When aliens attack

The new version of War of the Worlds (brought to you by the Spielberg and Cruise global movie brands) is unmistakably steeped in America’s post-9/11 fear and uncertainty about “foreign” threat, just as the 1950s version was steeped in Cold War communist paranoia. And if you didn’t notice the connection between al Queda and alien invaders, there’s a borderline tasteless shot in the movie of a wall plastered with “missing” posters searching for lost loved ones, shamelessly trading on a real world horror to add a cinematic flourish. That said, the film, all washed out colors and handheld camerawork, has an urgent grubbiness to it that works well. And director Steven Spielberg shows he’s still got what it takes to build suspense. Using lessons he learned well in Jaws, Spielberg creates a great deal of terror from scary sounds, usually noises outside a window. What you can’t see can be far scarier than what you can’t see. As a result, the first hour or so of War of the Worlds is pretty scary – it’s a real misstep, in fact, when Spielberg lets us see the aliens, who look pretty much like every other alien you’ve ever seen. Told from the eyes of working stiff Tom Cruise and his two children, the movie is stuck on the sidelines of the alien invasion, seeing only what Cruise’s character sees. That unique everyman point-of-view perhaps works best in a harrowing sequence involving a seething mob of people desperate to escape the aliens, where common decency is left behind in favor of every-man-for-himself rage. But it soon becomes clear that it can be hard to tell a satisfying alien invasion story from the point-of-view of a man who’s standing on the sidelines, worried more about running for his life than saving the world. As cheesy as some may find 1996’s Independence Day, there was a great deal of satisfaction to be had in following the exploits of a jet pilot, a scientist, and the U.S. president (all heroes at the top of the hero food chain) if only because doing so meant audiences got to cheer when the world repelled an alien attack. War of the Worlds lacks that kind of rah-rah climax, choosing instead to honor H.G. Wells’ original, abrupt, let-down of an ending. Yes, it makes an interesting point about nature and the state of the universe, but it’s not exactly a thrilling ending, nor it is particularly plausible given the otherwise advanced nature of these aliens. Then again, the aliens are presented as so formidable that there may not have been a plausible way to end the movie outside of showing the complete extermination of humanity. But the film doesn’t do a good job at all explaining what the aliens want or why they want it. First they’re zapping humans willy-nilly and then they’re exploiting them for food or fertilizer or something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense (why kill the thing you’re trying to use?). In the end, War of the Worlds starts off strong but doesn’t really know where to go and so it just sort of fizzles out, leaving one with a vague sense of pointlessness.

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