Movie review: War of the Worlds
SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers. I am going to completely give away the ending of the movie. If you don't want to know, get off your computer and go see the movie.
My main fear walking into Steven Speilberg's summer blockbuster revision of the H.G. Wells classic War of the Worlds starring "international superstar Tom Cruise" was that he'd turn it into an action movie in which Tom Cruise finds a miraculous way to single-handedly save the world. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Although certainly a modernized retelling of the story, Speilberg remains basically true to the source material, at least as far as the overall premise is concerned. War of the Worlds certainly has its share of strengths, and I found myself enjoying it a good deal for the majority of the film's running time. Unfortunately, it also has some glaring flaws that left me with a poor overall opinion of the movie.
The movie opens with a view of earth from space, with Morgan Freeman providing a minute or so of narration, telling us that while we go about our unassumingly busy lives, a cold alien intelligence is eying our little blue-green ball with envy, making its plans. Morgan Freeman has a wonderful voice for narration, but his narrative is completely unnecessary. If you're in the theater you already know that aliens are about to attack earth. He may just as well have said, "The earth is an oblong sphere with one moon, completing its orbit around the sun once every 365 days or so." Maybe this introduction is for the benefit of families who've stumbled into the wrong theater, intending to see "Herbie: Fully Loaded", so they can get their kids to the right movie before terrible things start to happen.
Those terrible things start to happen about five minutes into the movie, which doesn't leave much time to establish character. We meet Tom Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier, and are given no reason at all to like him. He's an immature selfish prick who can't even be bothered to remember what time his ex-wife is bringing his two kids for a visit. The kids--a 10-year-old daughter and a sullen teenage boy--don't like him, and he has no clue how to relate to them. In this too-brief eye before the storm, we are never given any reason to identify with or care about any of the these three characters. Too bad, since the rest of the movie is all about their attempt to survive.
Shortly after the kids arrive and establish the fact that they hate their dad, freak lightning storms start ocurring around the globe. One of them touches down blocks away from Ray's home, and he leaves the kids at his place to go and investigate. (Good call, Dad of the Year!) At the site where multiple lightning strikes hit the street, a massive three-legged alien war machine rises from underground and immediately begins laying waste to everything and anything. These tripods look fantastic, and are suitably scary. The damage they do is also suitably impressive. The powerful beam weapons they employ decimate buildings effortlessly, send cars flying hundreds of feet, and immediately creamate human flesh and bones, curiously leaving clothing intact. It's eerie to see people vanish into a puff of ash while their clothes flutter to the ground, but I found myself distracted by wondering why these immensely powerful alien weapons leave clothing unscathed. When we actually see the aliens later in the movie we know it's not because they want to dress themselves in the latest Gap fashions.
So begins the majority of the movie: Ray and his kids running for their lives. Ray's ex-wife is visiting her parents in Boston, so Ray decides to head in that direction. Naturally, everywhere they go the alien tripods show up and make a big mess of things. This combination of running and hiding accounts for about 95% of the movie's running time, which is good because it's the film's strong point. Speilberg can direct action like nobody's business, and he's no slouch at suspense and tension either. He's also excellent at showing audiences the horrific toll war takes on landscapes, and WotW has an abundance of shots chronicling the devestation wrought by the alien war machines.
As effective a director as Speilberg is, the action and suspense lose impact because we simply don't care about the main characters. As Ray's 10-year-old daughter Rachel, Dakota Fanning shows that she's got the range of frightened-to-terrified down pat, but in the few instances she's asked to act like a typical little girl she comes off a bit wooden. Tom Cruise is excellent as usual, but the gamut of emotions his character runs through is nothing we haven't seen him do before (and as recently as Minority Report) while playing more compelling characters. Justin Chatwin does a fine job of playing the angry sullen teenage son, but that's all his character does. If you're not a teen yourself, you'll want to slap him senseless and leave him for the tripods in no time flat. Speilberg should know by now that without an emotional attachment to the characters there can be no real horror--suspense and shock, sure, but not horror--and that goes a long way toward dampening the emotional impact of the movie. I never really cared if any of the characters lived or died, I only knew that Ray and his daughter would survive because That's The Way It Goes. Speilberg's previous movies owe a lot of their impact and success to the fact that he creates well-rounded characters that you can actually care about, or at the very least identify with. Why he chose to ignore that principle this time is a mystery.
Around the midway mark Ray and his kids find themselves on a hillside watching the army attempt to bring down one of the alien tripods. His son rushes forward, apparently out of a moronic rebelious need to fight the alien invaders. Ray leaves his daughter at the base of the hill with instructions not to move from the spot while he rushes forward to grab his son. Torn between rescuing his son and keeping well-meaning strangers from carrying the seemingly abandoned girl away, he leaves his son to reclaim his daughter. Moments later the crest of the hill erupts in a huge fireball, as the army's high-tech weaponry is swatted aside like so many gnats. The son is gone, presumed dead, and we don't miss him. It is here that the movie stumbles inexcusably by following an insipid rule of soap operas: if you don't actually see someone's body hacked into a dozen pieces, they're not really dead. More on that later.
In one of the movie's most tense sequences, Ray and his daughter take refuge in the basement of an ambulance driver, played with typical skill by Tim Robbins. During their stay, one of the tripods probes the basement for survivors by sending in what is essentially a big camera on a long flexible stalk. This would've been a lot more effective if this thought hadn't occurred to me: if an alien species can coordinate a world-wide attack from millions of miles away, complete with energy shields that render our most advanced military weaponry completely ineffective, why haven't they stumbled across infrared technology? That's like trying to imagine a military that's capable of producing stealth bombers but has never heard of penicillin. I tend to walk into movies with my suspension of disbelief already intact--the movie actually has to work to erode it, not build it. With that realization, my suspension of disbelief promptly fled the theater to cower in my car.
My biggest problem with War of the Worlds is that there's absolutely no emotional payoff when all is said and done. The ending itself, while remaining true to the source material, is anticlimactic in the extreme. The aliens are beaten not by any actions the human race takes against them, but by exposure to what is, to them, alien viruses. They all just get sick and die. To get this point across, the narration returns and explains it to us. Using narration to convey this to the audience is incredibly lazy storytelling. Narration can be used well in a movie, but only if it's used in a consistent manner or as a device that actually works in relation to the movie's structure. (As a good example, the narration in American Beauty is eventually revealed to be main character Lester's spirit reflecting on his life from the great hereafter, reveling in all the beauty he forgot to notice while he was alive.) Here, the ending narration seems to say, "I have no idea how to show you what happened, so I'm just gonna tell you so you won't leave confused." That the aliens were beaten by deadly infection and not the efforts of humanity is true to the original novel and the 1953 film, and I would've been pissed off if that had been altered. At the same time, it really lessens the impact of the movie, because the characters don't do anything to earn victory. It's as if, at the end of Red Dawn, the invading Communists ran out of ammunition and simply went home. "Thanks for trying so hard, kids. All is well. Nothing to see here." This also shows the source material's age in a way that tramples my sense of disbelief once more. At one point it is established that the aliens are drinking our blood. They've mastered interstellar travel but don't realize that an alien environment just might contain bacteria and viruses to which they have no natural defenses? These are not the brightest aliens I've ever seen. I could give the movie the benefit of the doubt and say that this is a comment on our own military, how we excel at making large holes in countries full of brown people but seem to be piss-poor at just about everything else, but even if that were true it still torpedoes the movie's impact.
Once the "war" side of things is wrapped up, we naturally have to resolve our main characters' plight, and it's here that the movie jumps from implausibility to outright insult. After wading through an otherwise devestated Boston, Ray and his daughter arrive at his ex-wife's parents' house. Their neighborhood is inexplicably immaculate, as if the aliens decided, "This place is too ritzy. Let's go trash the slums some more!" The ex-wife, her parents, and her current husband greet them on the front porch, looking no more disheveled than if they'd been watching Desert Storm unveil from the out-of-range comfort of their living room sofa. And guess what? The son is there too! There's not even an attempt to explain how he managed to survive and get cross-country to Boston, when during his on-screen time he never shows any more intelligence than your average paint huffer. I actually had to stifle a cry of, "Oh, come on!"
Ray's character arc was intended to show a failure of a father redeeming himself by protecting his kids, but frankly this falls flat. Yes, he protects his kids, but that's what we expect of him, or of any parent, whether they have a good relationship with their kids or not. He simply does what anyone with a sliver of parental instinct would do. It's nothing special, and at the end we don't feel as if he's progressed as a person or a father. It's just assumed that during the course of the movie we'll come to like him and respect him as a parent because he's in A Really Tight Spot. In fact, since the brooding teenage moron made it through okay on his own, Ray probably could've just said to his daughter, "Go with your brother. You'll be fine.", and then hunkered down in a basement until the end of the movie with the same results. How compelling is that?
Despite its stellar pedigree, War of the Worlds only amounts to a typical disposable summer movie: good special effects, lots of explosions, and not much else going for it. It has tension and some fear, but no horror. It has good acting wasted on one-dimensional characters who fail to engage the audience. You're supposed to walk out of a summer blockbuster going, "Wow!" I walked out of War of the Worlds with a resounding, "Eh." It's worth watching once if you like action and suspense, but don't expect to feel any excitement when the end credits start rolling.
posted by Yomper at 11:45 AM
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