Homeland Insecurity
Stephen Spielberg's H.G. Wells remake hones in on post-9/11 fears
War of the Worlds
PG-13, 116 min.
Opening Wednesday
There are at least two reliable ways in which we cope with hard times: sick jokes, and horror movies. For four years now, I've been waiting for the horror movies. The best ones speak the unspeakable: they tap into fears we won't allow ourselves to acknowledge—fears of failure, of mortality, of vulnerability—and allow us to confront them openly. A fair fright is a fair fight. When we need them most, though, American shockers have retreated to the vague, spooky abstractions of Japanese horror, and to the safest, dullest bugaboos of the genre: closets, haunted houses, night. Where are the movies that say there are worse things to fear than the dark?
Finally, Hollywood has grown a pair. If George A. Romero's Land of the Dead posits the post-9/11 world as a spiritually benumbed no-man's-land of walking contagion, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds goes back to Ground Zero, turning the H.G. Wells alien-invasion scenario into a relived nightmare of devastation on home soil. Grounding the action in blue-collar New Jersey, depicting the attack and its aftermath in strictly personal terms, Spielberg invokes specific images of raw, primal and utterly contemporary terror. His Halloween horror show attempts nothing less than an exorcism of national trauma.
If the movie's more successful as the former than the latter, it's hardly a disaster bash like Independence Day, that fireworks display with our national monuments as giant Roman candles. Morgan Freeman's opening narration sets the tone, warning of an unforeseen threat viewing us "with envious eyes" while biding its time. It's another punchclock day for Tom Cruise's delinquent dad, a dockworker: he fat-mouths with his boss before going home (late) to get his kids. Remembering Spielberg's monster-truck opus Duel, we notice the director has framed the innocuous scene so that an enormous vehicle appears to squash the characters under its tires.
As the day quietly unfolds in David Koepp and Josh Friedman's script, the long segue from background menace to foreground monstrosity is masterful—one of the most precisely paced and modulated sequences of Spielberg's career. An entire way of life slowly comes under attack. Roiling clouds gather over the Bayonne Bridge; sheets on clotheslines flap in the wind—which blows toward the storm. Cruise walks outside to see what's the matter. The camera strolls with him down the street, then joins the swelling crowd (in what seems like real time) at an intersection where puzzled cops stare at the buckling pavement.
What follows seems terrifyingly familiar in the details. Traumatized citizens stagger home through a nuclear winter of ash and trash and the smoking rubble of comfortable neighborhoods. As towering alien tripods level churches and churchgoers indiscriminately, Spielberg evokes the collapse of social order in just a single shot, scanning upward past a sign that reads "No Littering" over the ruins of a city street. The immediate aftermath is just as harrowing, as a believably shell-shocked Cruise and family plow their commandeered SUV through clogged streets and even human traffic. Saucer-eyed daughter Dakota Fanning asks the obvious: "Is it the terrorists?"
All of which places this $200 million mass entertainment in a precarious moral position. By summoning up images of collapsing buildings, let alone memorials for the missing, are the makers exploiting them—using them to lend significance or credibility to a summer popcorn flick? If I'd been anywhere close to the World Trade Center on 9/11, I might say yes: any fictional re-creation would feel like a travesty. As with Romero and Land of the Dead, though, it's only within the "safe," cautiously remote confines of a genre movie that Spielberg can even raise the issues. That's even before Cruise meets up with a wild-eyed bunker-dweller (Tim Robbins), who prepares for a suicidal payback while declaring—ostensibly of the aliens, but you connect the dots—that occupations don't ever work. (Guess Donald Rumsfeld never got the same homework assignment as Cruise's teenage son: a paper on the doomed French occupation of Algiers.)
If restricting the focus to Cruise's immediate point of view makes the first half horrifically effective, it weakens the second: given how little we hear about the rest of the planet, a more apt tile might be War of the Tri-State Area. The personal scale makes the action heroics look silly and out of place compared to the first half's collective-memory horrors; it doesn't help that every time Cruise needs to scram, a working vehicle and a magically clear path appear as if ordered by Triple A. And the satisfying irony of Wells' ending can't help but seem anticlimactic on screen, as it did in George Pal's fine 1953 version. But within the limitations of mass-marketed spectacle, this hair-raising thriller makes a valiant effort to connect with the real world—the one that our enemies try to knock down.
—Jim Ridley
Comments (0)