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 Close encounters of the 9/11 kind Steven Spielberg's infernal summer storm
Evil can't be understood, only pictured.
Which I don't believe for one split second, but in Steven Spielberg's
deeply serious, relentlessly glum and pessimistic version of H. G.
Wells' 1898 novel, "War of the Worlds," the faceless force that comes
to harvest humanity is never explained. (And they're vanquished with the
same alacrity of logic as in Wells' original.) Canny entertainer, player
and financier that he is, Spielberg allows that his slew of signifiers
and references are meant to contain multitudes. "There are politics
underneath some of the scares, and some of the adventure and some of the
fear," he's quoted by Reuters, "but I really wanted to make it
suggestive enough so everybody could have their own opinion." (Or their
own memory of Hitchcock's "The Birds.")
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth
century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own," Wells
writes on the opening page of his slim novel. We are at the indulgence,
Morgan Freeman's opening narration intones tonily, of "intellects vast
and cool and unsympathetic."
From the handful of hours between screening and deadline, the first
sensation of what's been wrote by the "intellects" behind "War of the
Worlds" is that they have been generous with their paranoia and their
portrait of rampaging homo sapiencide, and of the mortal ecstasy and
adrenaline purge of escape from inexplicable forces that do not need to
know your name to erase you from the face of history. Ideal summertime
viewing! The marketers at Paramount went to uncommon lengths to prevent
either reviews or the bootlegging of "War of the Worlds," down to
disallowing anything other than notebooks into previews; even Spielberg
had to check his cell phone at the New York premiere. Once past the
perfunctory setup of Tom Cruise as our callow New Jersey working man, a
deadbeat dad who's tending his two children for the weekend, an angry
teenage son and superhuman little Dakota Fanning, the blonde, screen
gravitational equivalent of a black hole. (She doesn't eat scenery, but
as always, easily holds the camera's love with the preternatural
fierceness of a rat in a drain.) Lightning strikes twenty-nine times in
the same spot. Electricity fails, computers fail, cars with computerized
parts fail. Cue: primal fear.
While the familial emotional gambits are mostly rote, the prickly
sensation of being alive today is what makes this film memorable, and
for several pulsing stretches, perhaps even great. Spielberg's movie
whirls with suggestive bits from this decade's paranoia and the
bloodstained century past. Words like "refugee" and "extermination"
come readily and regularly in "War," and could there be contemporary
resonance in a line like "Occupations always fail--history's told us
that a thousand times"? Spielberg goes where dreams live, whistling
darkly over many graveyards, in images, explicit images drawn from the
tenderest spots of collective consciousness. (Any other director would
have gotten an NC-17 MPAA rating for the "sustained intensity" of this
cut.) For some viewers and reviewers, imagery of the Holocaust and 9/11
may be sacrosanct, that popular culture should not traffic in the
deepest and darkest and deadliest of our shared fears. This movie will
offend them: as one colleague said afterward, he'd checked out late in
the movie when a sequence evokes the terror of being among humans heaped
into the cattle cars of the Nazi empire, body over body, on the way to
the camps, the ovens, the showers, inevitable death. (Too bad the Jews,
Gypsies and other victims weren't equipped with hand grenades, as
"War" allows here.) The improvised cardboard walls of "Have you
seen?" posters, fleeting to moosh in the rain, are unmistakable, as is
when Cruise emerges dusted white, dusted gray, shouldering the remains
of atomized people. Near the end, the aliens' aim (if not their reasons)
is illustrated with vile precision: the tableau of a countryside as
ruby-tainted and glutinous with blood and flesh and viscera as
first-hand reports and suppressed photos describe the plazas beneath the
World Trade Center.
Unmoor the metaphors and many images pulse with ghastly beauty.
Spielberg, as always, marshals American flag iconography with acuity;
the compacted shot of Cruise's block, each house with its own Stars and
Stripes in close formation and the Bayonne Bridge, a lengthy, elegant
arc to the left of the frame. Consider, too: At a crossing, a runaway
train that is a blur of reflective silver stripes and marauding flame; a
single corpse, heavy in a river, followed by a community of floaters; a
post- "Titanic" drowning of hundreds on a toppling river ferry, with
cars bounding at bodies and the camera; a crashed plane in a cul-de-sac
is the central image of "Donnie Darko" built out to the size of twenty
football fields; retreating solider-filled Humvees swathed in
incandescent orange, as if napalmed at Fallujah; strips of clothes of
the dead ribboning to the ground in a soft float like office paper
commuting into Brooklyn and the other boroughs, and the sea, on that
particular, severe clear Tuesday morning.
It'd make some double feature with "George A. Romero's Land of the
Dead": despite the ostensible "happy ending," the survivors of the
rampage of destruction across the planet will be left with the kinds of
moral issues art (and society) has not yet begun to address. It's
optimistic only in suggesting that some humans will live to suffer
another day, an open-ended horror like that described in James Howard
Kunstler's compelling but relentless and ultimately despairing "The
Long Emergency," a nonfiction polemic that projects what will come
twenty to fifty years from now, when the efforts necessary to continue
our suburban and oil-driven lifestyle will clash with development in
other countries and the finite resources of nature and how nature will
inevitably strike back. "War of the Worlds" is now playing.
Also by Ray Pride Being Samantha Stephens
Guy goes to Heaven
My parade, part 2
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
City of big wings
Tip of the Week
Cold beer and Nazi subs
Arrested development
Skater Boys
Tip of the Week
August Movies
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