The flick? Thrilling! Chilling! Mucho killing! Studio blurbmeisters, select any admiring adjective and attribute it to me, provided I get a box-office cut.
It's a stunner, though, that'll rattle your bones and shudder your spine (there's your legit blurb, meisters), even if lapses of logic within its fantasy realm are large enough to squeeze a Martian moon through. Spielberg's at the pinnacle of his summer-blockbuster skills, so expect a Jaws-like impact on moviegoers, even though modern audiences demand more visual wham-bam to experience the same visceral pow-oomph (and this is a pow-oomph-wham-bammer to the max). Jaws was also more character-driven than this spectacular destructo-fest. (Freebie blurb alert.)
You're wondering where all the WMDs went? Try the cineplex.
Tom Cruise runs, hides, escapes, protects his kids and overall acts—convincingly—without any couch-bouncing, Scientology-spouting, Brooke-and-Matt-scolding, face-squirting, Katie Holmes-slobbering antics. (That alone posts another star on the ol' rating.)
Go see War of the Worlds. You won't be disappointed. (Bonus blurb alert.) Now that we've covered that, let's give this a different kind of think.
Unlike future Dude, Where's My Car? remakes, H.G. Wells' novel, in all its translations, bears the weight of popular fiction-as-historical metaphor, mirroring the politically fanned fears of its time. For pop-culture academics—those favoring overarching themes over plot synopses and social-impact analyses over grade and star evaluations—it's a gimme. The WW mantra, with some dissenters, borders on gospel.
In his 1898 novel, when the sun had yet to set on the vast British empire, Wells meant the marauding Martians to represent the consequences arising from the arrogance of dominant cultures—the then-unthinkable notion of a superpower laid low. The ultimate comeuppance. Probably not coincidentally, British hegemony was shadowed by an alien threat—growing German militarism that would erupt into World War I. Though the Brits of Wells' novel (and the rest of humankind) survive the alien assault, they've paid a terrible price, symbolically, for their global misadventures.
Later Americanized WW's shifted the paradigm to U.S. nobility and innocence, with Martians as metaphoric bogeymen of two convulsive eras.
Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio broadcast—which scared a nation silly—foreshadowed our fear of fascism slithering to the surface in Germany, eventually unleashing Hitler's Nazis. We weren't guilty of evil. But, though Depression-weary, we recognized the coming evil, then heroically slayed it. The 1953 film version, amid Cold War doomsday scenarios of nuclear annihilation, air-raid drills and "duck-and-cover" TV jingles, strongly suggested the Russians as Martian stand-ins (the invaders even arrived from the red planet).
By 1996's Independence Day, it was an outright hurray-hurray-for-the-U-S-of-A! as our cleverness—we gave their mother ship a computer "cold"—slaps down these cosmic, pre-9/11 terrorist muthas, an entertainment catharsis, perhaps, after 1993's World Trade Center bombing lit the fuse on fanaticism aimed at civilians.
All convenient metaphorical monsters, particularly 1938's and 1953's, for a nation just emerging into superpower-hood, but with little reason—led by demigod presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower—to gaze into the mirror and question ourselves. (Even Hiroshima-Nagasaki did little to shake national certainty, though the fissures were in place that would later collapse into Vietnam.)
Then there's War of the Worlds, The Post-9/11-Terrorism-Iraq Edition. And the unsettling sense that this time, the Martians might very well be ... us. As in U.S.
Sure, the movie's plot-derived tag line, "They're already here," posits us as victims, evoking notions of terrorist sleeper cells waiting to be awakened, tapping into our everyday fears. Or you can counter-argue that this WW harkens back to Wells' original symbolism—a nation suffers righteous blowback for its imperialism. And you can always just accept its literal imagery:
America's under attack by icky alien dudes driving towering tripod killing-machines shooting horrific phaser fire that could fry the Star Trek gang into barbecued weenies! Drop yer c--k and grab yer socks, patriots! Put on a Toby Keith CD (or in a pinch, Lee Greenwood), call in the troops and get yer not-yet-vaporized ass outta town!
But us as the black-hearted bastards? What gives? Well ... Tim Robbins is in it; do the ideological math. But seriously, given our course in Iraq, it isn't hard to angle this film to suggest that, under layers of Spielbergian craft, it's us inflicting, rather than receiving, the "Martian" carnage.
Just wondering:
• Why is this U.S. president labeled "arrogant" more in one day than most chief execs are in two terms? (Watching the smug Martians on the screen?)
• How is it that America, usually the world's most desired ally, has much of the globe not running toward its protection, but fleeing its machismo? (See the muscle-flexing Martians on the screen?)
• When have we seemed so implacably, undeterrably, militarily single-minded with not an ounce of doubt from our leader? (Notice the ruthlessly methodical Martians on the screen?)
• Who presumed that we should arrive at the land of others, eradicate their way of life and replace it with our own? (Catch those vicious, planet-poaching Martians on the screen?)
• Which nation has the military technology to end all military technology? (Digging the Martian ka-boom-booms on the screen?)
• Is it really as simple as, "You're either with us or against us"? (Glimpse any compromise-minded Martians on the screen?)
• Why does so much of the world expect us to ultimately fail? (How 'bout a touching eulogy for those Martians on the screen?)
And narrator Morgan Freeman's Wellsian words at movie's end, though tinted in surface patriotism, spell out a clear warning: Save face—don't mess with the other guy's space.
Way oversimplified, we know—no Saddam, no Osama, no Twin Towers tragedy, no Taliban, no props for attempting to plant the seeds of democracy in a region largely barren of such a noble crop. No balance. No context. Well, art doesn't play by the rules of the college-debate squad. And recognizing such ideological parallels tucked inside a summer blockbuster doesn't mean moviegoers have to give in to them. If Hollywood packed that kind of power, we'd have a blue-state president.
But watching the newest War of the Worlds, a haunting sense settles over the mayhem that the frightening invaders of this bravura piece of popcorn diversion are uncomfortably, if metaphorically, familiar—making a cinematically cloaked, but nakedly political statement.
Or maybe it's that Tim Robbins is in it.