June 29, 2005

Steven Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS (original review) follows the BATMAN BEGINS pattern for me: loved it at the time, loved it on rewatches, but watched it now and still found myself thinking holy shit, I forgot how good this is. In the set up it’s almost JAWS-good – the beautiful look and sense of place, the natural and economical ways it sets up these people and their relationships, the dread about what horrors are coming even though honestly I wouldn’t mind hanging out longer in this normality that’s about to be interrupted.

Tom Cruise’s character Ray Ferrier kind of seems like the inevitable results of living as one of the charming dicks he played when he was younger – regular Yankees-hat-wearing, working class guy, pretty likable, but fucked up his marriage and now lives alone in a little place in New Jersey. Definitely a deadbeat in the parenting department, and isn’t disciplined enough to get his shit together (until now, when it really counts, during an alien invasion). (Spoiler.) We first see him operating a crane at the docks in Brooklyn, it looks pretty challenging and his boss (Peter Gerety, Homicide: Life on the Streets) seems to think he’s the best at it, but it’s still funny when he punches out and roars into traffic in his Mustang like he’s convinced he’s the coolest motherfucker who ever lived.

Turns out his reckless driving is for a different reason: he was supposed to be home at 8 when his ex-wife Mary Ann (Mirando Otto, HUMAN NATURE) drops off the kids to stay with him during her trip to Boston. He pretends he thought it was 8:30 and doesn’t even say he’s sorry, so it’s not that surprising his teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin, TAKING LIVES) hates him, doesn’t acknowledge him, won’t take off his headphones for him.

Dakota Fanning plays his youngest, Rachel, and it’s one of those uncanny Spielberg movie child actor performances you can hardly believe, though this one we saw coming because she was already great in MAN ON FIRE. She’s less aware of or more forgiving of her dad’s flaws, and enjoys joking around with him, but she’s also very attuned to Robbie and trying to mediate the conflict between them. No matter how precocious she may be, she’s still gonna scream and cry like a little girl when confronted with disaster and otherworldly terror, and she makes it so real it’s upsetting at times.

When you talk about the masterful Spielbergian setpieces in this thing it’s easy to jump to the FX-driven destruction that I found myself thinking of as “if a Roland Emmerich movie was good.” But one of the ones that blew me away this time was the introduction to this family – the way Mary Ann notices Ray not helping Rachel with her luggage, so she jumps in to do it herself, though she’s very pregnant. Then she comes in and sees what a mess his place is, nosily opens the refrigerator and notes the sour milk and lack of actual food. Furthermore, Ray has all the tables covered in engine parts from some project he was working on, having apparently expended no effort in preparing the place for company. And he cuts in front of her coming up the stairs so he can shut the door to his bedroom.

Otto plays it more like disappointment than nagging. I like that her husband Tim (David Alan Basche, FULL FRONTAL) has the wisdom to dismiss himself to wait outside. But the real genius of the scene is the sweetness that comes out in the middle of this discomfort – Robbie pausing grump mode to tell Mary Ann he loves her, Ray saying something sincere about her pregnancy before she leaves and making her laugh by saying “You tell your mom that Ray sends his love and kisses.” Despite all this they really do like each other.

(By the way, the pregnancy was added because Spielberg really wanted Otto for the role, and she was pregnant at the time.)

Nobody trusts Ray to take care of these kids, and for good reason. The first thing he does is take a nap, and wake up to find that Robbie has left with his car. So older brother is gone for part of the next big sequence, the freak lightning storms leading to the emergence of a 150′ tall three-legged alien vehicle from under the cement right there in the neighborhood. Before events turn extraterrestrial it’s such an authentic slice of life: people gathering to gawk at something weird, Ray going to his backyard to get a better look, the next door neighbors (including not-yet-famous Amy Ryan) seeing what he’s doing and following, running into people he knows, rumors spreading.

But at first he’s having fun, asking Rachel “You wanna see something cool?,” trying to joke around with her when she’s scared.

On a normal day who knows how long it would’ve taken to find Robbie. But on this day the alien invasion causes everyone’s cars to stop working. Robbie shows up apologetic, having abandoned the Mustang somewhere. We know Ray has not-a-terrible-father potential by the way he doesn’t seem to care about the car and gets multiple confirmations that Robbie is okay before he switches to angry dad mode.

Cruise was only two chapters into MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE at this point. He does do some of his trademark running (just barely escaping various exploding structures in his neighborhood) but I would say he’s supposed to be a slightly athletic regular dude thrown into danger, not a super-spy or capable action hero. It’s a really good performance, going through the whole gamut of ways to freak out while trying to hold it together for his kids. There’s the scene where he comes home from his first mass casualty alien encounter covered in the ashes of murdered earthlings and just sits down on the kitchen floor, too dazed and shocked to answer the kids’ questions about what the hell is going on.

Then there’s the way he tries to rush them out of the house and neighborhood without explaining that there are aliens about to attack. After that there’s the conversation on the highway, when they’ve dodged massive collapsing structures and are getting away in the only operable vehicle around, and he tries to calmly explain to Robbie his theory that alien pilots are somehow coming down in the lightning. He’s having trouble breathing as he stammers, “No, the machine I’m talking about was buried but what— came down in the lightning storm, operates it, that’s the, uh… You know. That’s the—”

And then the really good one is when they make it to Mary Ann and Tim’s gigantic home (they’re not there) and Ray tries to play the part of Calm, Responsible Dad by making sandwiches, but all he has is bread and peanut butter and he forgot Rachel is allergic to peanuts. But he still tries to act like everything is cool and fun by dealing pieces of bread like cards. When it becomes undeniable that the kids aren’t buying it he snaps and throws a piece of bread hard against the kitchen window, where it sticks. Cruise was promoting WAR OF THE WORLDS when he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and infamously jumped up on the couch to declare his love for BATMAN BEGINS star Katie Holmes. I think the sandwich scene really harnesses that type of weird, uncomfortable energy he could have sometimes, turning it into “guy unsuccessfully pretending like he’s not on the edge of losing his shit.”

Some of the other big moments are more subdued. There’s a real kick in the heart-balls when Robbie is arguing with him about wanting to run off with the army. Rachel starts pushing Robbie and chastising him and it seems like she has Ray’s back on this one until she cries, “Who’s gonna take care of me if you go?” Ray has to just stand ten feet away clenching his fists as Robbie picks her up and comforts her.

One comparison I don’t remember making is to EYES WIDE SHUT. For me it has a bit of that feeling of being an endless gauntlet of stress dreams. It starts out in a very naturalistic world but turns more and more surreal. The brightly lit security of Mary Ann and Tim’s house is commandeered by a blackout, strange noises, flashes and tremors, and in the morning Ray awakes to the rare opportunity to simultaneously stand in his ex-wife’s fancy new house and the crash site of a Boeing 747.

Half of the house is missing thanks to the downed passenger jet. I love the weirdness of seeing a guy climbing across the torn open cabin and not being able to get out of him if he’d been on it when it crashed or not.

The reason it looks so real is they bought a retired 747 for $2 million and dismantled it! Worth every penny.

Things just get weirder and more nightmarish from there – Rachel standing in shock as bodies float down a river, tripods yanking people out of the water or putting long tubes into them like a straw to suck their blood out, those flakes of… remains(?) that fall like leaves, the mist that turns out to be human blood spraying from tripod engines, hiding in the barn from the snaky mechanical probe, then the Martians, who don’t look that vicious up close (even kinda cute with their big eyes) but so bizarre it makes sense to be frozen in terror seeing them. The landscape gets dreamier as the blood red roots start to grow everywhere.

I’m not a fan of INDEPENDENCE DAY, but even if I was I think I would appreciate the novelty of an alien invasion movie that does not have the president, the generals, a war room, a map, nothing. The camera never strays far from this one regular family making a run for it, so we only know what they know, and it’s so cool that way. I don’t think this even needs the little bits of exposition it sneaks in when we overhear some soldiers or see some footage from a reporter Ray meets. But I respect the screenplay by David Koepp (I COME IN PEACE, JURASSIC PARK) and Josh Friedman (CHAIN REACTION) for its cleverness in economically conveying its information.

It was widely discussed at the time that this was one of the first big blockbusters to reflect the experience of 9-11, or even to acknowledge it with people asking if “the terrorists” are behind what’s happening. The way the tripods are often seen from a distance, partially obscured or shaky as people are running away is effective filmmaking, but also can’t help but bring to mind many of the videos we saw from that real life tragedy. And of course the idea of Ray realizing he has the ashes of dead people all over him. I think the aliens/terrorism analogy works if you set aside motives and politics and just look at it from the perspective of these civilians caught in the middle. The tripods have been buried here for, what did they say, millions of years? This is a conflict that predates us and escapes our understanding. We have no control over its beginning or end. They just happen.

What I don’t remember thinking about is that this is actually a much more cynical look at humanity than was prevalent in 2001, when many at least took heart in the people of New York (and around the world) looking out for each other. This does have a part where the blood bank only needs O-positive but otherwise has more than they can use. But mostly this is a more traditional idea that human nature in an emergency is to fuck over anybody you have to to survive. We understand Ray’s decision to steal the only working vehicle around to protect his family, but then people mob, wreck, and shoot at the van to try to get it for themselves. And when the ferry workers realize how many people are trying to get on they panic and take off without filling up as much as they can. This guy Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins, HOWARD THE DUCK) does wave Ray and Rachel into the safety of a barn, but he turns out to be a nut trying to recruit Ray into his little insurgency against the aliens. We do finally see some cooperation from the people captured in a tripod’s cage, working together to pull Ray out of its mouth. (I wish it didn’t have to be at the urging of a soldier. Civilians could figure that out too.)

Twenty years later the visual FX seem a little less photorealistic than I thought at the time, but 1) that’s what happens and 2) there is some incredible stuff, like the way the long green screen shot rotating around the van seamlessly pulls out into a shot that actually does look like a documentary.

Earlier in this series when I wrote “If there’s a universally agreed-upon absolute banger of a summer blockbuster type movie from 2005, it’s gotta be Christopher Nolan’s BATMAN BEGINS, right?,” my theory seemed to be disproven in the comments. I had considered WAR OF THE WORLDS as the other major candidate for that honor, but I remembered some people having quibbles with it that might not have been dispelled with rewatches since there weren’t as many excuses to revisit it. (There was no WAR OF THE WORLDS trilogy or reboot series.) But that was just speculation.

I remembered some complaints about the Tim Robbins part, but I couldn’t remember – was it his performance? Was it that it was a weird detour? I like weird detours. But maybe it was the part I had completely forgotten – when Ray decides that Harlan’s noisy panic is such a danger to him and his daughter that he has to… murder him off screen? And then Rachel never seems to notice that the scary man is mysteriously gone? I really have no memory of this.

Okay, I don’t really like that part either. But there’s an interesting irony that Ray convinces Harlan not to attack the probe with an ax, which seems wise at the time, but later he finds himself chopping the probe himself, so he might as well have just let Harlan do it and saved himself a murder.

The other complaint I remembered was about Robbie (SPOILER) seemingly getting blown up, but turning up alive at the end. I guess people saw it kind of like in RISE OF SKYWALKER when they pretend to blow up Chewbacca, let us mourn him for a bit and then turn around and say “psyche, he wasn’t on that ship.” I never had a problem with Robbie living though, mainly because they didn’t show him die so I assumed he didn’t.

Looking back on it now I was more right than I knew. For one thing, the scene was more intentionally ambiguous than I remembered it. It’s not as if they show us some impossible to escape scenario and then cheat their way out of it. He goes over the hill and then there’s some mayhem leading to burning Jeeps, but we don’t know where exactly he went or what exactly happened. Just a disaster that everyone had to flee from, causing them to be separated.

Yes, when Ray tells Rachel that Robbie is okay and will meet them in Boston, we suspect he doesn’t really believe that and is just trying to keep her calm. When he insists the same thing to Harlan we think maybe he’s trying to convince himself of that, or maybe he’s delusional. But we don’t know. It’s left as a question, with two possible answers.

What I see now that’s much more important is what this says about the father and son. Robbie has shown this familiar and relatable (but in my opinion toxic) drive to “get back at them” after he sees the destruction that the aliens do. He stupidly tries to just join the military on the fly. Hey guys, take me along, I’m sure I could figure out how to do the stuff you’ve been trained for. In the separation scene I don’t think he’s planning to join the battle, but he desperately wants to see people fighting back with his own eyes. Ray rightly tries to protect him from that instinct, pins him down and begs him not to go, until he sees Rachel in trouble and makes the choice to attend to her. But when he lets Robbie up he doesn’t just run off. They stop and look at each other first. They have a moment. It’s a goodbye and it’s an unspoken okay, I am reluctantly trusting you to do what you want to do. You still can’t drive my car without my permission but whatever you decide to do here, I’m not going to stop you.

So Robbie went off on his own and we can only imagine what happened to him. We can hope that the up close look he got at warfare made him realize he wants to be a social worker or a poet or some shit, but this is unknown. What we do know is that he did in fact find a way to transport himself safely to Boston before his dad did. It’s a learning experience for both Ferrier men and a very strong point in Robbie’s column in the argument about whether or not Ray should allow him to be more independent. This is all subtext of their reunion hug, not just “oh shit I’m glad you’re alive,” and I think that’s more valuable to the movie than the shock value of killing him.

I do have one (1) complaint about the movie, and it’s the part where Rachel orders food and it turns out to be hummus “from the health food place.” The take out menu says “John’s Natural Foods – A Fresh Taste in Healthy Eating.” What the hell is a “health food” restaurant? Was it just an awkward way to have Ray be a basic bitch without having him deride the cuisine of a specific ethnicity? And is there really a human being on earth who would take a bite of hummus and react with shock and revulsion? I demand answers.

We already discussed how lovable Morgan Freeman is in UNLEASHED and BATMAN BEGINS. So obviously that’s who we go to represent an omniscient view of humanity and world history as narrator of WAR OF THE WORLDS. That they stuck with H.G. Wells’ original ending of the aliens being done in by earth’s germs is part of the magic. I guess there’s that part where Ray points out to a soldier that the force fields are down on one of the tripods, but otherwise he has no effect on fighting the aliens. He can’t get in a plane and fly into the mothership and upload a virus. He has to focus on the part he has power over: trying to get to Boston without him or his kids getting zapped, fried, sucked or flattened. It’s not about The Great Hero Who Saved the World, it’s just The Divorced Dad Who Actuallly Came Through For Once.

I don’t need to do a ranking or anything but the fact is my mind doesn’t jump to WAR OF THE WORLDS when I’m thinking of the great Spielberg movies, even limited to the 21st century ones. That might change after this viewing. Great fucking movie in my opinion. Can we agree on this one at least?

p.s. In my original review I don’t know why I thought it was silly to cast Rick Gonzalez (BIKER BOYZ) as a friend of Tom Cruise. Obviously they know each other from work. I like the joke Ray makes (“I should’ve known you two were behind this.”) I’m glad I have less of a need to mock everything now that I’m old.