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Steven Spielberg's AI and Minority Report were dreadful but War of the Worlds ain't half bad. It's terse, moves like the wind, and tells its tale almost entirely in pictures, like an old silent film--you could watch it on a plane with no headphones and know exactly what is going on every minute, even if you'd never somehow encountered the Wells story. Critics mostly like this update, but a quick glance through the reviews at rottentomatoes.com pulled up a couple of debatable points:

Spielberg gives his pulp material grandeur because he is an A-list director. No, he is a pulp director with pretensions to A material, adding films such as Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, and Amistad to his shark and dinosaur canon. WotW works because it's pure sensationalism. And like the best B-movies, it has that undertow of other stories being told. Like, who is scarier to the children in the movie, the bloodsucking aliens or the angry, controlling absentee dad fate sticks them with after the apocalypse? Or, how close are we to the kind of savagery depicted in the film, where a mob attacks an SUV that is the only set of working wheels on the road?

You won't remember anything in WotW the next day. Beg to differ--that klaxon horn that heralds the arrival of the alien tripods still has me shivering. Because the movie is a silent film (with explosions) I can replay almost all of it in my mind as a series of images: Cruise struggling to keep his son from chasing the monsters while twenty feet away a well-intentioned couple tries to whisk his daughter away, thinking she's an abandoned child; the guy tearing through the SUV's window glass with his bare hands (but why is he black--pandering to suburban racial angst? Spielberg, meet George Romero); Cruise and Tim Robbins silently fighting over a shotgun while an alien roto-rooter probes the basement where they are hiding; Cruise yelling at his kids again and again.

Michael Atkinson of the Voice is right that the 9/11 references (e.g., walls dense with flyers describing the missing) are a bit much. And it wouldn't be a Spielberg movie without stuff thrown in for no reason other than to be "cinematic." [Spoilers] For example, people are kept in cages riding under the heads of the towering alien "walkers"; periodically a snake-thing comes out of a rubber anus and grabs a human, presumably for a snack. Yet when it comes time to use human blood as fertilizer for the monsters' crops, the victims are dropped ten stories to the ground, a snake thing comes down and stabs them and sucks their blood ten stories back up into the tripod, where it is then sprayed in a thin mist across the landscape. But why all this dropping and long-distance sucking when the humans are already in cages next to the sprayers? Because a body falling towards the camera from a great height is "visually exciting." In the director's defense, stuff like this also makes the movie more irrationally dreamlike and disturbing.

- tom moody 7-23-2005 8:21 am [link] [add a comment]