It is hard for me to believe that the same director who recently delivered the one-two punch of “Catch Me If You Can” and “Minority Report” is the same director of such a flabby, disappointing mess of a movie, and trying to view “War of the Worlds” as a kind of post-911 allegory doesn’t make it a better movie. Sadly, aspects of HG Wells’ original premise are outdated and just don’t work anymore, so Spielberg made a crucial mistake in honing to much of the original story. In a nutshell (and trying not to spoil anything), the aliens behave more like 19th century bug-eyed monsters than they do like beings who know anything about space exploration. More critically, the Tom Cruise character is essentially a bystander, so you get a sense that whole chunks of the story is happening beyond his frame of reference, but because he is the star, he must remain the primary focus. It just doesn’t work. Also, the film seems under-populated since Tim Robbins, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto and others are given little to do. And for the first time ever (as far as I can recall) in a Spielberg film, some of the editing is so sloppy in key scenes (characters run away and then magically are right back where they started) that it often dragged the narrative to a halt for me. Ironically, although Spielberg, like Martin Scorsese, is for me a director whose films I want to see no matter whether they succeed or fail because they often will be tinged with brilliance (e.g., some of the special effects, a witty reference to Hitchcock’s “The Birds”), for the first time I felt that Spielberg had been eclipsed: M. Night Shyamalan's “Signs” (2002) is a far more coherent, successful and scary “family-in- jeopardy” alien invasion film than is “War of the Worlds.” So far, Spielberg and Lucas have struck out this summer, and “Batman Begins” is so far the best film of the summer, and one of the best of the year.

Posted by: Alec on July 1, 2005 2:00 AM

Wow. I completely disagree with Alec. It's as if we saw two different films. I've recently read/watched/heard all of the War of the Worlds incarnations, and Spielberg's is actually my favorite. I think it does a fantastic job of adapting the original story to the present day. I was impressed with how many details from the novel that the film retained. (And I loved the little homages paid to the earlier film, a film that scared the daylights out of me when I was a child.)

I don't think the new War of the Worlds is a great film, but I think it's a very good one.

Posted by: J.D. on July 2, 2005 10:57 AM

For J.D: I see that people are split on this film, but I gotta ask (and still not trying to spill the beans about the film), Why hire an actress like Miranda Otto if you aren't really going to use her except as set-up? Why hire a great child actress like Dakota Fanning if she is largely going to be reduced to an alternately catatonic or screaming ninny? (semi-spoiler here) And although the original novel and its many incarnations does retain the power to scare in many ways, the idea that aliens have fantastic technology but are too stupid to buy a microscope might have worked in 1898 (the date of the original novel) but just doesn't work for me in 2005. And no matter how much we all might love Spielberg, you must acknowledge that some stuff related to Cruise's son in the picture (to put it obliquely and mildly) comes out of nowhere and absolutely needed to be explained or dramatized, but was not, leaving one of the biggest narrative loose ends in recent movie history.

Posted by: Alec on July 2, 2005 12:36 PM

Figures that conservatives would love this movie -- neocon foreign policy is essentially based on fantasy anyway, so it's not a big step to add rampaging space aliens to the mix. Maybe that will be the next reason they will audition for the war in Iraq -- we have to do it or the space aliens will win!

Anyway, I'm with Alec that it was a pretty lousy and pointless movie for Spielberg, although the special effects were great. It was nice to learn that the Tom Cruise character *really did* deserve visitation rights with his kids, but did we really have to sit through an alien invasion to establish that?

Posted by: MQ on July 6, 2005 1:07 AM

Didn't think it was that rightwing a movie - hell, the only think that made it tolerable was treating it as an allegory for the Iraq occupation (and then I was a little put out when (spoiler) Cruse fought against the resistance).

Posted by: chris on July 6, 2005 2:41 AM






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