'War of the Worlds'

By Jan Stuart | STAFF WRITER

June 29, 2005

Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins star in "War of the Worlds," directed by Steven Spielberg.

In bringing together Steven Spielberg, H.G. Wells and Tom Cruise, "War of the Worlds" represents a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of planets: the greatest of science fiction film directors, the mightiest of science fiction novelists, and the wealthiest celebrity advocate of a bogus religion cooked up by the most shamelessly opportunistic science fiction writer of all time.

Too often, a movie can disintegrate from the competing forces of so much well-endowed creative energy. In this instance, the collaboration clicks. "War of the Worlds" reinvigorates the pulse-racing thrill and unalloyed paranoia of vintage '50s sci-fi, when the monstrous evil of the alien enemy was not yet compromised by what Karl Rove recently termed the liberal urge to "offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

Much as Wells' 1898 novel reflected British concerns about German expansion and the 1953 "War of the Worlds" spoke to American fears of creeping communism, Spielberg's state-of-the-art remake acts as a lightning rod for our post-9/11 anxieties. When a mysterious eruption levels a working class New Jersey community in the film's signal invasion, the T-word (as in terrorist) jumps from everyone's lips.

In this instance, the explanation is even more terrifying and unfathomable than Cruise's notorious couch-leaping antics on Oprah Winfrey. As narrator Morgan Freeman quotes from Wells in the film's preamble, extra-terrestrials who have been "regarding the earth with envious eyes" have long ago planted their version of al- Qaida sleeper cells just below the earth, waiting to wreak havoc.

In the world according to Spielberg, of course, an apocalypse is never truly an apocalypse until it has been weathered by an attractive American family that is experiencing a ground-shift of its own. Cruise puts on his cocky blue-collar cap as Ray, a heavy machine operator whose ex-wife has quite improbably married into Boston money, leaving him to fend with an irritating, loose-cannon of a teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and a precocious younger daughter (the precocious Dakota Fanning).

Once towering alien machines emerge from below and begin to blow the locals to smithereens, Ray tosses his noisy offspring into a car and tears off across New England to reunite them with their mother. The Josh Friedman-David Koepp screenplay -- its requisite emotional core efficiently in place -- promptly gets out of the way and lets the spectacular visual effects take over.

Unfettered by the complex moral questions of "Minority Report" and "Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," Spielberg serves up a stops-out, all-you-can-eat banquet of spook-out creatures and sumptuously staged disasters. Since terror made incarnate is never as creepy as terror unseen -- a truism classically illustrated by "Jaws" -- "War of the Worlds'"array of spindly, tentacled aliens are rarely as scarifying as they are objects of wonder.

As in "Empire of the Sun," (whose epic Shanghai evacuation is recalled in a savage attack scene on Ray's family vehicle), Spielberg makes his most memorable impression with fleeting, surreal touches: a speeding train engulfed in flames, a river flowing with corpses, a drifting precipitation of dead victims' clothing, raining down from the sky.

Predicably, Spielberg softens the novel's darker depictions of human nature. For once, his sap-head instincts may be preferable. Prescient as H.G. Wells may have been, he called it wrong in one important way. Rather than succumbing to a self-survival siege mentality amid the horrors of 9/11, city residents pulled together magnificently. If and when the spacemen pull into town, New Yorkers will most assuredly rise to the occasion once more.