CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE FOURTH KIND
It's no more Mr. Nice Alien in the very scary 'War of the Worlds'
By Andy Klein
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Steven Spielberg went against the grain of all the paranoid alien-invasion films of his youth to give us benevolent aliens. Now he comes full circle with this new version of the great-granddaddy of all paranoid alien-invasion stories - H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. This may represent a change in Spielberg, but it likelier reflects a change in the culture. (Alternately, it may not reflect anything at all. As Spielberg says in the production notes,
"I just thought it would be fun to make a really scary movie with really scary aliens, which I had never done before.")
Tom Cruise plays an arrogant, insensitive divorcé who can't maintain a close relationship with anyone but a young girl.
And that's just on Oprah and The Today Show ... .
No, actually, that's in the movie, too. Ray Ferrier (Cruise) is a working-class guy in New Jersey, who is looking after his kids - sullen teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and 10-year-old Rachel (Dakota Fanning) - for a few days while his ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), and her new husband head off to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Boston. As Mary Ann leaves, it's clear that she considers Ray an unreliable guardian. "You got nothing to worry about," he assures her. Ho ho ho.
We're less than 15 minutes in when the sky begins to get all weird ... unpleasant-type weird. Then there's strange lightning - an electromagnetic pulse, we later learn, just like in The Matrix - that seems to neutralize all electric circuits, even those in cars, battery-operated devices, and digital watches. (Except, in the middle of this, one character is gratuitously and inexplicably shown using a camcorder - as obvious a gaffe as one can imagine.)
Then a hole appears in the ground a few blocks away, and out come mechanical tentacles firing awesome destructo beams that make people instantaneously explode into a burst of ashes. Cool, in a disgusting sort of way.
From then on the movie is structured as one long nightmare - a nightmare everyone has had. (At least, I hope it's not just me.) You're being pursued and pursued by an overwhelming, implacable threat; there's no way you can fight back; you can only run, but, no matter where you go, it finds you. There may be relatively calm moments, but they are undercut by the knowledge that the predator may - will - find you again.
This has always been the basic pattern of alien-invasion films. Some - like Invaders from Mars (1953) - have a dreamy feel from start to finish. Others - like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - start off in an altogether mundane "real world," which can make the intrusion of monsters even more terrifying. With the arguable exception of the first minute or so, Spielberg opts for the latter strategy. (As in the 1953 Byron Haskin/George Pal version, the opening has a voice-over - intoned here by Mr. Voice of God himself, Morgan Freeman - lightly rewritten from Wells's book. "No one would have believed that we were being watched," Freeman says. Right: No one except every inbred yahoo in the backwoods of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.)
It goes without saying that, in the movie's terms, the near-destruction of the earth serves the overriding purpose of resolving - or appearing to resolve - Ray's personal issues. The first 15 minutes suggest aspects of his failed marriage that are never fully explored. The apparent class difference between Ray and Mary Ann - she, her parents, and her husband all are from another, more well-to-do world - is emphasized repeatedly. ("What's hummus?" Ray asks his 10-year-old, after taking an unpleasant taste of the takeout she's ordered.) Perhaps part of the invaders' function is to make the working-class lug and his upscale former in-laws seem less alien to each other. The affirmation of family ties has long been central to Spielberg's work, and War of the Worlds is no exception.
Most of the film is utterly terrifying. On that level, Spielberg has succeeded totally. While there are innumerable high-tech effects, computer-generated and otherwise, they are not the most crucial component. The real genius here is in the sound mix. Sound can be far more evocative than explicit visuals - something Spielberg understood 30 years ago in Jaws and still understands. It's scarier when the characters are hiding and hear a creaking noise getting closer than it is when they actually see the alien soldiers. (As usual, John Williams's score - which repeatedly lifts from The Rite of Spring and sounds like Bartók toward the end - is a huge help.)
In fact, the special effects are, in a sense, less showy than they were in the 1953 version. Back then, what Pal and his crew achieved was impressive enough that it was the film's central attraction. Since the effects revolution that started with 2001 and picked up with Star Wars and Close Encounters, audiences have often been shortchanged by movies whose story and characters seemed secondary to the "Hey, look what we can do!" visuals. (The Phantom Menace would be the classic example.)
Spielberg knows that the state of the art has reached a point where almost nothing is going to wow audiences enough to hold their interest. Here, the effects, even when cool, are always functional. There may even be some deliberately retro intent: How else can one explain the aspect ratio? In a world where anamorphic widescreen is de rigueur for action films, Spielberg has chosen to shoot in what I'm told is 1.85:1 (the current non-widescreen standard) but felt even a little narrower than that.
Where the film runs into problems is in the overall pacing and structure. That is: The terror doesn't really build; the first half is as scary as - in fact, generally scarier than - the later stuff. War of the Worlds reaches such a high pitch in the early scenes that it can't really crank it any higher. The knob is already at 11.
Another issue is inherent to the source material. Rightly, no one wants to mess with Wells's final plot twist, which is crucial to his entire point. Unfortunately - and this was the case in the 1953 version, too - that twist is, by definition, anticlimactic. And anticlimactic plays better on the page than it does in a dramatic medium like film. We are used to such stories building toward a big confrontation; but Spielberg, following Wells, has the entire conflict suddenly ended by a development out of left field. All the struggles and efforts of the protagonists are irrelevant to the resolution.
Which is why Spielberg focuses the story - more than Wells did - on the hero's personal quest to mend his broken family. The final scene - which includes welcome cameos by the 1953 film's stars, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the former of whom starred in one of the director's earliest TV triumphs - gives a sense of closure. But it doesn't really address any of the issues that drove the family apart in the first place. Just maybe Ray and his brood have moved into a new phase in their relationships. It only took a few million deaths to accomplish.
Published: 06/30/2005
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