You will not see a better made film this year than Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. There’s been more than one occasion when I’ve felt that Spielberg has squandered his gifts so casually that I’ve left the cinema jumpy with irritation at him. I didn’t yesterday evening.
At a certain point craftsmanship becomes so fine that it produces magic. If this movie had been made by a European director with a history of fashionable independent releases behind him, it would have been praised ecstatically for setting a believable family tale in the eye of an equally believable global horror. Instead even the American critics do Martian tentacle squirms to avoid sounding too admiring. They grudge. They gripe. They quibble. They sniff. Spielberg is too successful, his work too popular, his talent too great. I smiled today when, after some googling, I found out that one (I thought serious) objection that I had to one of the performances in the film turned out to be completely unfounded. Everyone wants to pick at the master’s vision. The New York Times review exemplifies the clever flying needed to peck the eyes of a giant:
“reasonably entertaining”
“Millions of deaths and incalculable property damage seem like pretty expensive family therapy, but it’s heartening to know that even an alien invasion can provide an opportunity for learning and growth.”
“Mr. Cruise has lately proven himself to be much more interesting and unpredictable as a talk show guest than as an actor”
“fairly spectacular”
To take these poses in order: I was transfixed from start to finish (and I’m easily distracted); what’s especially satisfying about this film family is that Californian psychobabble and the therapy culture seem to have passed it by completely; I can’t stand Tom Cruise but his performance in this is magnificent: generous, authentic, and free of vanity; but it’s that “fairly spectacular” that says the least about the film and the most about the person writing about it. To strain so hard at nonchalance in the face of some of the most awe-inspiring and convincing images of destruction ever committed to film takes a special kind of stupid: the kind of stupid that only an over-educated broadsheet journalist, working in the company of his peers over several years, can attain.
As for the specially clever Mr Spielberg, he’s tackled the Holocaust, the future of criminal justice, and (more than once) what would happen if mankind encountered extraterrestrial life. What unfilmable story could he take on next?
[If you don’t mind plot spoilers you’ll learn a lot about the greatness of H G Wells from this Wikipedia article too.]
I haven’t seen it yet so will hasten to do so. But I also find Spielberg to be so obviously gifted that his lack of critical acclaim is simply ludicrous, and shows the critics to be posers who are so unsure of their own sensibilities that they can only set themselves up in opposition to whatever is popular. But sometimes what is popular is also good.
I thought you had packed up.
I was just about to take you off my blogroll when you pop up again. Good to see you back anyway.
I’m not a fan of scifi but this movie pulled me in completely. I think what a lot of critics forget is that movies are *entertainment*, first and foremost. War of the Worlds is the best (theater) movie I’ve seen in quite a while.
Good to see you drop by.
Damian! It’s nice to see you back. I went to the movie yesterday, partly on your recommendation.
Sorry about this.
You’re an idiot.
“…what is especially satisfying about this film family is that Californian psychobabble and the therapy culture seem to have passed it by completely.”
The *only* time I laughed (and I was the only person in a so-so audience to laugh at all) was when the daughter said “I have a bad back” having revealed that she’s allergic to peanut butter, claustrophobic, and whatever else.
It was rubbish. No, it wasn’t. It was worse. Everything in it was idiotic. Taking a fairly high-brow ambitious novel and turning it into such schlock takes some doing.
Hello Dave
It takes chutzpah to embed those words in a comment that shows a complete failure to grasp one of the central themes of the film (and its main running joke).
Blue-collar Cruise’s daughter is now living with a white-collar step-dad. We are encouraged to disapprove of Cruise’s cack-handed, unreconstructed parenting. Then a great terror arrives and it shows us more clearly both the strengths and the weaknesses of his simple approach.
Fanning: “I’m allergic to peanut butter.”
Cruise: “Since when?”
Fanning: “Since I was born.”
Cruise slings his son a baseball mitt and takes him out into the yard in an inept attempt to bond with him. The session ends with his son calling him an asshole and the baseball crashing through the back window.
Fanning asks for food. Cruise says to her, “You know how to order”. Later Cruise finds her leftovers and gags on the hummus: “I told you to get some food.”
Fanning is calmed at one point by her older brother leading her through an anti-panic ritual. When Cruise tries in another situation to recreate it he fails comically.
And—the clincher—[SPOILER ALERT]
Ex-wife delivers children and strides through house. To her disgust there is a V8 engine in Cruise’s kitchen. Later, it’s only because Cruise knows his car maintenance that he manages to find someone who has got a van running and (t)his “real” family escapes the carnage wrought by the tripods.
Cruise is never superhuman or supersmart, he is just dogged and lucky. This is a film made by a megastar Hollywood director about how being ordinary can be good, not great. Cruise’s character succeeds in many ways that benefit his children, but [SPOILER ALERT] he never develops emotionally. The only journey he takes is a literal one—and the film is all the better for that.
Welcome back Geek! I’m still recovering from the shameless reissue of ‘Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds’ (and you thought it was by H G Wells??) so I’ll probably wait for the DVD.
[NOTE FROM THE PROPRIETOR: THIS COMMENT CONTAINS SPOILERS]
While I enjoyed the film immensely, Spielberg’s decision to stick to the original ending was its undoing. Bear in mind that when Wells wrote the book in 1895?, Darwinism was still an imaginative and quite startling idea in the minds of most people, so the notion that the smallest of God’s creatures could halt the monstrous aliens in their tracks had genuine appeal. Unfortunately, in the cynical, sophisticated, technically rich world that we live in today with its GM foods, stem cell research and cloning, such a convenient 11th hour reprieve no longer has any impact whatsoever! It’s for this reason that Independence Day was a more satisfying remake overall because at least it was a computer virus that got the bastards. Indeed, for all its haunting imagery, Spielberg’s film is essentially a homage to George Pal’s 1953 original and even includes several of the scenes (and if you listen carefully, sound effects) from that earlier film. In spite of the awesome retro-victorian gothic tripods and the eerie organic aliens themselves, War of the Worlds (2005) didn’t seem more than the sum of its parts and hence missed the mark for me.
The film is crap, Damian. Don’t tell me its anti-American to say so.
It isn’t. I didn’t.
You might be interested in the Mark Steyn review of WotW in http://www.spectator.co.uk. Haven’t seen it yet. Wanted to until I read Steyn. Less keen until I read you.
I haven’t seen it yet since I’d heard some negative things and it hasn’t been doing so well over here, but I’ll take the recommendation in deference to its source. I think the reason it has “flopped” over here is quite a strong bit of negativity toward both Cruise and Speilburg, and Hollywood in general. You would think that these rather successful entertainment stars would have learned to keep their politics confined to their own dinner tables and out of the papers, but the entertainment and broadsheet journalism industries tend to attract about the same caliber of intellectual.
Welcome back by the way, I had thought you were still offline.
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