Steven Spielberg: War of the Worlds

It's just as well that War of the Worlds was hobbled upon its initial release by the lingering effects of Tom Cruise's infamous couch-jumping whatever. If Americans were going to let a stupid thing like that distract them, who knows how they might have reacted if they realized what all the movie had to say about 9/11 and the still-raging debate over Iraq. Even the conclusion of H.G. Wells' original novel, forecast in the opening credits expanding outward from single-cell organisms to humanity and even the cosmos, reflects the pitfalls of the War on Terror. "Occupations always fail!" declares a mad character late in the film, and one gets the distinct feeling he isn't just talking about invaders from Mars.

But War of the Worlds is, for the most part, not a commentary on the War on Terror so much as snapshot of what inspired it and how the national emotions of panic, grief, rage and bewilderment contributed to it. There's no criticism here; that would come with Spielberg's other 2005 film. No, War of the Worlds' primary aim is still to function as a blockbuster, but in its finely detailed, occasionally surreal construction is an almost therapeutic attempt to recreate an event fresh in the nation's mind, all the better to study it and to (hopefully) make a more informed decision than we did when that day actually happened.

Though Catch Me If You Can served as the non plus ultra of Spielberg's pet themes of absent fathers and confused children, War of the Worlds finds a new angle from which to approach that well-explored subject matter. Cruise may have sent the marketing department up the wall before it was all over, but his was an inspired casting choice. Spielberg presents the actor, then still America's everyman, as not merely a neglectful dad but a willfully repellent one. Cruise's Ray arrives home from work to find that he's late for picking up his kids from his ex-wife (Miranda Otto), and he offers no apology for his misunderstanding of their meeting time. Alone with the teenaged Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and young Rachel (Dakota Fanning), Ray proves to be uninterested in his children and almost willfully unconcerned with their lives and well-being.


In these opening scenes, Cruise is nearly at his most unpleasant, surpassed only by his misogynistic event speaker in Magnolia. In a hopelessly outdated and transparently thin attempt to interact with Robbie, Ray makes his son come out for a game of catch. The contentious lines they exchange slowly increase the force of each throw, until Robbie makes the mistake of mentioning him mom's new husband. Cruise's face doesn't change, but he throws the baseball so hard that one doesn't need to hear the resulting thud of the ball hitting Robbie's mitt or see the boy wince to feel the oomph behind the toss. Ray spares but a modicum more affection for Rachel, snottily reacting to her ordering takeout from a health food place and largely ignoring her.

By presenting Ray as such an unlikable figure at the start, Spielberg emphasizes that what is about to happen can affect anyone, and also that it can profoundly change people. The director forecasts the oncoming horror in ways that should be obvious to everyone: news reports bring updates of strange storms in other countries that trigger EMP blackouts, rendering whole areas without electronics. But that is the rest of the world, and no television that shows these reports stays on for very long before someone changes the channel or turns off the set. And when one of those storms forms over New York, Ray observes that the wind is blowing toward the storm clouds with a tone of mild curiosity. Even when lightning rains down on the area (without accompanying thunder), he and others continue to mill about to see what is going on. Naïve and sheltered, the Americans congregate around an opened crack in the ground, totally unperturbed until the ground begins to quake and splinter, and finally cave into a giant hole.

The next hour and 45 minutes display Spielberg at his visceral best, twisting the formal prowess he normally uses for elegant, graceful depictions of wonder and optimism into a device for conveying sheer and utter terror. From the giant hole in the ground emerges an enormous tripod, a war machine that barely has time to stretch out fully before it begins slaughtering people and destroying buildings. Ray only just manages to get away, running back to his house to grab the kids and steal a van that's been repaired after the EMP blast. As Rachel shrieks "Is it the terrorists?!" New York is reduced to embers behind them.

The connections between the alien invasion and 9/11 and the War on Terror range from the literal to the abstract. The machines, buried for however many millennia, obviously reflect underground sleeper cells, dormant until a surprise attack. Their heat rays turn people into ashes, which blanket Ray as beams cut through those around him. The image of Ray literally covered with the dead recalls horrible images of people covered in the dust and debris cloud of the falling towers, while downed airplanes and crumbling buildings only hammer home the horrid sights of that awful day.

In broader terms, the aliens elicit basic, deeply felt emotional responses. Every time a tripod happens upon Ray's location, the frame almost literally shudders with fear, while the sense of not knowing what's happening or where one might go for safety pervades every frame. There is also the anger, the instant thirst for reprisal that overrides any strategy, even sense. Robbie begins to wear a look of perpetual fury on his face, itching to strike back at the invaders despite the hopelessness of the situation. As with terrorists, the aliens are impervious to the best of our military technology: the aliens have even better technology that renders them invulnerable to attack, while the terrorists' organization makes might an irrelevant factor in the equation. Robbie represents so many people in the wake of 9/11, so ready for payback that they never stopped to consider what kind of conflict they'd be getting into, or what might happen to them when they did.

Spielberg frames all of this with surprising formalism, flecked with even more surprising traces of surrealism. After spawning an entire generation of clumsy knock-offs with the gritty, close-up handheld cameras of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg offers a check to his legion of copycats by capturing visuals no less wrenching and instantly felt despite their careful, classical composition. Occasionally recalling the love of old genre fare that informed the Indiana Jones series, Spielberg employs some shots that have an almost storybook quality to them, as if he'd brought an illustrated copy of the book to life. One scene that particularly sticks to me takes place at a ferry as throngs of people push toward the overloaded boat, only for telltale warning signs to precede the emergence of a tripod behind everyone. As the machine lets out one of its booming horns, the camera cuts to frame it looming over the Hudson as mist swirls over the bright lights around the pier. It's a gorgeous shot, and one that freezes my heart every single time I see it.

As for the surrealism, Spielberg tops even the grim oddities of Empire of the Sun. That film included a memorable scene of Jim wandering around his ransacked neighborhood in Shanghai, abandoned luggage cast aside and clothes strewn across the ground as if their wearers had been raptured out of them. Spielberg resuses that offbeat, troubling image on a larger scale here, as tripods snatch up prey and send clothes falling gently to the ground like giant snowflakes after using up the people inside them. The director even perverts his personal use of close-ups in a shot where Rachel heads out of her brother and father's eyesight to use the bathroom by a river, only to see bodies drifting downstream. As sunlight bounces off the clear water, Spielberg pushes in on Fanning's face as the golden light flickers over her stunned features. The flicker almost gives the shot a feeling of an old silent film, and Fanning's overwhelmed shock a tinge of Expressionist horror.

There's also a shot late in the film after Ray discovers that the aliens are spreading a red weed everywhere that they fertilize with liquified humans. As he stumbles out from a hiding place, Ray walks in front of a broken wooden fence looking out into a (literally) blood-soaked horizon. It's a shot that might have come out of Johnny Guitar, a beautifully grotesque, madly stylized Western panorama as striking as it is disturbing.

Another disquieting element of War of the Worlds is the frank manner in which it suggests, like any good monster movie, that the other survivors can be as bad as the creatures. When Ray reaches the Hudson ferry, he and the kids are forcibly taken from the van by a crowd of people who want it even though there's nowhere to run. And when the tripod rises up over the ferry, the soldiers on-board instantly call for the ferry to take off, callously stranding hundreds to be massacred to make a futile attempt at getaway. But the true personification of the insanity of those left behind comes in Tim Robbins' delightfully named Harlan Ogilvy, a man who would be perfectly at home in a George A. Romero zombie film. Driven out of his mind by his family's death, Harlan shares Robbie's absurd dream of taking the fight to the aliens; armed with a shotgun, he is only infinitesimally less hopeless than the unarmed boy. As Harlan slips deeper into madness, Ray slowly realizes that he will need to deal with the man to keep Rachel safe. When the situation comes to a head, Spielberg treats us to one of his darkest shots, again staying in close-up on Rachel's face, a blindfold over her eyes and her fingers jammed in her ears as she sings a lullaby to herself, as Ray murders Harlan in the next room. Were it not for a certain scene in Munich which I will later discuss, this would be the single bleakest, most unsentimental shot in Spielberg's entire canon.

These gut-wrenching moments, combined with the technical perfection of practically every moment (Spielberg's decision to use as much live-effects as possible, as with Jurassic Park, makes the CGI that much more lastingly great) would cement War of the Worlds as one of Spielberg's greatest achievements, if not one hiccup. Yep, you guessed it, it's the ending. Spielberg retains the gist of Wells' ending for better and worse: it's fitting that he should still attribute the downfall of the invasion to bacteria against which the aliens have no immunity. It was a brilliant touch in the original novel and one that fits seamlessly here as a lesson about a technologically superior force inserting itself into an unfamiliar environment where the elements can defeat even the strongest foe.

But the other part of Wells' ending, the unlikely reunion with characters presumed dead, is harder to defend. Robbie's awkward return is simply senseless, and it robs the film of its somber implications regarding his headlong rush into death. When he leaves Ray and Rachel, he doesn't do so on the best of terms: there are things left unsaid, and the expectation of his death in the sudden conflagration spoke to all the lives cut short by that patriotic swell of enlistment and the unquestioning deployment into the Middle East. For Robbie to just show up, totally fine, at the end and allow a proper reconciliation between father and son is one of Spielberg's most glaring moments of dishonesty, denying the painful reality for a tacked-on bit of cheer that ironically seemed to piss off everyone. But with Spielberg's next release, even this tiny shred of optimism would be ruthlessly purged from all discussion of our current climate of war.

Man on Fire

Man on Fire was not Tony Scott's first triumph, having streamlined Quentin Tarantino's script for True Romance into something that actually benefited from outside tampering and scored two solid genre movies with Enemy of the State and Spy Game. But it was his 2004 film that set off Scott's modern reinvention as perhaps the most daring, or at least egregious, talent in American action film. Using a glossy/grainy digital aesthetic, endless in-camera effects in opposition to CGI and and remarkably sensual approach to blockbuster filmmaking, Scott would take the slapdash construction favored by such sloppy directors as Michael Bay and forcibly bend it toward something approaching poetry.

Scott's visual élan explodes from the start, as alternately slow and fast motion film, heavy grain, overexposure and even a fade to black and white gussy up the first images of the film. A scroll of informative text rolls across the screen saying that a kidnapping occurs in Mexico once every 60 seconds. When the text disappears and the frame unfreezes, Scott leaps into pure frenzy, layering overexposed images as cars speed up and shove people into backseats as onlookers scream helplessly. In this moment, the director reveals his biggest stylistic leap, that of deeply subjective filmmaking, rooted in the perspective of agitated people under extreme stress.

American cinema has occasionally posited the idea of a bodyguard hired to watch over children, but usually in a comedic way, playing on the idea that burly-'n'-surly trained mercenary juxtaposed with precocious tykes equals yuks aplenty. Yet as Man on Fire notes, kidnapping has grown to such an epidemic in Mexico that the bourgeoisie there have taken to hiring bodyguards out of necessity. A retired CIA operative, Rayburn (Christopher Walken), invites his old friend John Creasy (Denzel Washington, in the first of his collaborations with the director) to his comfortable estate in Mexico City to offer him such work. Aware that Creasy, a former Recon Marine, has lapsed into alcoholism and despair, Rayburn thinks that a steady job looking after a panicky middle-class family would be a way for Creasy to get his demons under control. Rayburn's even got a job lined up for Creasy to watch the daughter of a businessman (Marc Anthony) who does not particularly fear any kidnapping but wishes to placate his American wife's fears as cheaply as possible.

Scott's muscular but tender approach finds its perfect outlet in Washington, who has been steadily bulking up his entire career as if combating the onset of a paunch years in advance. But he's yet to lose that twinkle in his eye and the disarming power of his smile, and he can still collapse and entire film around him with one good look. Before he mentions his substance issues or chugs a drink, Creasy lets us know of his problems solely through Washington's body language, still mostly erect through rigorous military training but sagging through revulsion, not sloth. Those eyes never seem to look anywhere but inward, and the glimmering chrysalis that encases them suggests Creasy doesn't like what he sees. He takes the job because he has no other options, and his isolated depression makes him a mobile obelisk following around the chirpy, mature-beyond-her-years daughter of Samuel and Lisa, Lupita, or "Pita" for short (Dakota Fanning).

Bravely, Scott devotes nearly a whole hour to Creasy's ingratiation into the Ramos household. This arc follows the expected path -- hardened ex-soldier slowly warms to young girl's charms -- but cliché is only ever unbearable when nothing about it is new, and Scott's inventive framing combines with believable performances from Washington and Fanning to make for a friendly chemistry that practically never exists between child and adult.

Pita, at this point used to having a bodyguard, has the forthrightness of a child mixed with the no-nonsense talk one has with an employee, making her almost unbearably blunt. "Being black, is that a positive or negative in Mexico?" she asks Creasy as he drives her to school. "Time will tell," replies Creasy in that sardonically chipper tone that says he's already fed up with the conversation. Yet the sudden reintroduction of the in-camera effects after the (relative) calm when street people swarm the car in rush hour show that as much as Creasy may not care about her, he still won't let her get hurt, and he's still got his sharp instincts.

Only when a night of heavy drinking leads to a failed suicide attempt does Creasy finally merge those retained instincts with an actual interest in Pita's safety. Scott is brilliant with the suicide sequence, the frame warping and skipping as Creasy stumbles around in despair not unlike Willard at the start of Apocalypse Now. The cuts bewilder in a meaningful way, disorienting as the character is disoriented, occasionally stopping on such minor, beautiful images as whiskey dripping from John's sagging lip. The bullet he places in his gun misfires, and suddenly the frame calms as the experience centers Creasy. Scott isn't just playing around, he's getting at something here, a feeling rather than merely a presentation.

Creasy's epiphany leads him to start living life again, and he warms up to Pita in the usual way, helping her with history homework and awkwardly tiptoeing around the subject of concubines. Scott even devotes considerable time to the unnecessary sideplot of Pita's swim training just to allow her connection with Creasy to deepen. A full 45 minutes into the film, the biggest development in Man on Fire is the swim meet that allows Pita to put all the advice and practice Creasy helped her with into practice. Scott probably could have gotten away with making a film without any explosions or gunfights, so skilled is his ability to make this more human drama so kinetic.

Then, it all changes. Coming out of her piano lesson, Pita is cornered by kidnappers (and colluding cops), and not even Creasy's valiant efforts can prevent her seizure. Severely wounded, Creasy lies in a hospital bed as the police accuse him of murdering two officers and the Ramos family scrambles to retrieve their daughter, using an insurance policy Samuel took out to collect $10 million for a drop-off. But the drop goes awry and the kidnapper's nephew dies, leading the man to tell the family that he will not return Pita. When news of the girl's presumed death reaches Creasy's room, he wrenches himself from his bed and vows to kill anyone who had even the slightest involvement in Pita's kidnapping.

Unfortunately, Man of Fire soon lapses into too typical a revenge fantasy, presenting Creasy as a one-man army tearing his way through Mexico killing all in his path. Even the numerous twists of the narrative do not complicate the film so much as provide clever asides in Creasy's single-minded killing spree. He tortures information out of lackeys as he rises the ladder of a criminal organization, uncovering police corruption and even a more unexpected collaborator.

Scott's modern work is based fundamentally on feelings and moods, not the grandeur of typical blockbuster bombast, yet Man on Fire shows the director trying to fully break from the latter. Thus, the film occasionally shifts between his more intimate style and a larger focus, and the break from visceral immediacy hurts the film. Scott could also have done with some trimming, not, surprisingly, in the 50 minutes of build-up but the repetitive tedium of Creasy's rampage. Where the beginning displayed Scott's élan in such extraneous but delightful moments as the speeding up of the image as Creasy drives through a tunnel or the close-up of the daffodil Pita picked for Creasy situated next to his necklace of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (another gift from Pita), the rest of the film spends too much time playing Creasy's sickening bloodlust with a straight face. While the idea of Pita unlocking not only Creasy's humanity but his monstrous past brings up interesting if narrow possibilities, but Scott does not follow up on the potential theme.

Still, not all of Scott's violence here is as simple as it seems, and the more thoughtful approach he'd take to it later peeks through here and there. Pita's kidnapping is one of Scott's greatest sequences, communicating not Creasy's badass cool but his desperate concern for Pita's safety. He may have a steady aim and be seemingly impervious, but that's because his focus is entirely on the girl. The scene climaxes in a beautifully framed moment as a wounded Creasy and corrupt cop shoot each other, the sound cutting out so only Pita's terrified gasp is heard. Too often, though, I found myself pining for Scott's exciting framing of Pita's swim competition instead of the carnage of his his third-act mayhem.

Ultimately, Man on Fire is more coherent than Scott's subsequent Domino and Déjà Vu but lacks the avant-garde invention of those films. It also lacks the more focused narrative-driven tautness of Unstoppable. But the film still shows the major evolution of a director whom no one would suspect of being at the forefront of mainstream innovation. So many little touches, such as Scott's gleeful breaking of the 180^o rule to the incorporation of subtitles into the frame, placing them in the middle and animating them to coincide with the mood -- Lisa's tearful Spanish spoken to the kidnapper is translated in wavy subtitles, while the oft-repeated phrase "I'm just a professional" appears on-screen despite the words always being spoken in English, a motif of self-absolution from those in Creasy's sights. Though it may lack the power of subsequent efforts, Man on Fire still has enough ingenuity to stand out among revenge fantasies, and as much as I continue to feel let down by the brutality, I also continue to find myself moved by the ending, which coalesces the violence back into the sensual feel of the film's first half. There, he gets it all together; later films would show him applying the combined skills in full.