War of the Worlds
Also reviewed by:
Johnny Five
Uncle Cliff
"It just looks like I've seen it all before."
This was my girlfriend's excuse for not going to see War of the Worlds one night (yes, geeks can have girlfriends; no, she is not a robot that I built from spare parts). I didn't want to admit it at the time, but she was right. It did look familiar. The trailer looked very 'Bruckheimer' and the story sounded very Signs.
We agreed to rent Saving Private Ryan on DVD instead, as I was still honing for that Spielberg fix. That night, it occured to me just how insignificant Spielberg's films have become over the past few years. He hasn't had a Saving Private Ryan or a Schindler's List or even a Jurassic Park in a while. These days, he's making films like Catch Me If You Can or Minority Report:good films, but nothing special. Anyone could have made them.
Ironically, my girlfriend's attempt to dilute my enthusiam with a past Spielberg classic only exacerbated my need to see War of the Worlds. Perhaps her tactical subroutine was faulty. A few weeks later I saw the film, sans girlfriend.
I now realise that I entered the cinema with the wrong mindset. I was still reeling from the effects of Saving Private Ryan, and my expectations were set to 'high'. Perhaps things would have been different had I have just come from watching The Terminal.
The film started by setting up the usual Spielbergian characters (divorced parents, distant father, restless kids) and no matter how formulaic it may seem, I still like to get to know people before the carnage comes. I like carnage, carnage is good, but I love carnage when it happens to people I know or care about. Disaster films are only ever as strong as their characters, otherwise there's no disaster.
When the carnage did come, it was awesome. Streets being ripped up, buildings crumbling, Tom Cruise running all over the place. It had all been filmed using shaky hand-held cameras, which made it all the more real and chaotic – no less from the guy who had directed the amazing opening scene of Saving Private Ryan (the battle scene, not the old guy walking through the cemetry with his family).
But the carnage just kept on coming, more and more, it didn't let up. The noise. The destruction. The laser beams. And you know what? It all began to feel too early on in the film for me. There was no pace or tension to it at all. The film began to lose its way. It became like a meaningless 'road movie', with Tom Cruise and his kids moving from one scene of disaster to the next, and narrowly escaping everytime.
That's when I realised I was expecting too much from the film. It wasn't meant to be a contemporary Close Encounters of the Third Kind or futuristic Saving Private Ryan, it was meant to be Jurassic Park with aliens instead of dionsaurs. That's all. The film wasn't meant to have complex character arcs, it was meant to have kick-ass special effects and monsters – and this is ultimately why I didn't like the film.
Everything 'outer-space' in this film looked terrible. As anyone who has watched Star Trek should know, the possibilities for depicting something 'alien' are endless, but that doesn't necessarily mean everything works. Something works when you see it and it seems natural, as if from another world entirely, like HR Geiger's designs in Alien. Yet the alien 'space crafts' in War of the Worlds looked like they were recycled props from the set of a 1950s B picture. If this was meant to be cleverly referential, it was completely at odds with the realism in which everything else was happening. I can only assume the special effects team thought they were making a different film.
To cap it all off, we actually get to see the aliens, and they look bloody awful! I'm not going to blab on about something being scarier the less of it you see, but if we must see the aliens, don't make them look like the "He-man" figurines that Mattel rejected.
The last third of the film is devoted to an overly-long and increasingly more irrelevant scene with Tim Robbins. It felt like a new film had begun. It was a clear sign that the film had run out of steam and run out of tracks. So where do you go from there?
Well, if you're Spielberg, you come up with the happiest, most impossible and meaningless ending you can think of, and tack it on the end. It's not like he had anything to lose by that stage anyway.
I went to see this film expecting another Private Ryan. About halfway, I lowered my expectations, and settled for a Jurassic Park. By the end, I realised I was watching Jurassic Park II. My girlfriend was wise not to go. Now if only I can download her from my computer somehow...