I already gave my initial impression of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds but I haven’t fully explained what I think about the film. I’ll preface this with a couple of notes: the first is that, as previously mentioned, I’ve given a lot of time to thinking about alien invasion films because I’ve been working on scripts for a couple of films on that subject. The second is that, although I may sound like I’m being quite critical of Spielberg’s film, I did enjoy it and am planning on seeing it again in a couple of weeks.

As I’m discussing the film in some detail, be aware of spoilers.

Let’s get the nitpicking out of the way first (and don’t start going on about the continuity errors and gaffs about the EMP effects - I KNOW!). As much as I liked the scene with the first tripod rising out of the crater in the ground underneath the city, I’ve got a real problem with what they’re doing there in the first place. It’s obvious that the idea is that they’ve been planning it for “millions” of years as Tim Robbins’ character Ogilvy says.

Well let’s look at this. To get the war machines into the ground underneath cities requires one assumption - that humans were not around and no cities had been built. In the case of America, this isn’t so bad as the modern cities and towns are relativly new compared to other parts of the world? But in other parts of the world, surely the aliens must have buried their machines, without anyone noticing, thousands of years before? That’s fine. I can live with that. What I can’t quite live with is the idea that in all that time, the aliens hadn’t developed more advanced technology that they could use to invade another planet. And if they had that technology way back then, why wait all that time before invading? It’s a very silly premise and I’m sure it’s written just so that they could have the tagline “They’re already here.”

If you hark back to the original book, however, we may be able to explain it. (I’m clutching here because the film offers no substantiation for this reasoning). In the book, the martians actually build the war machines and people catchers while they’re in the cylinders that they used to get here from Mars. So perhaps the machines were built here by an advance party and built underground so that humans wouldn’t notice. Don’t ask me how they got the materials or the advance party here or why they didn’t then suss that a common cold might be a bit of a problem - it’s just a theory.

Anyway, irrespective of how they got the machines here, once the film opens and the aliens go on the rampage, it doesn’t really matter. The film rocks. The war machines are unstoppable, the humans have no way of fighting back and there’s no heroics, just survival. The imagery that Spielberg uses is straight out of modern history and in particular the awful footage of the collapse of the World Trade Centre in 2001. There’s clothes and newspapers falling to the ground, everyone covered in dust and ash, poster boards with pictures of the missing attached… all symbolism that conjures up the memories of the fear and horror that we’ve been experiencing this century.

The film is quite a low key affair too. It’s told entirely from the point of view of Tom Cruise’s character and we only see what he sees. This means that we don’t see the destruction of the US military forces by the aliens, or the destruction of the cities and it keeps the focus on how an event like this affects the ordinary man. This is very much like the original book which is written as a “history of events” by the narrator and told entirely from his perspective except with inserts about facts he has since come to learn.

Unfortunately, the film staggers towards the end and loses the pace. I like the scene in the cellar with Ogilvy for the most part (although I didn’t like the aliens so much). It’s an amalgamation of two chapters from the original book where Ogilvy is a combination of the character of the curate and the artilleryman. The alien tentacle/probe is lifted straight from the 1953 version of the movie but it’s all very effective. But after that scene and the subsequent (slightly dubious) escape from the tripod, the film is over. I know it’s faithful to Well’s original, but even so, it just ends. (Again, I’m not going to explore the ins and outs of the aliens succumbing to bacteria - it’s faithful to Wells from that point of view and at least it’s not water!)

From a cinematic point of view, it would have been better to make a visually more spectacular ending, perhaps draw out the trek from the farmhouse seeing the barren, torn apart landscape peculiarly lacking in tripods or something that actually led to the closing scenes. But more than that, the ending was a wasted oppurtunity and my feelings about it were voiced very well by a good friend.

When Ray and his daughter finally reach Boston they trek safely through the city to find his ex-wife and her parents (who, trivia fans will be delighted to note, are played by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the stars of the 1953 version), we see that Boston remains largely untouched by the alien attack. Either that or the glaziers in the city got back to work very quickly as the houses still have all the windows untouched and not only did Ray’s family get back to their house unscathed but are also remarkably clean. Delightful!

But how much more poignant would it have been if, after discovering that the aliens were dying, the humans had returned to homes that were reduced to rubble and lacking the basic essentials of electricity and running water? After the blatant 9/11 imagery of the alien invasion at the beginning, why didn’t Speilberg of the cojanes to finish the film with a scene that would invoke the imagery of post war Baghdad and to highlight what these displaced people, who have spent the last few days on the run, have lost and to give an idea about how they are going to have to spend years rebuilding their lives.

Incidentally, I wrote the first 10 pages of a new draft of an alien invasion script back in January. It featured an EMP attack and a plane crash. Great minds…! Won’t be able to use it now though!