Deep Ice: What is this world coming to? (Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Part 2)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Another way in which Spielberg’s War tips its provenance is in the human response to the aliens. When you compare it to, say, Independence Day, certainly both movies show the gung-ho attitude of, “Rar! Let’s go kick some alien ass!” But War of the Worlds breaks from the military fetishism of a Roland Emmerich or a Michael Bay. Independence Day, for all its big dumb military bravado, is still operating in the ’50s Sci-Fi Monster Movie mold, at least insofar as the fundamental approach is, “Let’s go science the shit out of it.” The military response might be showy, but it’s organized, based on the strategic combination of intelligence and strength. In fact, despite how almost perfectly dumb the movie is, it depicts this fusion of brains and brawn in a wonderful harmony, this beautiful Voltronning of Jeff Goldblum’s brains, Will Smith’s charisma, Randy Quaid’s comic relief and Bill Pullman’s rugged manliness that come together to Captain Planet the shit out of the aliens. In this respect, Independence Day is actually closer to the 1953 War of the Worlds than Spielberg is. Because Spielberg’s War doesn’t show humans responding with strategy and determination and pluck; it shows a response inspired more by Toby Keith and Alan Jackson: We don’t care if this will work; we don’t care if this is the best use of resources; we don’t even care if we’ve picked the right target: we just want to hurt someone as we have been hurt. Not, “We need to withstand and endure and repel this enemy,” but “We need to make them hurt, Blood calls out for blood.” This isn’t the response of the confident, assured, imperial power that’s just had its landmarks blown up in 1996; it’s the response of the confused, scared country that just got a black eye from nowhere and is willing to sign off on an invasion of any random country the President has a grudge against because, “We have to do something.”

This is basically the character arc, such as it is, of Ray’s teenage son Robbie. Robbie isn’t there for the initial attack. He takes a long time to believe what’s going on. But then he suddenly becomes hell-bent for leather about joining the army to fight back, culminating in a tense character scene where he begs Ray to let him go. And, I mean, it doesn’t work as a narrative arc; it’s played as though this is a big “Father must learn to respect his son as a man and let him find his own path,” moment, but… It’s not. Nor, really, should it be. Robbie is objectively wrong here and that is kind of important. The right response to the aliens is not to fight back; it’s to do exactly what Ray wants to do: run away and stay alive and the aliens will take care of themselves. Also, kind of important, the idea that Ray has some kind of trouble respecting Robbie’s right as an adult (as a man, really, because the cultural baggage that implies is relevant) is not supported by anything else in the damn story. Ray is an irresponsible absentee father who is very bad at parenting. The rest of his arc, where it really ought to be going, is him proving himself as a father by the lengths he goes to in protecting adorable moppet Dakota Fanning (Who starts off like she might have a decent arc herself about needing to find confidence in her own precociousness in the face of her overbearing mother and deadbeat father, but who basically just turns into a glassy-eyed peril monkey in a portrayal which is very realistic for a child in trauma, but honestly not good storytelling), which will culminate in him murdering a dude and risking his life against a tripod to rescue her. That’s Ray’s emotional climax: Dakota Fanning gets captured and he has to allow himself to get captured to rescue her, which he does by contriving to get sucked up the tripod’s orifice while holding a string of grenades.

Having Robbie exit the narrative in the second act could have worked with Ray’s arc, had it been played as Ray’s nadir – the big mistake which finally kicks him into turning his life around. Except that the scene does not come off like that in any way, shape or form. It isn’t played as “Robbie challenges Ray and Ray gives in because that is what he always does and besides, the army will probably take better care of him anyway. But oh no, he’s made a terrible mistake and now his son is imperiled and/or dead!” No, it’s played as Ray realizing and accepting that he must let his son go be a man. And Robbie turns up at the end perfectly okay and having somehow made his own way to Boston for the tearful reunion at the end. Robbie should’ve died. Ray should’ve seen Robbie die and realized that no, he can’t delegate the survival of his children to anyone else. I mean, you could let Robbie live if he turns out to be not-quite-dead or something, but we have to be shown that Ray is wrong to let Robbie go. And the entire tone of his departure has to be different, showcasing Ray’s inadequacy and his son’s stupidity, rather than trying to sell us Robbie’s sincerity and maturity and Ray’s begrudging acceptance.

That all said, that 9/11 angle comes back again to make Robbie’s arc not actually good, but at least comprehensible. Because when you look to the reaction of New Yorkers after 9/11, they worked together, they rebuilt, they dealt with their trauma and by and large they moved forward with their lives. The people who gave in to fear, who were hellbent for righteous vengeance against, y’know, whoever? That attitude was much more common among people far removed from the attacks. So in that light, it fits that Ray, who witnesses the destruction firsthand, who comes home – like many of the first on the scene at ground zero – literally covered in the ashes, whose response is the rational one: get out, find somewhere safe; while it’s Robbie, who is a step removed from the initial violence and who is, without sugar-coating, a dumb asshole, whose response is unfocused belligerence.

Of course, where this 9/11 metaphor breaks down is the extent to which the mass of humanity responds to the invasion much like they do in any zombie apocalypse: not just panic and run, but turn on each other like animals*(I say “like animals”, but I don’t actually know what percentage of animals turn on each other in a crisis). Large chunks of the first two acts reenact what we saw in the 1953 film only for one scene near the end when the mob attacks the trucks from the institute. Desperate people fighting each other in order to save themselves personally and everyone else be damned. That was the common expectation of how things would be from apocalyptic fiction prior to 9/11. But one thing those bombings made it hard to overlook is that in actual real-life crises, humanity tends to huddle together, help each other, and perform acts of self-sacrifice for the common good. I’m not saying the panicked dog-eat-dog rout we see has no place, but the emphasis on it is far too great to really mesh with the lived experience of the post-9/11 audience for which it was made. On top of that, Spielberg kinda abandons that whole theme late in the third act, when the collected prisoners in a tripod’s basket band together to help Ray save Adorable Moppet Dakota Fanning and blow up a tripod from within.

As I have said repeatedly, I don’t actually think War of the Worlds is very good specifically as a story. It’s important and it’s a good idea and it contains many other good ideas in addition to its main one, and it’s a good structure for a story. But it reads more like a sourcebook for a Victorian Alien Invasion Role Playing Game than a novel. The plot is just “Man walks across southern England taking frequent breaks to deliver exposition about Martians,” and the characters are practically nonexistent.

Spielberg largely keeps the original plot, which is fine, but this being a movie, he does what George Pal did in the fifties: he makes what the movie is about be the character journey rather than the alien invasion. And this is a good idea. Except that, kind of inexplicably, this movie seems to have no idea what to do with its characters. Extreme events forcing Ray to face his inadequacy as a father and rise above it is a fine character journey for a story like this, but it doesn’t really deliver that arc; it sets it up, and then… Just kind of meanders forward. There is no climax for the character, no growth, no transition. He just sorta is a proper dad at some point… And then he gets to Boston where he can dump the kids back with their mother, I guess. Robbie is written as though he is supposed to be going through a coming-of-age arc, but he…. just kinda isn’t. He’s a stupid asshole making dumb decisions, he makes a dumb decision to leave, and then we don’t see him again until he reappears with no explanation in the last scene just because we want a happy ending I guess.

Spielberg makes the very wise decision to combine all of the novel’s secondary characters into one – Tim Robbins plays a fusion of Ogilvy, the Curate and the Artilleryman. But his narrative purpose is reduced to that scene in the musical where hologram Liam Neesen punches a live actor: Ray is forced to kill him when he becomes hysterical and risks attracting alien attention. He sort of takes over Robbie’s role of being the one who is belligerent and wants to fight back and doesn’t really care about the details. But because he’s an adult rather than a stupid teenager, this is associated with him being unhinged. This is all good character work with some good space for Tim Robbins to do acting, but it doesn’t slot into the overall story well and the forward momentum of the story, thus far a pretty good mix of our lead actors fleeing in terror intermixed with the visceral horror of the alien tripods, comes to a crashing halt while the movie becomes A Quiet Place for a bit, which isn’t really the kind of movie you should be right in the middle of your big explosiony blockbuster.

Speaking of the tripods. The tripods are very good. Downright Lovecraftian. Always emerging out of the smoke with big scary searchlights, making a sort of scary-foghorn sound. They’re pretty true to the novel, down to having underslung baskets where they collect prisoners. But the most interesting thing about them, in light of this being, as I said, a “big explosiony blockbuster”, is that they don’t actually do that much property damage. In the 1953 movie, the Martians blow up LA City Hall and the Eiffel Tower, and in Independence Day the aliens blow up skyscrapers and the White House. But these tripods do not do any significant landmark-demolition.

Spielberg sort of threads the needle here. In the 1953 movie, the Martians are at their scariest in two places: the farmhouse, where they threaten our heroes directly (This scene is substantially reenacted in the Spielberg movie but it’s part of the Tim Robbins Derailment), and early on when they are mostly shooting individual dudes, like Pastor Matthew or the three laborers who first approach the capsule. Later on, when we switch to full-on Special Effects Extravaganza mode, the war machines are shooting abstract military forces and landmarks, and it’s cool but not really scary. Spielberg manages to combine the two, in that his tripods spend the entire movie primarily shooting people. When they first appear, it almost seems as if their weapons only work on people – we keep seeing people being vaporized while cars are only pushed around (We do see buildings explode a bit later; it’s not that the tripods don’t destroy buildings, but that the structure of the film isn’t interested in that part of what they are doing. In this, perversely, the film is more like The Asylum’s treatment than really any Hollywood blockbuster).

Saying that I “enjoy” the parts of the movie that focus on the tripods attacking humanity is a bit strong, but they’re definitely effective scenes, evoking a lot of the more horror-adjacent aspects of, say, kaiju movies. But at the same time, they don’t shy away from actually showing you the horror; it’s lots of “money-shots”, rather than the budget-friendly horror tradition of relying on what isn’t shown and keeping the aliens out-of-sight until the climax.

The downside, though, is that even the parts of the movie that aren’t a slog are just relentlessly grim. Independence Day was all full of Will Smith being all Will Smithy and Randy Quaid being all Randy Quaidish, and there were fun explosions. War of the Worlds is just a whole lot of people dying and getting covered in cremains and being scared and it is very powerful cinema and absolutely no fun. And then the movie slows down and parks itself in Tim Robbins’s basement for half an hour. I mean, obviously “fun” is not what you come to War of the Worlds for, but, like, could I at least get Justin Hayward to sing a Lego Jingle?

I’m surprised, doing research for this post, how well-regarded the film ended up being. It kinda seemed to vanish from public consciousness in a way few things with Spielberg’s name on them do, and I’m sure that for a while it was badly regarded but I can find no evidence of that now and a bunch of awards and nominations.

But ultimately, “I am struggling to find evidence about how people felt about this movie,” is a bit representative of just how I feel. I certainly don’t hate it. But I don’t like it. Visually it’s lovely, full of these, and it’s a lot like the novel insofar as it’s a setup in search of a story. I’m sure some people considered it a cinematic mistake to retain the original ending that strips the human characters of agency in the outcome of the invasion. I think this is a problem not inherently, but rather because the novel’s ending isn’t complemented by a solid human story going on with its characters. The character arcs are a hot mess. It’s hard to call them any less substantial than the ’53 movie, but at least the love story between Doctor Forrester and Sylvia Van Buren is a recognizable narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end.

The pity is that I’m pretty sure this movie thinks its characters are its strength. It certainly seems to get that the invasion plot isn’t supposed to be its main focus. I found myself not really caring all that much about the “primary” story. Usually I make a point to pay attention to geography in these stories, but I have no idea where any of this is taking place. I know it starts in Bayonne and ends in Boston, but, like, I think we’re halfway through the movie when they cross the Hudson river and then they’re in a succession of farms and then they’re in Boston, and I’m pretty sure that is geographically nonsense but the film seems to actively not care and neither do I.

It’s a hard film to like. Fortunately, I do not have to like it very much, because “Visually powerful” and “Much much better than the other two” is good enough.

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• War of the Worlds is available to stream on many platforms whose names do not rhyme with “Jet Sticks”