“It’s an extermination”

Steven Spielberg is one of the most fascinating Hollywood directors, because he’s probably the one filmmaker whose own preferences and techniques dictate those of Hollywood itself. That’s why, whether we’re talking about Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, or the film I saw the other night, War of the Worlds, I think it’s unfair to deried his now-trademark unearned happy endings as pandering to Hollywood values. After all, over the past 30 years, Hollywood values have become whatever Steven Spielberg wants them to be.

And if the spate of large-scale genre films listed above is any indication, what he wants them to be are bleak, disturbing, and viciously cruel almost–almost–to the point of relentlessness. In the past, I’ve argued that what holds him back from going full-scale Texas Chain Saw-nihilist on us is his belief (endlessly derided by his critics, though not in so many words) that humanity isn’t a giant pile of shit. If there’s an explanation other than a trendy love of cynicism for why people could compare the brutal yet ultimately optimistic Private Ryan unfavorably to the unending parades of cheesy war-movie cliches that were Platoon and The Thin Red Line, I’d love to hear it. At any rate it’s tough to argue that the happy endings of the aforementioned Spielberg films send people walking way from the theater whistling a happy tune; if anything, they’re the micron of sugar that helps the extremely nasty medicine go down.

But I think there’s something extra brutal about War of the Worlds, in that the ending feels so tacked on and gratuitous and unearned that the redemptive flavor of the Spielberg “and they lived, if not happily, then well ever after” ending is lost. In part this is due to Spielberg’s fealty to H.G. Wells’ original ending, the happy patness of which only serves to reinforce humanity’s impotence against the alien onslaught that the book concerns itself with. But even moreso, it’s due to the gruesomeness of what’s come before. And I’m not just talking about the actions of the aliens, with their disintegration beams and human fertilizer. Mainly what I’m talking about is the man who bashes a hole in the rear window of the Ferrier family’s stolen SUV, then begins tearing the glass apart with his bare, bloody hands.

In other words, and playing firmly against type, Spielberg is giving us an apocalypse movie where the apocalypse brings out the worst in people, rather than the best.

This concept that is fascinating to me, as you might have guessed. We all want to believe that our post-armageddon character arcs would run something like Jake Weber’s in the Dawn of the Dead remake. But for me the truly terrifying element of apocalyptic horror is not (just) the genre-driven mechanics of the apocalypse itself–be it extraterrestrial, viral, avian, or undead in nature–but the nagging fear that if faced with such circumstances I’d be a lot more like Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, or Kaufman or Cholo in Land of the Dead, or the guys who set up the mobile rape camp in the novel version of The Stand. The fear that I’d fall to pieces, or become a barbarian. The fear that I can’t hack it.

In War of the Worlds, we’re presented with lots of people who can’t hack it. Foremost among them, I would argue, is Tom Cruise’s character, Ray Ferrier. Many have argued that Spielberg heroicizes this everyman simply through his casting choice, which is an understandable argument, but I daresay that Cruise’s sudden outbreak of inanity-slash-insanity over the past few months helped his character rather than hurt him. When Cruise is asked to play an asshole incapable of behaving responsibly, it’s suddenly a lot easier to believe the result.

From the moment the alien attack erupts, Spielberg and Cruise give Ray a consistently self-interested behavior pattern. Beyond the desire to protect his children–a desire so tough to shake among non-sociopaths that it hardly qualifies as heroism, especially here–Ray’s actions are never outside the box of basic flight-or- well, flight; as society breaks down around him, he’s really more than willing to participate in that breakdown, as is established from the moment he (wisely) steals the minivan from the mechanic and (also wisely) refuses to pick up any of the thousands of stranded humans he drives past. He’s also shown failing on any number of occasions–he orders his son to quickly pack some food, but all the son can find in Ray’s bachelor pad are condiments; he lets his son drive the van while he himself gets some shut-eye but fails to instruct the kid to keep well clear of people; his whole plan–to travel to Boston and rendez-vous with his ex-wife, her current husband, and her parents–is a mixture of fairy-tale wishful thinking and an inarticulated desire to fob off the responsibility for his children on their more capable caregiver. (When his son calls him on this last bit, Ray gets upset, but does not deny it.) Particularly wrenching is the scene in which Ray must quite literally choose between his children. Ray has been glibly (heh heh) and unthinkingly self-interested his entire life, and Cruise nails the horror (and, subtly, the resentment) that making a genuine life-or-death decision would fill such a man with. Moreover, the circumstances in which this decision is made reinforce the futility of the sort of heroism Ray’s son has been attempting to demonstrate throughout the film. (That’s if the scene in which the son risks his life to pull clinging stragglers onto a boat only to have the boat capsized by the aliens shortly thereafter didn’t already hit that point home. And that’s only a minute or two after meeting tthe family friends who were introduced only to be gut-wrenchingly abandoned…) By the time it dawns on Ray the type of person in whose basement he’s sealed himself and his daughter, I was reminded of the rueful blend of rage, regret, and selfish self-pity found in a line uttered by Tony Soprano in his eponymous show’s fifth season: “All of my choices were wrong.”

And perhaps that’s an appropriate quote to kick off a discussion of the film’s final third. It’s the part of the movie that forces even its most die-hard defenders to call it “flawed,” though for my money the flaws are fascinating. Have you ever seen a section of a movie that alternates between brilliance and incoherence so many times in such rapid succession? The big out-of-the-shadows “hey look! It’s Tim Robbins!” intro shot did not augur well for the upcoming sequence, and my initial misgivings (allayed for a moment by Robbins’s pretty solid tri-state area dialect, complete with “you’re welcome to stay, both’a yez”) were justified the moment Robbins began his ham-fisted “I’m crazy, get it?” bugout. But then there’s the moment where Cruise, driven to desperation by not knowing any lullabies to sing his daughter, resorts to crooning “Little Deuce Coupe” by the Beach Boys. It’s a moment that got quite a few unintentional (?) laughs from the audience, but I think it hit pretty hard (speaking as someone whose dad sang him a few Beach Boys songs as lullabies himself). But then there’s that unbelievably long and tedious and ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the alien probe, the detection technology of which apparently hasn’t advanced that far beyond that of velociraptors. But then there’s the weird (in the old-school sense) and gruesome red-vine sequence, including the use of human blood as fertilizer and the shots of Cruise and Robbins becoming aware of what’s being sprayed all over the place. But then there’s the dopey Indepence Day aliens and more Jurassic Park cat-and-mouse. But then there’s that silent struggle for the shotgun with Robbins. But then the tension’s deflated with a goofball line, and the opportunity for Ray to do what he ends up doing minutes later only during the most Hollywood-y suspense sequence of the movie is wasted. But then there’s that terrific line–“You know what I’m going to have to do…”–and the blindfolding and the singing and the off-screen murder. And–actually, things tighten up there once again, as the desperate-times “heroism” of that action is immediately undone by another alien probe (that’s smart filmmaking, man). Maybe my favorite part of the film is when Ray grabs that ax and chops away, enraged but in vain, at the tentacle-like probe, with the past two hours’ worth of tension and disgust pouring out of the audience in an enormous wave of futile catharsis. I even bought his subsequent hand-grenade-wielding saving of the day, since so much of it depended on dumb luck rather than extraordinary actions. And even there Spielberg ladled out more awfulness as we watch a captured human sucked into the alien tripod’s orifice to be spit out as liquid. Dumb luck in the face of awfulness, ultimately, is all that saves humanity from extinction; we see it in microcosm before we see it writ large, is all.

Then there’s the “happy” ending at the end of it all, with the improbably reunited family–ex-wife, ex-in-laws, new husband, even presumed dead son. I invite viewers to watch that scene again, and as more and more family members appear to greet Ray and his daughter as they stumble down the street, tell me that Spielberg’s not aware of exactly how ridiculous this is given the movie we’ve just watched. (John Williams is certainly aware of it: The expected joyous fanfare is nowhere to be found.) It’s a happy ending so transparently contrived that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a critique of happy endings. It certainly doesn’t do anything to gain supremacy of memory over the image of Ray washing the ashen remains of other human beings from his face, or the lengthy closeup on that fleeing woman in the department store that ends only when she’s blasted from the face of the earth, or the literal river of dead bodies, or the mutilated cow (Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Private Ryan, WotW–Spielberg and dead cows, man) during the hand-grenade sequence. And on. And on. And on.

So yes: If this movie had used zombies instead of aliens and was directed by George Romero instead of Steven Spielberg yet was in every other way the same, the genre in-crowd would be going berserk for it right about now. And not just because of the tremendously proficient craft and abundant scares, the latter of which I’m not alone in finding lacking in Romero’s latest effort (see Matt Maxwell‘s excellent and insightful LotD review, which overstates the “it’s not horror” case a bit (it’s still zombies eating people, after all) but is otherwise rock-solid). It’s got that message, is what I’m saying.

See, I watched this movie on 7/7, the day of the London terrorist bombings, so I ended up eschewing the absurd current-events interpretation offered by the film’s own screenwriter and seeing things through a different lens. What I saw was a far more universal critique than one directed at a particular nation’s particular administration’s particular conduct in a particular nation in a particular region. It was in the way the rubbernecking crowd at the crater in Ray’s town erupted into frantic chaos. (Though I found myself thinking “they should all be using cameraphones at this point”–learned that one the hard way, didn’t we?) It was in the claustrophobic mob scene around Ray’s SUV. It was in the 9/11-style flyers and posters, and the orderly and hopeless lines of fleeing survivors. It was in the way every single safe haven reached by the family was violated almost immediately. It was in the “what a story” reporter and her literally deaf cameraman. It was in the way it plays upon your suspicion that your own reaction to tragedy and terror is in some way deficient, base, selfish, stupid, subhuman. It’s the methodical articulation (vast and cool and unsympathetic) of the fear that disaster is degrading.

POSTSCRIPT: Click here for some final thoughts.

Recommended reviews:

Steven at Corpse Eaters

Jon Hastings at The Forager

Bill Sherman at Pop Culture Gadabout