the fleeing refugees look almost bored; then when something bad happens, they all totally panic. And then they go back to looking bored afterwards. Sorry, but I just don’t buy it. That’s not how people are. (And while we’re on the subject of “how people are,” where was religion in this movie? Wouldn’t an awful lot of people, even in New York, react to an alien attack by reaching out to God? Shouldn’t there at least be an obligatory Christian who gets zapped by a heat ray while kneeling in the street doing a rosary?)
The failure to accurately portray real human emotions extends to the main characters as well. I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe that Tom Cruise’s character and his teenage son, played by Justin Chatwin (whose acting was really quite abysmal, by the way; his nuanced method of showing how angry he is at the aliens, setting up his attempt to join the Army, is to scowl and virtually growl at them every chance he gets), would be unable to put aside their differences and stop having screaming fights about random family sh*t while THE WORLD IS UNDER ATTACK BY ALIENS and they are in the midst of fleeing for their lives. Honestly, am I wrong here? Maybe I’m naive, but I really think that 99.9% of people would be able to put aside petty differences like that and come together to deal with the crisis.
Among the main characters, the daughter (played by Dakota Fanning) is really the only one I cared about at all. I have mused before that she might be a little overrated, but she disproved it in this movie; I totally forgot that she was Dakota Fanning and became completely engrossed in her character. The same cannot be said of Cruise, who, in my mind, never came to embody Ray Ferrier. Maybe it’s because of all the publicity surrounding him lately, but honestly, when he was about to introduce himself to Ogilvy (played by Tim Robbins), I literally half expected him to say, “Hi, I’m Tom Cruise.” Contrast that with, say, Tom Hanks, who is such a damn good actor that I always forget he’s Tom Hanks by a half-hour into one of his movies; he becomes his character. Not so with Cruise, at least not in this film, at least not for me.
As Spielberg himself has admitted, there is definitely a strong post-9/11 feel to this movie. Although I had read about it in advance, I loved Dakota Fanning’s character’s line, “Is it the terrorists?” That is, after all, exactly what you’d think, isn’t it? (Well, at least until you saw the alien “tripods.”) Especially if you live in or near New York, if you realize that some weird stuff is happening and possibly causing death and destruction, the first thought that naturally comes to mind is, “Terrorists!”
There are also some pretty direct references to 9/11 itself, some of which are poignant and appropriate — like the scene where Cruise realizes his face is covered with gray dust from the vaporized remains of other people, and scrambles to the sink to wash it off as fast as he can — while others are just totally out of place. One in particular bothered me: the random wall covered with pictures of missing relatives. It just didn’t make sense in the context of the plot (you don’t start posting pictures like that until after the crisis is over; while the crisis is ongoing, events move at much too fast a pace), and thus it felt like a totally inappropriate, in-your-face reference to 9/11, which had nothing to do with the movie.
Another scene I didn’t like was the one where a mob attacked Cruise’s character and his kids, trying to steal their car because it was the only one functioning. I understand the point Spielberg was trying to make — that people in desperate situations will become savages and do what is necessary to survive — but the way that it was portrayed just wasn’t believeable to me. Honestly, that mob was self-defeating; in the process of trying to steal the car, they pretty much destroyed it, and moreover, anyone who got inside would immediately become a target for the rest of the mob! I’m not saying that mobs need to be totally rational, obviously, but I just have a hard time believing it would go down that way. The same point could have been made much more realistically, I think, if they had been carjacked by a handful of strangers with guns, rather than by a self-defeating mob. (In that vein, the final interaction between Cruise and Robbins makes the “savagery” point much better, I think.)
Speaking of people in desperate situations becoming savages and doing what is necessary to survive, I don’t think this movie adequately portrays the flip side of that equation: people coming together to help each other in a crisis, something that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by recent events (9/11, the blackout, the hurricanes, the tsunami, etc.), really does happen. Yeah, there’s a bit of this in the movie, like the son heroically rescuing people hanging off the boat ramp or the strangers trying to save the daughter when they think she is all alone. But overall, Spielberg definitely gives us the sense that he believes the overwhelming response to a mega-crisis such as an alien invasion would be “every man for himself.” Perhaps I’m naive, but I just don’t think that’s true. There’d be some of that, sure. But I think the real world is a more nuanced — and better — place than Spielberg’s world.
Yet another problem with the movie is explained well by Roger Ebert:
The movie adopts the prudent formula of viewing a catastrophe through the eyes of a few foreground characters. [Yet] When you compare it with a movie like “The Day After Tomorrow,” which depicted the global consequences of cosmic events, it lacks dimension: Martians have journeyed millions of miles to attack a crane operator and his neighbors.
Heh. I, too, felt it needed more “dimension.” The fundamental arc of this story isn’t the alien invasion from beginning to end — it’s Cruise’s journey from New York to Boston. That seems very odd for a big-budget summer alien-attack blockbuster. The intense focus on the central characters, to the near-exclusion of everyone else, maves this movie more like Signs than Independence Day — which some might say is a good thing, but personally, I would have preferred a bit more focus on the aliens and the global assault, and more of a glimpse of what was happening elsewhere. I understand what Spielberg is trying to do with the heavy focus on Cruise & co., but, as Ebert said, I think The Day After Tomorrow, though hardly a cinematic classic, struck that particular balance better. (Besides, the “prudent formula” that Ebert describes works a lot better when your main characters are more compelling and likeable than these boring blokes.)
One last thing: there’s a glaring cinematic omission that I just don’t understand. Considering the epic scale and the big-budget effects, I have to ask… where is the sweeping aerial shot of a deserted, utterly destroyed New York City? Cruise’s character tells us that “everyone in that direction is dead”; why not show us? You can’t convince me that Spielberg was squeamish about the 9/11 reference; the pictures-on-the-wall scene blew that theory out of the water. So I don’t understand why he didn’t use the FX tools at his disposal to create that shot. It just seems like it’s obviously needed, and would have been really cool.
Oh, well. I enjoyed watching the movie, I’m just disappointed because I feel it could have been so much better. All things considered, the most thoroughly fulfilling part of our trip to the movies was the preview for King Kong… awesome!!! It looks very cool, and what’s more, somehow it just feels right to have a Peter Jackson movie coming out in December to look forward to. :)
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Categories: TV, Movies & Entertainment
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July 1st, 2005 at 11:57:31 am
Brendan, I haven’t seen the movie yet. But keep in mind that Speilberg is attempting to ressurect an old genre (1950’s sci-fi/invasion movies) in an era of CGI. Now, I admit I haven’t seen the movie or read any reviews, but I’m guessing that the numb-then-panicked-then-numb extras weren’t meant to be realistic–they were probably meant to harken back to those old-fashioned alien invasion movies.
July 1st, 2005 at 12:18:11 pm
Maybe so, but they (and, even worse, the let’s-stand-around-and-watch-instead-of-running-for-our-lives extras) were so unrealistic that they jolted me out of the mindset where I could have become fully engrossed in the movie. I can suspend disbelief in a sci-fi with regard to certain things (for example, if the aliens were really do jealous of the Earth, why did they bury those tripods underground a millions years ago and wait until there was a civilization of several billion humans here to resist them, instead of simply taking over the planet a million years ago when doing so would have required much less effort?), but I can’t suspend disbelief to the extent of accepting totally unrealistic portrayals of human behavior.
July 1st, 2005 at 12:41:51 pm
Thanks for saving me a few bucks!
July 1st, 2005 at 12:56:49 pm
Keep in mind the source material. The book was all about the narrator running and hearing the occasional rumor. It also had a liberal bias against British imperialism. And in the original, the tripods landed; they weren’t buried. The millenia of planning came from needing to make enough tripods and launching sites.
At least these aliens couldn’t see what was going to do them in, unlike Signs, where they could see GIANT OCEANS OF POISON (to them) COVERING 70% OF THE PLANET, and they didn’t turn around.
Independence Day at least had people praying and one great scene where the Israeli and (I think) Syrian air forces are just standing there… looking at each other. But you know at the climax that they fought together to down the giant flying saucer.
I’ll probably wait till this is on DVD, and I can get it with my Netflix subscription for real cheap.
July 1st, 2005 at 4:28:24 pm
Thanks for saving me a few bucks!
Hmm… well, it’s your call, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the movie isn’t worth seeing. Now, if we were talking about A.I., I would absolutely say, “Don’t bother.” But this is by no means a Spielberg clunker on par with A.I. Instead, it’s a mediocre movie with flashes of brilliance — and, like the one “A” on a C student’s report card, those flashes of brilliance make the mediocrity all the more disappointing. But “mediocre” doesn’t necessarily mean not enjoyable. As I said, I did enjoy watching the movie… I was just disappointed with it.
Also, I think I may have been a little hard on it, because Becky and I kept whispering to each other during the movie about things we didn’t like, which sort of took me out of the moment. I was pondering giving it another chance, perhaps seeing it by myself and trying to be a little less critical and suspend disbelief at bit more… but I probably won’t do that, mostly because I’m not made of money. :)
Anyway, like I said, for the most part I did enjoy watching the movie*, and I wouldn’t recommend not seeing it… I just wish certain crucial things had been done better.
That said, if you’re going to choose one summer blockbuster to watch, between Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, absolutely see Batman Begins. In terms of whose big movie was superior, Katie Holmes wins the battle with her “future husband” hands-down.
*Of course, I also enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow… so much so that I saw it twice in the theater on opening weekend. So take that for what it’s worth. :)
July 1st, 2005 at 4:57:31 pm
Brendan, I haven’t seen the movie yet. But keep in mind that Speilberg is attempting to ressurect an old genre (1950’s sci-fi/invasion movies) in an era of CGI. Now, I admit I haven’t seen the movie or read any reviews, but I’m guessing that the numb-then-panicked-then-numb extras weren’t meant to be realistic–they were probably meant to harken back to those old-fashioned alien invasion movies.
July 1st, 2005 at 5:18:11 pm
Maybe so, but they (and, even worse, the let’s-stand-around-and-watch-instead-of-running-for-our-lives extras) were so unrealistic that they jolted me out of the mindset where I could have become fully engrossed in the movie. I can suspend disbelief in a sci-fi with regard to certain things (for example, if the aliens were really do jealous of the Earth, why did they bury those tripods underground a millions years ago and wait until there was a civilization of several billion humans here to resist them, instead of simply <i>taking over the planet a million years ago</i> when doing so would have required much less effort?), but I can’t suspend disbelief to the extent of accepting totally unrealistic portrayals of human behavior.
July 1st, 2005 at 5:41:51 pm
Thanks for saving me a few bucks!
July 1st, 2005 at 5:56:49 pm
Keep in mind the source material. The book was all about the narrator running and hearing the occasional rumor. It also had a liberal bias against British imperialism. And in the original, the tripods landed; they weren’t buried. The millenia of planning came from needing to make enough tripods and launching sites.
At least these aliens couldn’t see what was going to do them in, unlike Signs, where they could see GIANT OCEANS OF POISON (to them) COVERING 70% OF THE PLANET, and they didn’t turn around.
Independence Day at least had people praying and one great scene where the Israeli and (I think) Syrian air forces are just standing there… looking at each other. But you know at the climax that they fought together to down the giant flying saucer.
I’ll probably wait till this is on DVD, and I can get it with my Netflix subscription for real cheap.
July 1st, 2005 at 6:55:11 pm
Ugggg, you enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow? I mean, I know you’re a huge weather nerd, but that movie was horrible! I don’t even know where to start–for crying out loud there were “action” scenes where people were running away from frost!
July 1st, 2005 at 7:01:48 pm
I know. But for me at least, it was so bad, it was good. :)
July 1st, 2005 at 9:28:24 pm
<i>Thanks for saving me a few bucks!</i>
Hmm… well, it’s your call, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the movie isn’t worth seeing. Now, if we were talking about <i>A.I.</i>, I would absolutely say, “Don’t bother.” But this is by no means a Spielberg clunker on par with <i>A.I.</i> Instead, it’s a mediocre movie with flashes of brilliance — and, like the one “A” on a C student’s report card, those flashes of brilliance make the mediocrity all the more disappointing. But “mediocre” doesn’t necessarily mean not enjoyable. As I said, I did enjoy watching the movie… I was just disappointed with it.
Also, I think I may have been a little hard on it, because Becky and I kept whispering to each other <i>during the movie</i> about things we didn’t like, which sort of took me out of the moment. I was pondering giving it another chance, perhaps seeing it by myself and trying to be a little less critical and suspend disbelief at bit more… but I probably won’t do that, mostly because I’m not made of money. :)
Anyway, like I said, for the most part I did enjoy watching the movie*, and I wouldn’t recommend not seeing it… I just wish certain crucial things had been done better.
That said, if you’re going to choose one summer blockbuster to watch, between <i>Batman Begins</i> and <i>War of the Worlds</i>, absolutely see <i>Batman Begins</i>. In terms of whose big movie was superior, Katie Holmes wins the battle with her “future husband” hands-down.
*Of course, I also enjoyed <i>The Day After Tomorrow</i>… so much so that I saw it twice in the theater on opening weekend. So take that for what it’s worth. :)
July 1st, 2005 at 11:55:11 pm
Ugggg, you enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow? I mean, I know you’re a huge weather nerd, but that movie was horrible! I don’t even know where to start–for crying out loud there were “action” scenes where people were running away from frost!
July 2nd, 2005 at 12:01:48 am
I know. But for me at least, it was so bad, it was good. :)
July 2nd, 2005 at 12:07:01 am
You should recall though that even well after jets smashed into the WTC people stood around staring at other people jumping out of the building. And even after the first tower crashed, there were those who stood around wondering if the second would fall.
That being said, there were a few scenes in the movie that did defy basic logic (like people walking TOWARD a battle with the military forces), but it wasn’t enough to make me dislike (or even advise against) seeing this movie. I’ve always enjoyed the original movie and was actually kind of surprised at some of the similarities in this one (including some nearly identical camera shots).
And you had to like the caemos by the original stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson (or did you miss that).
I felt it was worth a few bucks. I didn’t find it as scary as everyone said it was, but I think that was because the “scary” scenes were in large part similar to the 1953 version
July 2nd, 2005 at 5:07:01 am
You should recall though that even well after jets smashed into the WTC people stood around staring at other people jumping out of the building. And even after the first tower crashed, there were those who stood around wondering if the second would fall.
That being said, there were a few scenes in the movie that did defy basic logic (like people walking TOWARD a battle with the military forces), but it wasn’t enough to make me dislike (or even advise against) seeing this movie. I’ve always enjoyed the original movie and was actually kind of surprised at some of the similarities in this one (including some nearly identical camera shots).
And you had to like the caemos by the original stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson (or did you miss that).
I felt it was worth a few bucks. I didn’t find it as scary as everyone said it was, but I think that was because the “scary” scenes were in large part similar to the 1953 version