Monsters from the Id
Does 'War of the Worlds' ever escape Tom Cruise's fevered brain?
By Andy Klein
During slow weeks - and a quick look at the new releases will confirm that this is one helluva slow week - my attention tends to wander toward films with ambiguity that I don't feel I've sufficiently plumbed. Sometimes that may mean a film like Memento or Mulholland Dr., whose makers were consciously crafting puzzles. But other times it means a film where the extra layers are not flagrantly drawn attention to.
In this case, the film I have in mind - please don't laugh - is Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
Sure, it was designed primarily as a big summer thrill machine - a popcorn entertainment. But if there's one thing that the history of American film criticism has shown us, it's that there may be as much art to analyze in commercial Hollywood product as there is in the most self-conscious European art films. Back in the early '60s, when Robin Wood first wrote his seminal analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's American films, the idea of an entire book devoted to serious interpretation of Hitchcock appeared laughable. I mean, it's not like he was Orson Welles or Fritz Lang or something.
Four decades, several critical reevaluations, and shelves full of books later, it no longer seems so silly.
In my initial review of War of the Worlds (June 30), I wrote that, after the first appearance of the tripods, "the movie is structured as one long nightmare - a nightmare everyone has had." In fact, nearly every review of the movie used the word "nightmare" at least once, presumably not in the literal, R.E.M.-sleep sense.
But then I began to wonder if maybe it was literal.
What set me off - aside from the fact that I am predisposed to look for this kind of reading - was the most egregious gaffe in the movie. No one expects realism in a horror movie, but one can reasonably expect a semblance of internal logic. That is, don't go to great lengths to establish that vampires don't have reflections and then have someone look in a mirror and see Dracula sneaking up behind them.
No single element in War of the Worlds evoked more ridicule in reviews and on Internet message boards than the hugely gratuitous shot of some guy shooting video footage during the first confrontation with the aliens ... right after we've had it pounded into our heads that the aliens have unleashed an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that has disabled all electronic circuitry. I mean, come on!
Now, the easiest explanation is that this is sheer sloppiness on the part of Spielberg and/or screenwriter David Koepp. Given how many people in the audience immediately went "Huh?," it's hard to imagine that nobody noticed it in postproduction. So maybe the filmmakers just went "Eh? Who cares? No one will notice. It's not important." (When told about a far more trivial continuity problem, Hitchcock once said something like "If that's what the audience is paying attention to, we've already lost them.")
But who needs that eminently excisable shot? Yes, it establishes that someone captured the scene on tape, which we later see in the news van. Still, viewers would have been less likely to wonder "How could there be video?" in the van sequence than they are during the initial scene, which comes right after Spielberg has so heavily emphasized the effects of the EMP. It's not just that the cars and the telephones and the hero's watch don't work: Moments before we see the video camera, there is a shot of someone with a camera taking still pictures; and Spielberg is careful to show that it's not a digital camera and that the shutterbug has to advance the film with a lever.
No, I'd like to believe that this error is deliberate, that it's a tipoff that maybe none of the film's action is "real," that in fact everything after the first 10 minutes is a horrifying, ultimately self-serving dream.
When we first see Ray (Tom Cruise), he's way up in a booth, using a huge crane to haul cargo containers around. He is apparently coming off the night shift and needs to get home to meet ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), who is dropping off the kids for the weekend. (Now, as an aside, I'm willing to bet up to a buck-eighty that, either in the script or in an early cut, Ray is so nervous about this meeting that he stops off at a bar, which is why he's late; and that it was removed because it made him too unsympathetic. A number of things make more sense that way, including the fact that the woman Ray meets later at the ferry is credited as "Bartender." If anybody who worked on the project can confirm or deny, please do.)
Ray is late and makes up a lame excuse. He's humiliated by his family. Nobody thinks much of him, let alone his ability to look after the kids for two days. "Take care of our kids," his ex says. "Mary Ann," he grinningly replies, "you've got nothing to worry about." Ex-wife and new hubby leave; Ray hears news report about EMPs in the Ukraine; he plays catch with surly son Robbie (Justin Chatwin), who again denigrates his parenting; he goes to sleep, and then he wakes up.
Or does he? We are at that point precisely 11 minutes into the film. Put yourself in Ray's shoes. He's obviously insecure about looking after the kids. He has a nightmare in which that task becomes a life-and-death challenge. In his dream, aliens show up in conveyances of hugely unlikely design, which are not unlike the equipment he works on. When the ships call their patrols back from reconnaissance, they emit a loud blatt that is just like the signal that ends Ray's work shift. The news story he just heard about EMPs is woven into his fantasy, as are echoes of 9/11 anxieties.
In classic nightmare fashion, everybody around Ray is getting zapped, yet somehow he keeps escaping. Daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) makes it clear she trusts her brother to look after her more than him; Ray has to prove that he's the responsible male guardian, so the son goes off to war and is instantly replaced by Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). Harlan is linked to the son through their mutual, insane desire to fight the aliens; Ray feels threatened by Harlan talking about "looking after" Rachel, but in this case he can kill the competition, since it's no longer his own son. In addition, the many weird time and place distortions - how many days and nights transpire, and how did Ray and Rachel walk the 180 miles from the Athens ferry to Boston in what appears to be half a day? - are classic dream logic.
Hey, if Ray's ever seen the 1953 George Pal version of the story, that would explain why he dreams its stars, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, as his in-laws.
The important thing is that - despite the fact that the opening scenes define Ray as neither smart nor knowledgeable nor responsible nor even particularly likable - he triumphs in the most important way: He gets his ex-wife's smiling approval.
Published: 08/18/2005
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