WAR OF THE WORLDS: Tripod Shuffle

Every other day leading up to the release of his new movie Bridge of Spies, we will be dissecting a film in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. I've picked ten movies spanning the length of Spielberg's career, five of which I have seen and five of which I haven't. This week War of the Worlds batters us with the frailty of humanity.

Other Reviews in this Series: Duel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can, Munich, Lincoln

Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Josh Friedman, David Koepp
Cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin
Runtime: 116 mins.
2005

The coolest thing about War of the Worlds is that it's bleak as hell. Until this point Spielberg's history of representing extraterrestrials had ranged from awe-inspiring (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to charming (ET), but with War of the Worlds old kid-friendly spielberg leans heavy into despair. The movie is punishing, as if Cormac McCarthy decided to apply himself to B-movie sci-fi. The actual scribes were Josh Friedman and David Koepp, with some key input from Spielberg. They craft a narrative that starts out mean and gets meaner, until the saccharine turn at the very end of the movie that many critics rightly thumbed their collective noses at.

The burden of modernizing the nineteenth century science fiction novel rested primarily on Koepp's shoulders, and he makes all the right choices. The narrative may be divorced from the power it held as a radio play, but there are a new set of perverse fascinations at its heart, as the screenplay sometimes awkwardly but mostly gracefully gestures to terrorism and the post-9/11 American frame of mind. Koepp claims to have avoided such associations as best he could, while Spielberg more readily admits to being inspired by them.

The real interesting thing is that the reason Spielberg took a turn down this dark path of mass genocide, mob violence, and confused hopelessness is because Tom Cruise thought it would be fun. After their work together on Minority Report, Spielberg found Cruise to be an excellent collaborator and met with him about reuniting for another project. Cruise brought three ideas to the table, and the one that sparked Spielberg's imagination was of course War of the Worlds. It was a good idea. Unlike the vast majority of remakes, War of the Worlds feels like it deserved to be made, thanks to the fresh themes, the charisma of the filmmakers, and the advances in special effects.

And those effects are spectacular. The tripods glide through earth's atmosphere like amphibians glide through water. It's not easy to place sci-fi spaceships in a grounded world and make them feel tangible and threatening; this may be War of the Worlds's greatest success. The avoidance of schlock, camp, and cheese is complete. Maybe it is the cinematography, or the perfect build of tension, or the sinister organic/mechanic design of the tripods, or the chilling John Williams score, or the masterful sound design, or the devastating way Spielberg stages crowd scenes... at any rate, War of the Worlds resonates because it all feels so real.

This is the point at which I should definitely inform you of the premise, just in case you should be unfamiliar with one of the most influential pieces of genre fiction in the last 100 years. War of the Worlds began life as an 1898 novel by H.G. Wells. In 1938 Orson Welles performed an experimental radio play that a good portion of America took to be actual news reports of an alien invasion (in perhaps the first and most successful form of viral marketing?). It was henceforth adapted for screen many times over.

Spielberg's version differs from the original in key ways (the time period, the way the aliens arrive, the limited POV), but the main tenets are the same. An alien force uses its tripod war machines to decimate life on earth with no warning or attempt at diplomacy. Our weapons have no effect on these invaders, only bouncing off invisible shields. Of course, the famous fatalistic ending remains the same, which I will not share for the sake of not wanting to spoil a story from 1898.

The shift from a wide range of military, governmental, and civilian perspectives to that of one man works well for the most part, other than a particularly obvious bit of exposition dropped by a news reporter who shows up out of nowhere and then leaves (a conversation saved only by its breathtaking setting). Grounding us in a helpless father's perspective drives home the confusion and vulnerability that an invasion would immediately invoke.

Not to mention that Cruise's role here is fascinating in that it requires him to be a dick, and he does so admirably. Much like his role in Edge of Tomorrow exploits our expectations for comedic purposes by making Cruise a coward, War of the Worlds unsettles us right off the bat by saddling us with a protagonist who is a semi-competent deadbeat. He's still charismatic, he just wields that charisma in selfish ways.

That's not the only tool Spielberg uses to knock us off balance. The lighting in this movie is off the hook. Several times I wondered whether something was wrong with my screen because the lighting looked... wrong, somehow. Not bad or messy, just off. Even from the placid beginning of the movie, Spielberg and cinematographer Kaminski use light to give the world an uncanny feel. I wish I were a good enough critic to tease out exactly how they accomplish this; I do know that in the mob scene the filmmakers use a bunch of different types of light sources to make the visual landscape more chaotic and mess with the audience's heads. 

Between the lighting and the sublime effects, some of the best shots in the movie feel like a gothic painting. The camerawork is no less of a masterstroke, especially some classic Spielbergian long takes like an amazing digitally assisted (surely?) shot that involves the camera swirling around our heroes' escaping car at 60+ mph.

Dakota Fanning was really good.

It could be true that I'm more in love with the idea of War of the Worlds than the movie itself, but I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt. Spielberg does flub the ending a bit, and there are awkward patches here and there, but there is also a great deal of genius and gleeful misery packed into this movie. The suspense works; I was tensed up for much of the runtime despite knowing the story and having seen the movie many years ago. This is about as bleak as PG-13 sci-fi can get.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS