Deep Ice: There’s rioting breaking out throughout the city (Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Part 1)

There hardly seems to be any point in doing this now, since Lindsay Ellis said all that really needs to be said over a year ago.

But anyway, it is June 29, 2005. Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck get married. Princess Alexia of the Netherlands was born a couple of days ago. Yesterday, three US Navy SEALs died in Afghanistan as part of Operation Red Wings. Last week also saw the passing of John Fielder and Paul Winchell, the original voices of Piglet and Tigger (Fielder also, weirdly enough, played Jack the Ripper in an episode of Star Trek). I’m kinda struggling to fill this news section; a lot of stuff happened in 2005, but not so much in the last week of June, and I’m holding one of my news snippets back for dramatic reasons. Leslie Gore of all people has a new album out. AMD files an anti-trust suit against Intel.

Tomorrow, Viacom will launch Logo, its LGBT-themed lifestyle channel. The short-lived surrealist sitcom Stella debuts on Comedy Central tonight. Doctor Who just finished up its first series with “The Parting of the Ways” a week and a half ago. The most recent video game I’m familiar with to be released is Psychonauts last Wednesday.

The weekend’s theatrical releases include the big-screen version of Bewitched and George Romero’s return to the Living Dead series with Land of the Dead.

Anyway, remember how there were, for some reason, like three different War of the Worlds film adaptations in 2005, when there had previously only been, like, one ever? I’ve kinda joked about why that might be, but I never really came right out and said it. Because it turns out that there is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you’d have multiple War of the Worlds films coming out right around now.

It’s because the middle of 2005 is roughly the amount of time it takes, from initial pitch, through getting the money, through writing the script, through editing and post-production, to make a movie, if you started shortly after September 11, 2001.

It’s said that in England, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America a hundred years is a long time, and that’s why England made Doctor Who and the US made Star Trek. Maybe that’s also why War of the Worlds has always been more popular with American audiences than in its native country. Or maybe it’s because the comparative geographical isolation of the US compared to Europe made the idea of invaders coming abruptly out of nowhere feel more plausible to US audiences, while British audiences had grown up expecting that any invaders they ever faced would be showing up from one of the several countries right next door they’d been having wars with on a regular basis since the dawn of time.

However the details play out, that’s why it happened when it did. Oh, I’m sure that the myriad early-21st-century adaptations had roots that went back further, but the catalyst that made so many people finally decide that the market was there and it was time to make this concept into a concrete mass-media product was the fact that it suddenly became incredibly, painfully relatable to audiences to imagine a world where a civilization which had long thought itself invincible one day looked up without warning to see death literally drop out of the sky in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sent us reeling and challenged everything we believed about our place in the world order. We’re still reeling.

Like basically everyone else who’s thought about it, I identified Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day as a sort of loose adaptation of War of the Worlds, almost at the level of parody. But of course, it’s not quite, is it? At its core, Independence Day is a disaster movie where the disaster happens to be aliens. And disaster movies are pretty much always fundamentally stories of hope. About the indomitability of the human spirit and what we will do to survive and prevail against overwhelming odds. They are stories about survival and rebuilding. We keep going. We fight back. We retake control. War of the Worlds is not about survival. It’s not about rebuilding. It’s about trauma. Even in the original novel, it’s about trauma. Most of the book is about bearing witness to the destruction, to the hopelessness, to the loneliness. Survival and rebuilding happen, but they’re mostly a footnote; the actual guy who’s actively trying to build a new civilization and take the war back to the aliens? He’s a joke.

It is on that level, and really only on that level that Spielberg’s take on War of the Worlds really works, and it’s only through the lens of 9/11 that the movie really makes sense. I’m not going to go as deeply into the plot of this movie as I do for some adaptations, but let’s start with the big flashy divergence from the book: the Martians (I’m not sure they every say they are from Mars, but the opening sequence keeps showing Mars when it refers to them. I suspect this is basically a weasel to excuse the fact that an intelligent civilization going unnoticed on Mars is a hard sell in 2005) don’t bring the tripods with them, but rather beam into tripods that were hidden underground for millions of years.

And the trouble with this, to be very blunt, is that it is nonsense. It’s so much nonsense that I don’t even know where to begin explaining how much nonsense it is. Some of the nonsense would be forgivable if it were properly contextualized, but of course it won’t be. Like, okay, the aliens can build tripods which remain operational after millions of years of inactivity, and, despite, again, millions of years of plate tectonics, they happen to be conveniently located under every major city and didn’t all end up clustered in a big pile in Challenger Deep, but at the same time not even one ever got dug up by oil prospectors. I mean sure. I could accept this if you had some science character say something about some kind of unobtanium-based stasis technology or whatever. They don’t, but we’re still early in my litany of complaints. Harder to accept is the economics of a plan that has a millions-of-years-lead-time. I happen to live in the United States in the year 2020, so I know for an absolute fact that people do not invest massive resources and public spending burying expensive war machines to be prepared for the consequences of your own planet’s ecosystem collapsing millions of years in the future. If they’d foreseen the need to conquer Earth millions of years ago, they’d have just done it then.

The other big change from the novel and from other adaptations is that the aliens are not interested in humans to consume their blood. Instead, they are harvesting humans to use as fertilizer for the red weed. I do not know what to make of this, and it ultimately isn’t all that important, but it too is kinda nonsense; if they are, as we are told, trying to make Earth more like their native planet by spreading the red weed, how is it plausible that the red weed thrives on human blood?

But let’s get more existential. I’m usually a big opponent of assuming alien civilizations must behave like us and follow our patterns in recognizable ways. This one is a bridge too far even for me though: this invasion is the culmination of a plan millions of years in the making, involving burying a giant warfleet, allowing humans to evolve and build a civilization, then beaming down and conquering them… with big stompy mechs that shoot pew-pew guns. A civilization that thinks in millions of years-terms, makes plans spanning time like that, invests resources in that… And their strategy for conquest is Big Stompy Mechs.

It’s more than I can take. I know Wells described the Martians as, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,” but what he actually showed – what every adaptation has actually shown – is alien life that’s technologically advanced, sure, but we’re talking decades more advanced, practically speaking – centuries at the outside. We could guess at the basic principles of their technology and their battle strategies could be roughly understood. Here, we’re shown a civilization with such strategic prowess that they could plan to conquer a race which did not even exist when the bulk of their preparations were made, and yet themselves have not developed in the intervening time in any way that poses a problem for their plans – millions of years is enough time that even if they’re still functional, the tripods are the best they could do? Sure would suck if in the intervening time, they’d evolved into something with longer arms but which is probably quite incapable of drinking tea. Big Stompy Mechs is not the invasion armada of a race that plans invasions millions of years in advance; it’s the invasion armada of a race that gets defeated by an 8-year-old Japanese boy and his flying robot. They’re big-budget Power Rangers villains.

We’re still not to the worst of it, though. It’s always a point of tension when you have modern science at your back to quite accept the original premise of, “The Martians scrutinized mankind for decades, “As narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water,” and yet somehow completely miss the fact that the planet they were looking to conquer was a big old ball of plague. It made sense to Wells because he was operating under the “nebular theory” and reckoned that if Mars was older than Earth, and bacteria were “primitive” lifeforms, the Martians would have no concept of disease since all the bacteria on Mars had long ago settled down and evolved into something respectable like insurance adjusters. But here, it’s considerably worse, because here, the aliens have already been to Earth. Someone put those tripods there. Someone’s been watching them all this time. This is not a desperate scramble to find a new home in a hurry: it’s a plan they’ve been working on for a geological timescale, and they have already been here.

I could live around this. I’ve accepted worse. Much worse. Much, much worse. But if I’m going to just overlook this gaping hole in the plot, I’d really like to get something in return. And so, what do I get? What is the payoff for accepting this? What does “the tripods were buried underground for millions of years” add to the story? Why not just have the tripods beam to Earth along with their occupants?

And here, we struggle. Because it doesn’t really seem to add much. It doesn’t influence the plot at all really. The exposition scene where our hero (Tom Cruise as Ray. I had expected it to become relevant sooner, but whatever) learns that the aliens ride the lightning down into the buried tripods is given a lot of weight, but, like, I mean, so what? It doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t lead to anything. So why? Here, I think, we must fall back to, “Because this movie was made after 9/11.” Because I think the slightly grody truth is that Spielberg very much wanted to present the idea that the invading force – the one which is described as “terrorists” multiple times throughout the film – comes not just from outside. He very much wanted to say, “They’re already here. They’re already among us. Hiding. Waiting to rise up and destroy us.” Whether you interpret this as “ZOMG TERRORIST SLEEPER CELLS REPORT YOUR NEIGHBORS REDS UNDER THE BEDS,” or as something more nuanced like, “We kinda set ourselves up for this with decades of military adventurism and foreign policy designed by sociopaths,” is up to you – this movie is really only in it as deep as, “THEY’RE ALREADY HERE” (which I think was one of the taglines?).

To Be Continued…