Victory march
Steven Spielberg does H.G. Wells proud in remake of "War of the Worlds'
By JEFF SIMON
Arts Editor
6/29/2005
Tim Robbins, left, provides shelter for Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in "War of the Worlds."
Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a man who would do anything to protect his daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning), during a catastrophic alien attack.
REVIEW
War of the Worlds
****
(Out of four)
Rated PG-13
Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins in Steven Spielberg's bone-rattling version of the H.G. Wells nightmare about a Martian invasion. Now playing in area theaters.
It would be nice to just call Steven Spielberg's terrifying "War of the Worlds" a sci-fi masterpiece and adjourn for lunch. But there's so much more to it.
It's not going to save Hollywood's sagging box-office bacon single-handedly but here, by God, is a film actually worth getting excited about - a film that isn't a frozen lichen from the bat-cave or a fungus from prime-time of yore.
And, so help me, you knew it was going to be this good the minute you first laid eyes on the roster of summer films. You knew that the early summer movies that had a chance of being truly extraordinary for audiences were going to come from the two men whose work invented the blockbuster era - Steven Spielberg, the man who first terrified summertime filmgoers with "Jaws" and his pal George Lucas, who tickled and merchandised them to death with "Star Wars." Add Paul Haggis' magnificent "Crash" and you've got the sum total of the summer movies in current multiplexes that will remind you why people once got so hopped up about movies in the first place.
The idea that Spielberg was going to employ all the fearsome technical resources of modern film-making to remake one of the terrifying Saturday morning classics of his youth - George Pal and Byron Haskins' marvelous 1953 version of H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" - was enough to get the adrenaline swooshing among film intelligentsia. George Pal's special effects 52 years ago were state-of-the-art (they're still nifty in their primitive way) but what has become possible since is mind-boggling. And Spielberg has presided over quite a bit of it ("Jurassic Park," "ET,", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind").
"War of the Worlds" may not, literally, shock and awe, but it will assuredly jolt, amaze and terrify. And if it falls prey, at the end, to a kind of glutinous plot slowdown, that's an inevitable result of some fidelity to Wells' novel. That's what happens when you graft civilized British anti-climax-a kind of parlor aphorism raised to the level of a denouement - onto a wild and nightmarish multiplex thrill machine.
It's also what is increasingly happening in Spielberg movies. I don't know why, but his sense of climax has been intermittently defective since "Schindler's List," where he ended by chucking his movie story entirely and returning us, powerfully, to the very real gravestone of a once-very-real Oskar Schindler. (The ending of "A.I." was little short of appalling.)
If the first two-thirds of "War of the Worlds" don't rattle your bones and shiver your timbers, you may well be a pod person, an impostor among us movie-lovers.
Orson Welles' youthful radio version of "War of the Worlds" - and the resultant national panic - was the historic annunciation of the powerful mass media age we're still in. It's in the very DNA of this story of interplanetary invasion, then, to horrify and unsettle in special ways.
And it does, it does.
In a post-9/11 world, apocalypse doesn't seem screaming sci-fi silliness anymore (nor was it, really, in the eras when there were Nazis on the march and nuclear weapons being routinely and openly tested in Utah). The sight of hordes of people on foot fleeing an attacked city isn't just Spielberg's fantasy on Wells, it was what we all saw on network television on a beautiful September Tuesday four years ago.
So when Tom Cruise, as an irresponsible, near-deadbeat dad, grabs his tall teenage son and quivering 10-year old daughter and hightails it away from Martian death rays just a few feet away, you won't have time to disbelieve or scoff. You're "in the moment," as the actors say, and, if you've got blood in your veins rather than Kool-Aid, you're likely to be scared witless. ("What's that stuff all over you?" his daughter asks. How do you tell her it's human ash?)
Steven Spielberg. His mark.
As always with Spielberg, nothing quite conveys wonderment, or terror, like the up-raised eyes of the beholders. And in between is a standard Besieged World movie ("Deep Impact," "Armageddon," "Independence Day," etc., etc.). The difference is that this one was made out of classic material by a master.
Cruise plays a Jersey dockworker who's supposed to watch his semi-estranged two kids for the weekend while his pregnant, remarried ex-wife visits her folks in Boston.
And then the Martians come to town.
Lightning storms atomize everybody. Skyways tumble. Gaping holes open up in city streets. Cars refuse to run. Huge creatures emerge, making loud hideous foghorn noises and zapping people and buildings with almost playful cruelty (another Spielberg mark - the sadistic playfulness of malice).
His family's odyssey through a human world of devastation and people acting sub-human is brilliantly imagined. Utterly amazing images tumble over one another. In one, a long march of refugees is momentarily stopped by ringing bells at a railroad crossing. A passenger train screams by at top speed. Horrifying flames are roaring out of every car window.
In another, the 10-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning, as adorable as any Hollywood child actress has ever been) is alone, looking in the woods for a place to go to the bathroom. She encounters a country stream. One body floats by on the swift current. Then, after a brief interval, dozens and even hundreds of them.
They take refuge in the home of Tim Robbins, as a Good Samaritan with a lunatic, non-Samaritan agenda.
"This is not a war," he says, "any more than there's a war between men and maggots. This is an extermination."
One of Spielberg's scriptwriters was David Koepp. Anyone who's seen Koepp's own films - "The Trigger Effect," "Stir of Echoes" - will recognize that Spielberg has redeemed a lot of brilliant ideas that Koepp himself, as a director, couldn't quite get to work.
If the frights and momentum are stopped finally by some minimal fidelity to Wells, it may not be an entirely bad thing. Just as "Saving Private Ryan" would have been unendurable if its full-length had been as powerful as its 45-minute opening sequence, Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" couldn't, for its full length, ask its audience to ride along on a flaming train for 117 minutes.
What's onscreen is unforgettable enough.
I wouldn't exactly say it's safe to go back to the movies. But if you ever loved movies and you miss this one - well, let's just say you're making a big mistake.
One final word: I understand international piracy concerns these days but many, especially women, in the preview audience wanted to know if it was absolutely necessary that they be forced by studio security to leave their purses in the car.
At this stage of summer, mightn't a little friendliness and audience courtship be wise?
Just asking.
e-mail: jsimon@buffnews.com