"War of the Worlds"

Steven Spielberg would like to believe his new alien movie taps into our fears of terrorism. Well, it's frightening all right.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Tom Cruise, Movies, Steven Spielberg, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

June 29, 2005 | Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is the ugliest little movie of the summer. Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.

Spielberg knows what we're expecting when we come out to see "War of the Worlds": a scary picture about an alien invasion, based on a 107-year-old novel by H.G. Wells and featuring one of the world's biggest (and dullest) movie stars. But he also needs to show us how savvy he is about our national mood -- that's part of his little pied piper's song and dance. At one point the camera scans a wall covered with fliers of missing loved ones (presumably humans who have been abducted or just plain disintegrated by the marauding aliens), as direct a reference to post-9/11 New York City as you could make. I can't possibly divine what Spielberg intends by that shot. Are we meant to nod solemnly, jolted by the recognition that this alleged bit of summer fun has a real-life parallel? Is he trying to make us feel guilty for enjoying the jolts and thrills he's obviously working so hard to give us? Or is he just a really cheap, shallow guy? It's bad enough that Spielberg has lost faith in his own sense of decency, but it's even worse that he's lost faith in the decency of his audience.

"War of the Worlds" is a delusional work of craftsmanship -- it's all visuals with no vision. Cruise plays Ray, a divorced dockworker who doesn't have the greatest relationship with his kids, 10-ish Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin). Shortly after his ex-wife (Miranda Otto), now remarried and pregnant, drops those kids off at his modest, messy New Jersey house for the weekend, a weird lightning storm changes the color of the sky and the fate of the world. Ray goes into the center of town to find out what's happening, and, along with a crowd of fellow citizens, watches in horror as a massive metallic "creature," poised on three spindly legs, breaks up through the concrete and begins zapping buildings and humans, willy-nilly. These so-called tripods are really vehicles of some sort, with moist, skinny aliens inside: They've been planning this attack for millions of years and they waste no time getting down to business, not just in New Jersey but in locales all across the globe.

All good horror and sci-fi movies build a sense of dread: We get that sickly feeling in the pit of our stomach as we begin to realize that evil is creeping our way -- it's the body's way of dropping anchor against runaway flights of the imagination. But Spielberg doesn't just build dread; he pimps it. The picture is dark and dank-spirited (a quality that many moviegoers often mistake for complexity, as if all shades of darkness were created equal).

The "tripods" themselves, at least when we first see them, are magnificent and imposing -- they've got shiny, sleek wedge-shaped heads, and their sinister determination is weirdly graceful as they amble forward on those supermodel daddy long legs. But there's grim glee in the way Spielberg shows us the horrors that these creature vehicles wreak: When their deadly rays hit human flesh, skin, bones and tissue disintegrate immediately, although the shell of clothing around them remains intact -- pants and shirts flutter helplessly, still airborne even though the terrified, running bodies inside have already turned to ash. (Later in the picture, this image will be reused: The ghostly picture of bodyless clothing drifting from the sky is unnervingly, and obviously intentionally, reminiscent of the melancholy flutter of debris that inhabitants of lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn remember from the morning of 9/11.)

Dakota Fanning's knowing-but-innocent face comes in handy for Spielberg, over and over again. More often than I could count, Spielberg would move the camera in on her terrified face, as if he were expecting us to get our jollies from fixating on the fears of a child. He mercifully spares us from seeing major world landmarks destroyed, although the generic horrors he puts in their place serve the same purpose anyway: We see a church facade crumbling to the ground (though not before the sunlight streams through its central stained-glass window), and a crashed plane split into numerous clumsy parts, although, conveniently, there are no bloodied bodies (presumably, the aliens have already sucked them out). Later, the aliens cast a web of blood-engorged vines over everything in sight; we see crows pecking greedily at these throbbing red streaks. Spielberg presents all of these horrors not with a sense of fun, or even an over-serious sheen of import, but with a self-satisfied smirk. Each succeeding image reads like a boast: How does that grab ya, kids?

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