War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds is the latest blockbuster from Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise and it lives up to all of the hype, really. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is a mindless summer smash ‘em up action film in the vein of Independence Day. This is a serious film, seriously. Thought provoking, with an underlying commentary on man’s inhumanity to man, this summer flick has some seriously mindful messages in it. This is a gritty feeling film for all that there is not that much gore in the violence. Spielberg may have long resisted the urge to show villainous aliens but when he chose to go for it he went full force. War of the Worlds is at times a refugee film, a family drama, and of course a science fiction film. The film has surprisingly strong performances from its lead characters especially Cruise and Dakota Fanning whose characters are a lot less likeable than the standard hero fare. At times this film reminded me of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in it’s cinematography of the refugees and at other times it was like Shamalan’s Signs.


War of the Worlds is of course a science fiction film based on the HG Wells book about a hostile alien invasion that threatens to wipe out all of humanity in one calculated extermination effort but Spielberg decided to move the story into modern day. Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier a union dock worker with an ex-wife and two kids who know they can’t depend on him for anything. For Cruise, who has made a career of playing the man-child role Ray is a great opportunity to stretch his acting abilities playing a worn man whose childishness has lost him the respect of the important people in his life. His ex-wife can’t rely on him to show up on time and is now happily remarried. His son, Robbie, played by Justin Chatwin is a sullen teen who calls Ray by his first name, borrows the car without notice, and has no respect for his dad, kind of general teen sort of stuff. Dakota Fanning plays Rachel Ray’s 10 year old daughter who is one of those neurotic children who seem older than their age. She is allergic to peanut butter, suffers from claustrophobia, and has a bad back. She is also one of the more authentic children in recent movies completely freaking out when people start exploding and screaming for her mommie. You’d think that the kids in Jurassic Park or Independence Day or any of dozens of disaster movies would have done the same.


The kids are dumped on Ray one Saturday as Ray’s ex heads to her parents’ for the weekend. Ray plays with the kids for all of ten minutes before going to sleep and leaving them to fend for themselves. When he awakes his son has his car and his daughter had ordered take-out and is watching tv. These kids are used to and capable of getting along without their father’s help. A freak lightning storm brings Ray and Rachel to hiding under the table bonding but when all of the cars in New York stop working and other strange things start to happen it is her brother that Rachel turns to not her father.


Spielberg doesn’t hold out on us long like in Jaws or Jurassic Park. Perhaps because of the ease of computer graphic effects rather than more traditional and cumbersome animatronics the aliens get a lot more screen time than previous heavies. The aliens come up out of the ground in their tripods blasting everyone in their path into cinders. They begin hunting people through the streets of New York in a tense and well cut romp. Ray runs home, grabs the kids, and sets off in the only working car in the area.


From here on the pace of the film and its dark tone picks up. Ray and his kids are not a complete family unit, which is obvious in Ray’s inability to lead clearly in time of crisis and the fact that his two children question his actions and directions as equals at every turn. The Ferriers are refugees and the only goal they have is to get to Boston and to their mother, the kid’s real core of stability and family. Ray tries to shield his daughter from the horrors that are all around them as best he can but he is ill suited for this role taking all of the wrong provisions and not ably determining how and where they are going. What Ray is though is observant. He knows human behavior and so he tries to avoid people and study the aliens whenever they cross their paths. This ability, and a lot of dumb luck, allows Ray and his kids to survive long after others are cinders.


Some of the most terrifying and chaotic moments are not when the aliens attack but when mobs of people converge and try to take Ray’s car away from him. It is a scene that shows not only what is important to Ray but what is important to others and what they are willing to do to get it. It also says something about guns and gun violence but I will leave that to the viewer to decide the message behind it.


Unlike most alien encounter flicks Ray does not have a climactic battle scene with the aliens. The film is more a cat and mouse game with Ray and his kids running and hiding from the ever advancing aliens. Tim Robbins has a brief role as a survivor holed up in a house somewhere in Connecticut who wants to take out the aliens and is probably losing his mind. He brings about the real climax of the film when Ray must decide how much he is willing to do to protect the remainder of his family if only for a little while. After that Ray’s showdown with the alien seems significantly less important.


Of course though this film is built on solid characters whose human travails against an evil far greater than themselves, the touchstone of all summer movies is the special effects. On this point War of the Worlds delivers as well. The aliens, only hinted at in the trailer, are present in all of their mechanized and fear inspiring glory. They are large tentacled machines that march across the land eradicating people or scooping them up with their tentacles to turn people into fertilizer for their strange red weeds. The aliens emerge from these ships for union breaks where they grab a drink of water and look around the place, one of the tensest scenes of the film, and then when the whistle blows they climb back into their ships and resume their relentless destruction of the human race.


The only problem with the film was that with all of the recent Tom Cruise specifying and ranting I kept looking for hidden Scientology messages in all of Ray’s actions. Luckily Ray was too busy avoiding aliens and chasing after his kids to worry too much about psychiatric drugs or falling in love. But I don’t think the recent Cruise rantings will have any effect on the weekend box office or the overall take of the film which is bound to be vast.


Of course the aliens have a fatal flaw, but it is not people who triumph here, it is just that they lucked out. I can’t help but think that if the alien race is going to invest so much time and equipment and bodies to taking over Earth that they would have done their homework a little better and sent scouting parties to take the lay of the land before a full fledged invasion. But that is just me.


This film was tense and emotional without all of the gore associated with so many films. It leaves its horror more for the humans and their poor values than to the aliens and their bid for world domination. Like Signs, War of the Worlds is a family drama at heart. It just happens to be set against an alien invasion. But in this case the father is not the drifting emotional center of the family; he is a vacancy, a man who isn’t there for his family in any way. Through his journey with his kids from the aliens he reconnects not just with them, but with his responsibilities to them. He protects his children as ferociously as any lioness ever would. And his children respond by relying on him and trusting him to be the adult that he should be.


I really like this dark blend of action and violence and personal drama. War of the Worlds is one of the best films of the summer and possibly one of the best of the year. It is nice to see such venerable material updated for the modern day to showcase the breakdown of the family and the violent propensities of man in ways that were barely imagined by even HG Wells.