Steven Spielberg says he wanted to make a movie of War of the Worlds a while ago, but Independence Day got there first. That alien-invasion picture did indeed lift the basic idea from HG Wells’s 1898 novel, but then that book is the great-granddaddy of all alien-invasion stories.
What Independence Day did not copy was Wells’s original ending, possibly because it felt a bit downbeat and much too ironic — and big-budget American movies do irony at the peril of their box office. And, of course, they had to have a big, explosively triumphal climax. What? The aliens were wiped out by bacteria? No way! That’s not good enough! It’s not even cinematic! We’re gonna blow the fuckers up!
Spielberg, who has now got around to making his version of War of the Worlds, is thus to be commended for sticking to something like Wells’s ending, though that’s about all the movie can be commended for. He manages to get some stirringly explosive action in at the climax as well, so he gets the best of both worlds; and yet he fudges it anyway. Bracketing the movie’s action is a solemn voice-over (a cross between CNN and a Bible reading): at the end it tells us how God so ordained things that the humble bacteria would be there to defeat the aliens. What Spielberg and his two scriptwriters can’t tell us, though, is why God in his wisdom didn’t get those microbes busy on the aliens before the aliens annihilated millions of people and devastated half the planet.
Perhaps God is a bit confused about what he’s trying to achieve and/or how to go about it. In that respect, God has something in common with Spielberg. Or maybe God is a player of games, and it’s more satisfying to his coldly ludic mind to defeat the aliens with bacteria once they’ve had a good run of destruction — that, at least, is cinematic. And, in fairness, he cheats the aliens too; there they have been planning this conquest of Earth for millions of years, observing us as if through a microscope (as the voice-over portenously tells us), but they didn’t look closely enough to see the bacteria.
And their technology! Yes, their huge, long-legged tripod war-machines are mildly scary, but they’re scary in a rather 19th-century sort of way. In that respect, they are pure Wells — they come from a time between the invention of the armour-clad battleship and the tank. They look a bit like some of the preposterous machinery of Wild Wild West. Spielberg has given them some extras, such as long, serpentine probes with lights on the end — but no motion-sensors or heat-detectors. He has also, utterly gratuitously, given the aliens vampiric tendencies, as well as (built somehow into their war-machines) a hilarious organ that conflates the mouth and the anus. Obviously, these are really, really bad creatures.
This is asking the audience for the kind of cheap gross-out response that Starship Troopers so darkly mocked in its final moments. On the more human level, though, Spielberg is just as crassly manipulative. When a key character dies, one is presumably meant to mourn along with those who are bereaved. Here is a serious, harsh emotional moment, created to give the movie an emotional core, to make us care. When it comes, Tom Cruise manages some tears (unless they, like the aliens, were computer-generated). But at the movie’s end, the character thought dead reappears, alive and well, without any explanation. The big teary reunion is supposed to make us forget such gaps, I think, but all it does is remind one of how fake and empty that supposed grief was in the first place, and how coldly our strings have been jerked. If, like God, Spielberg can resurrect people at will, why put us through the trauma of death in the first place?
In War of the Worlds, Spielberg is trying to give us whiz-bang action as well as human drama; he’s giving us a spectacular alien-invasion movie, but he’s also giving us a story of family survival. In particular, the latter involves the redemption of deadbeat dad Cruise. The moral here is that if you’re a divorced father who can’t clean up his house for his kids when they need to stay over, or feed them properly, let alone communicate with them or sing them lullabies, you’d better hope for an alien invasion during which you can prove your paternal worth.
But Cruise is about as credible as those 19th-century alien war-machines. He plays a dock-worker who looks barely a decade older than his teenage son and, despite his domestic sloppiness and general deadbeatness, he still has an immaculate, gym-built body (displayed early on in the movie). Such narcissism is a narrative failure; it punches a hole in the believability of the character. If Cruise were a serious actor, he’d have gone and got a bit of a gut for this role.
On the level of the acting, things are hardly any better. Cruise does some heavy emoting at certain points in War of the Worlds, but mostly he relies on a lot of face-dirt, the odd wound and much anxious shouting. And having Dakota Fanning as his 10-year-old daughter really shows the limits of his talent: it’s always a mistake to act with children, but it’s a disaster when they have more gravitas than you do.