Mayhem, delirium, destruction. It’s War of the Worlds children — strap yourself in! Warning: spoilers ahead.
To address Edwin Starr’s burning question, from his 1972 Motown mega-hit, War (”What is it good for?”) I must answer: Watching Tom Cruise being sucked up into a giant alien spaceship’s anus. That’s what it’s good for.
Of course, moments later, while still rectally lodged, Tommy pulls a couple of hand grenade’s pins out with his teeth and soon the entire metal booty is rocking and groaning and exploding — freeing Mr. Cruise, his comatose daughter and the other poor captives from their heinous fate of becoming bloody Miracle Grow for planet Red Alert!
O! Hollywood, thank you for that! L. Ron Hubbard couldn’t have written it better.
Now — if that doesn’t grab you — I’m here to tell you, just like Larry King, that War of the Worlds is mindbendingly spectacular — and is the best film of the year, displacing The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill as my fave for ‘05. War reminded me that cinema can still be transportive and that director Steven Spielberg has retained the ability to show us things we’ve never ever seen before.
On the surface this is a freaky sci-fi classic remade for the “New Millennium of the Burning Bush,” but really it’s much more. This is Spielberg giving his psyche a huge, freeing enema. Like Jerri Blank from Strangers With
Candy, Little Steven has “got something to say!”
Yes, post-9/11 referencing abounds — but why shouldn’t it? As the Chinese curse goes, we’re all living in “interesting times.” When Cruise’s daughter, Dakota Fanning, asks, amidst the first slew of alien explosions and earth-ruptures, if the terrorists have finally arrived, you stifle your impulse to chuckle because you realize you’re doing so out of nervous recognition. It’s one of the film’s most unnerving moments.
Spielberg’s palette for War is dingy and worn — bad browns and washed-out blues — very little brightness to be found, except for the glinting metal of the alien’s terrifying tripods — or the bloody, day-glo, Martian mist culled from the Book of Revelations, coating the country in its red tide.
Spielberg echoes the horrors of history throughout — Rwanda’s bloody legacy, New York’s dust-covered post-9/11 hush and the Night of the Living Dead-like Rodney King moment of the LA Riots — to name a few. Some reviewers interpreted this as blasphemous and gratuitous — like Salon’s always puffed-with-her-prose-to-near-popping, Pauline Kael wannabe, Stephanie Zacharek, who whines:
Are we meant to nod solemnly, jolted by the recognition that this alleged bit of summer fun has a real-life parallel? Is [Spielberg] trying to make us feel guilty for enjoying the jolts and thrills he’s obviously working so hard to give us? Or is he just a really cheap, shallow guy? It’s bad enough that Spielberg has lost faith in his own sense of decency, but it’s even worse that he’s lost faith in the decency of his audience.
Dear Ms. Zacharek, it’s called “making art,” — you dimwit. Check into it sometime. Like Picasso in his prime, Spielberg’s hit a ripe, carefree stride in his career where he finds himself, for one astounding moment, aligned with the country’s dark spiritual Zeitgeist. He’s not only creating from his personal vision and set of inspirations — but he’s providing, too, a cathartic release for his audience.
War of the Worlds is a grand, sweeping, eye-popping metaphor for how fucked-up things have gotten on planet earth. We’re imploding, darling. And the aliens? — well, you don’t really want me to start listing all of their stand-in qualities do you? Well, OK, just a few:
Wars‘ screenplay writer Dave Koepp already confessed to Canadian horror magazine Rue Morgue that the Martian attackers represent the American military, while the Americans being destroyed at random represent the Iraqi civilians. Simple enough, I suppose. But it’s the more personal, American divide, between haves and have nots, that is also tacitly diddled in the film — each positioned in their corner of the ring, waiting for the bell to sound. I’ve got my organic produce and bottled water over here, while you’ve got your stockpile of Chicken McNuggets and pull-tabs over there. Tick Tock.
Yes, despite whatever corner we might occupy, we’re all zooming along the same crazy road together — like one of War of the Worlds‘ eeriest, plucked-from-a-nightmare moments — one of the most harrowing images I’ve ever witnessed in a movie: a hurtling, runaway death train that appears mid-way in the film — conductor-less, billowing fiery flames, all its passengers fried zombies.
Coming to a cliff in your neighborhood soon!
The notion that this movie has anything to do with 9(don’t make me say it)11, are absurd. It only points out how blatantly self obsessed and self referential Americans can be. Is everybody going to whine about this for ever.
CNN’s coverage of the London bombings case in point. It is less about our sympathy for Londoners and more about the fact that we empathize because, “it happened to us.” Well there are bombings in Bagdad everyday and CNN has yet to come up with a theme song and credits for Terror in Bagdad.
On the other hand, maybe Jaws was about 911 and the shark was the terrorist and the babe that got it first was the World Trade Center.
No, no, of course it was Oscar Schindler, was George Bush and he was trying to save the Jews (symbolic of countries living wihtout Democracy) - get it stupid.
I for one enjoyed it immensely for what it was - a movie version of a book written long ago. Wait a second - maybe humans are the alien terrorists and the planet earth is the World Trace Center . Oh get over it - we’re all going to die anyway.
I didn’t write that War of the Worlds had “anything to do” with 9/11 (though this piece over on Slate seems to think so, and argues why it is appropriate) — so spinning off on that notion has made your riff seem ridiculous and shrill — but not in the good, funny way. And as to what WOTW’s screenwriter had to say about his metaphors, well, I was simply referencing him in my review.
9/11 WAS a demarcation line for American culture and, not surprisingly, the repercussions from that tragedy are still rippling within our collective psyche — case in point would be G. W. Bush’s re-election. Spielberg, it seems, has decided to amplify this new POST-9/11 (as I called it) climate in his film and find a way, as an artist, to vent some of his own frustrations, weariness and sadness.
David K./Publisher
The train scene — I liked it, too, though I did get a little sense of “here comes the Art” when they stopped at the tracks. But that was ok. I thought of the train scene in Spirited Away, for some reason. Sad, and wild.
One thing I appreciated about the movie was how unhinged the little girl character became. No tough little heroine act. Made the movie scarier.
tom cruise is no longer a person but a phenomenon he is like a plastic david bowman star child but even so I would still probably do him.
I thought the most gripping scene was the mob violence over the automobile. I guess it was the memory/trauma of three christmas’ ago in line for the last batch of ‘Tickle me Elmo’s’.
Scarry shit.
she’s buetifull