Review: War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds
Starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, and some robots
Directed by Steven Spielberg

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Any chance I might have had to approach War of the Worlds with objectivity has been destroyed by Tom Cruise's public descent into hysteria. It's hard enough for actors to get respect for voicing legitimate religious or political opinions, but when you start advocating Scientology as a serious practice (I know it looks like it has the word "science" right in there, but don't get suckered, people) and having your publicist set you up with a woman half your age just so you can prove your heterosexuality, you're pretty much asking to not be taken seriously. It's no wonder that studio heads almost pulled the plug on Mission: Impossible III for fear Tom's madness would overshadow it; it almost certainly will.

Here, Cruise stars as Ray, another in the long line of the jerks Cruise has played (Frank T.J. Mackey, anyone?), a dock worker in Bayonne, N.J. His ex-wife and her new husband drop off the kids at Ray's rundown house at the beginning of the film, and for a while Spielberg gives us what he excels at: families pulling each themselves apart. I was reminded of Roy Neary's self-destructive nuclear unit in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and not for the last time: Spielberg assembles pieces of his past masterpieces throughout War of the Worlds. But that's later.

Ray greets his kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning), and goes to sleep to recover from his midnight shift. Robbie looks like he really wants to be bass roadie for Jimmy Eat World, and Rachel is inexplicably dressed like Punky Brewster, with multi-colored gloves and a bizarre vest. Fanning is undeniably weird, but weird in a good way. I've never cared for her much, and she's as annoying as I'd feared for the first two acts. But as Rachel progresses through the story and calms down, Fanning begins to display the faintest glimmer of what could, with time, develop into genuine talent. But back to the story: Ray wakes up to find Robbie gone, which is bad news because some freak lightning storms are happening in the neighborhood. Ray sets out to investigate the storms, which is about when all hell breaks loose. A giant alien craft emerges from under the street where the lightning struck, sprouts legs and starts vaporizing people. The walker lets out a large foghorn blast, the antithesis to the pleasant five-tone calling card of Close Encounters. And in a freakish homage to Schindler's List (1993), Ray winds up covered with ash from the raining cloud of recently evaporated citizens. Robbie returns, and Ray grabs his kids and hits the road, hoping to make it to Boston and his ex-wife and her family.

Focusing on Ray and the kids' lonely journey sets War of the Worlds apart from other alien-invasion fare, most notably Independence Day (1996), Roland Emmerich's ode to righteous American wrath in the face of adversity. Spielberg takes a different path, following one man's desperate search for survival. Ray doesn't even know there are multiple crafts until a reporter in a wrecked news van shows him footage of the machines destroying the city.

We follow Ray on his journey across the countryside, through crowds of people clamoring for help. Army convoys pass on Humvees, headed to fight the alien machines, and Robbie keeps trying to ditch his dad and go with them. Ray forbids it, telling them that they have to get to safety. "We have to get back at them," Robbie shouts, but Ray keeps him away from the fighting. It's in exchanges like this one that Spielberg lays out a not-too-subtle critique of the desire for retribution in the wake of 9/11. Both of Ray's children ask, when they're first attacked, "Is it the terrorists?" Emmerich's film was a fantasy about being invaded, but Spielberg's post-millennial tale is about being invaded again. In our world, these things just happen now, and the wreckage of planes brought down by the aliens is more jarring than it would have been 6 years ago. But anger and retribution aren't the key, Spielberg tells us.

At one point, Ray and family are taken in by a man named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), who's hiding in his basement to avoid the aliens. Ogilvy holds out hope that the aliens will inevitably lose out. "If history's taught us anything, it's that occupations always fail," Ogilvy says, and here Spielberg shows us the other side of the American coin: not just the invaded, but the invaders. Too soon after 9/11, and this story might not have been told. America was too blood-thirsty then, and pop culture seemed to reward people who wanted to take an eye for an eye (I'm looking at you, Toby Keith). But the advantage of time and the inept, blundering invasion of Iraq have let Spielberg voice what would have once been an unpopular opinion: maybe survival is more important than vengeance.

This may be Spielberg's biggest disaster flick yet, but it's by far his least effective, which is a shame, because the notion of hostile alien forces seems much more plausible than the idea of peaceful ones. The dominant cultures in our history have always enslaved the weaker ones, so it only makes sense that, if we're the discoverees and not the discoverers, things probably won't work out too well. The strength to follow such a line of thinking could have elevated War of the Worlds to the level of such classics as the original 1953 film or 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still. But Spielberg backs off. The movie meanders on for a while, and rather than evolve into a natural conclusion, things are suddenly solved with a twist so random that even Shyamalan would be embarrassed. The movie ends as it began, with voiceover narration by Morgan Freeman. The words are meant to inspire awe, I guess, or at least some sense that the story is worth telling. It almost was.