I'm rarely left this speechless after a film, so allow me to quote another review of War of the Worlds I read recently: Steve, I never knew you had it in you.
Indeed, I would have been hard pressed to believe before hand that Spielberg had the cojones to make this brutal a film. Granted, this is the same man who brought terror to the water in Jaws and directed the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan, but this is a whole different area here. I walked out of the theater shell shocked, and it didn't help my state of mind when I saw dark clouds outside that were eerily similar to those above New Jersey in the film. I'm left after the film not able to do one of my conventional reviews, so allow me to touch upon the high points (Here be spoilers):
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Show of hands: How many people noticed that Cruise's character works in a high tech machine that stands very high off the ground and picks up objects (kinda like a tripod)? I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to signify, but it was a neat little detail.
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It's been said that Steven Spielberg's Jaws, as good as it is, is largely responsible for the Summer movie phenomenon that now dumps oh-so-many big budget travesties into our local theaters every year. The same kind of complaint can be said for John Williams in that, as good a composer as he is, his work has influenced others to simply drown out films in music, leading audiences down every emotional cue. You must give him and Spielberg credit, then, for practicing some restraint with this film. Their faith in the visuals and sound effects have allowed them to draw back and let these elements speak for themselves. A lesser director would have made the horrible mistake of putting in some "exciting" music during Cruise's escape from the first tripod as people are zapped into dust around him. Thank heavens Spielberg isn't one of them.
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Spielberg does a very nice circular camera shot around the moving minivan. I know it was probably done with the help of CGI, but I'd still like to see the "making of" when the DVD comes out to see exactly how they managed it.
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Way back when, some friends and I rented John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. The film was by no means perfect, but one concept intrigued me: The reception of grainy video footage ... from the future. The footage is of the front of a church with a dark figure standing in the doorway backed by a flood of light. There's nothing incredibly original or spectacular about this, but the format itself made it seem more real, and thus more frightening.
Since then, I've seen this technique used for a solitary scene (Signs) or an entire movie (The Blair Witch Project). It was also this element that drew my appreciation of the Firefly series, when Whedon would purposely have footage of the ship go out of focus and zoom in and out, like someone was on the ground capturing this with a camcorder. One might infer that Spielberg was simply adapting a method that had already worked: Orson Welles captivated the nation in a broadcast with no spectacular visual effects or indeed any visuals at all, just the medium of radio and a straight faced interpretation by his troupe of actors. It worked then and it works now.
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I suppose one can never know the effects of mass hysteria until one is in the middle of such an experience. So when we see the scene at the ferry and all that happens there, we sit gaping at the breaking down of the rules of civilization and wonder if this fictional representation could be accurate? The only gripe I had was everyone running for the boat. Seems to me the last place I would want to be when being pursued by agile killer aliens is on a slow-ass boat, made slower by the weight, in the middle of a river. C'mon people, split up!
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Acting-wise, Cruise is on a higher level here, registering the fear necessary for the role. The one drawback was near the end when he yells some advice to a soldier. The yell sounded just like his "Red Light. Green Light" at the end of Mission: Impossible, and given the campiness of that previous role, I couldn't help but giggle when Tom did it again. Tim Robbins puts forth menace when his character could have easily laughable. He's helped in his confrontations with Cruise by the fact that he's a full ten inches taller than him. As for Fanning, this is actually the first time I've seen her in a film. She's mature and very good here; close to Sixth Sense good.
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Do you get the feeling that Cruise and Spielberg got some serious deja vu while shooting the basement scene? Cruise silently eluding the snake-like surveillance camera personally reminded me of the spider-robots scene in Minority Report.
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There are different ways to terrorize an audience, and one of the more chilling is a scene where people are held captive and absolutely helpless while awaiting their fate. The scene inside the metal baskets underneath the tripod was along these lines and brought to mind The Second Renaissance, Part II segment of the Animatrix DVD. Granted, Cruise saves the day here, but those initial moments will stay with me for awhile.
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Spielberg wisely leaves a lot of questions unanswered when it comes to the invaders. Only the scattered and sometimes contradictory rumors are what we and Cruise hear (not counting Morgan Freeman's narration). Do they actually drink blood or is it used for some other function? Can they also use animal blood? What other purposes did they have on the planet? What was with the creeping red vines? Were the vines actually part of the aliens themselves?
The biggest question for me was as to when exactly the ships were buried. If we are to believe one character, it was millions of years ago. This leads to the most confusing series of thoughts when trying to make sense of it all. If they were here so long ago, why didn't they take over then? If they needed to wait until we evolved for the purpose of harvesting, then this means they must have done this with other planets in order to survive, which means that they should have encountered the germ thing previously. And on and on and on.
Ebert apparently had the same objections, and he gave the film only two out of four stars for it. I think this is way too harsh. A rating this low is only deserved if the film is boring and tedious enough so that you dwell on such inconsistencies while viewing the thing. That was not the case with myself or any of the audience members that I saw it with. We all pretty much held our breath for the majority of the film (well, not literally, of course. That would be messy, and the floors are sticky enough).
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And then there's that happy ending. I suppose we can't have things be totally bleak in a Spielberg film, and I was willing to roll with that. Lord knows the main three characters had been through enough hell to finally have some sun shine upon them at the very end. I've read so many complaints about the plotholes and the ending, but I can't give this thing anything lower than a nine. It's just too damn well made for it to receive anything less. It's an experience, plain and simple. See it in a theater while you can.
Nine out of Ten
(This can also be viewed at Blogcritics)
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