REVIEWED - WAR OF THE WORLDS: The world ends with a bang and a whimper in Steven Spielberg's grimly powerful drama of America under siege, writes Michael Dwyer
When Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977, Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Vietnam war finally had come to an end. Steven Spielberg tapped into the mood of renewed hope and optimism and broke the mould by making a movie depicting aliens as benign creatures. Five years later he offered an even more benevolent view of intergalactic visitors in ET, the Extra-Terrestrial.
Times have changed, and in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, the aliens are enormous threatening invaders that play havoc with the weather, destroy whole towns and kill the human population at will, even turning vampire towards their prey. The earthlings are helpless, bewildered and terrified against these unfamiliar forces of evil, and there is no sign of a leader at any stage to reassure them.
Spielberg has reworked the classic HG Wells novel as a metaphor for a country experiencing an unprecedented climate of fear after 9/11, while the death toll escalates daily in the Iraq war.
With the exception of Schindler's List, this is as dark as Spielberg gets in terms of theme and visual style. As in Close Encounters and ET, the human focus is on children and a lone parent, but in sharp contrast to the loving mothers from those earlier films, the parent here is a flawed man - a divorced New Jersey dockworker, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), who resents the fact that his sullen teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious 10-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning) clearly feel a stronger emotional attachment to the new man in their mother's life.
Ferrier gets a shot at redemption when his children spend a weekend at his slovenly kept home. The area is struck by a ferocious lightning storm, and a huge tripod bestrides the town, causing chaos, panic and destruction.
There goes the neighbourhood, but Ferrier escapes with his children, who ask if the invaders are terrorists. When he says they come from "somewhere else", his son asks, "Like Europe?" That is one of very few gags in a resolutely serious movie that also eschews such traditional trappings as a romantic subplot, and it registers as the polar opposite of jokey alien invasion pictures such as Independence Day.
The imagery is powerful - a river swarming with floating bodies, brilliantly staged sequences of mass hysteria, and abrupt outbursts of violence when nothing matters anymore beyond self-preservation.
When the tension dissipates during an over-extended encounter between the Ferriers and another survivor (Tim Robbins), the respite feels welcome for a while, since we know that more mayhem will follow. Unfortunately, we also know that the overworked young Dakota Fanning, who really ought to spend more time at school, will continue to scream and screech her way through the role of Ferrier's petrified daughter.
The special effects are outstanding, perfectly serving their purpose without ever swamping the movie. There is an eerie beauty to the superb visual compositions captured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. And John Williams provides a robust score that features a menacing riff on the notes played to attract the aliens in Close Encounters. Refreshingly, nobody gets to be a superhero.
