War of the Worlds - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'War of the Worlds': No warm, fuzzy, flower-toting aliens this time

By CHRIS GARCIA
Austin American-Statesman

In Steven Spielberg's relentlessly frenetic "War of the Worlds," an alien lands on Earth to startle us all. The bizarre creature behaves erratically, terrifyingly. It has large, striking teeth and an intense glare. It follows unfathomable creeds straight from science fiction. Its name is Tom Cruise.

Paramount Pictures

'War of the Worlds'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Justin Chatwin, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto, David Alan Basche
Run time: 117 minutes
Release date: June 29, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images.
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Tabloid freak Cruise is the good guy in this violent extravaganza of human-hating space invaders, which ferries uneasily between obvious post-9/11 allegory and parenting handbook. Going into any Spielberg movie, it's a given you'll have to hold your nose at a misplaced contrivance or two and a conclusion that gropes for manufactured uplift. That's the Spielberg curse, and it's why he isn't as great a director as he should be. In "War of the Worlds," an otherwise impressively grim sci-fi spectacle, there are bits of dumb expedience and a tacked-on end note that would have made the film distinctly stronger, and darker, if left out.

What can't be quibbled is Spielberg's mastery of sustained action fluidity, which is breathtaking. His handling of the malicious Tripod invasion — towering metallic jellyfish that explode from underground then lurch through cities and the countryside with spindly determination — is thrilling, full of terrible wonder. There's no getting around the monsters' CGI origins — the model UFOs in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" were far more enchanting because they were tactile objects — yet the slightest suspension of disbelief rewards with an unnerving fantasy vision of death and destruction. There's a lot of kablooey going on and many anonymous Americans are by turns vaporized, stomped, thrown and drained of blood in most disturbing fashion. As the director himself points out, this is not one of his sugary alien love-fests.

Cruise and Spielberg have conspired to make a darkly entertaining disaster movie whose heart beats in notions of the family ideal. This is familiar territory for Spielberg, starting with the tense dynamics of the Brody brood in "Jaws," on to the familial disintegration in "Close Encounters" and the divorced mother with kids in "E.T."

With moderate credibility, Cruise plays a divorced father of two children — a doll-eyed 10-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning — ubiquitous, precocious, a little annoying) and a mopey teenage son (Justin Chatwin), who is a rote, poorly etched source of dramatic tension within the trio (his late-movie disappearance is welcome).

Cruise is a slapdash dad with a slovenly blue-collar air, who's put to the parenting test when the Tripod hordes pop from underground. We're never told where the aliens came from, what they are and why — a commendable approach that follows the 1898 H.G. Wells book that inspired the story. But if the enormous metal beasts have been secreting themselves beneath our cities for eons, as we are told, why didn't geologists discover them?

That's one question too many in such a finely tuned entertainment. No one questioned the stunning stupidity of "Independence Day," which attempted to distract with flatfooted jocularity.

If you're seeking subtext, take your pick: Do the Tripods represent America's neo-colonialism, stomping and conquering foreign soil with total disregard for civilian life? Or do they signify a terrorist attack on American ground where, as the film actually says, "No death is in vain"? Personally, I don't care. I'm in it for the hoot.

Once the aliens appear in force, pulverizing buildings, flipping cars, using people as Slurpees, "War of the Worlds" assumes a frantic beat that doesn't let up. Cruise grabs his kids and runs and pants and ducks and hides, doing his sweatiest to protect their innocence from an ugly world. So-so Dad becomes Super Dad in the flash of an alien laser. The movie hammers home his latent heroism yet never denies him a tender side, which includes tears, fear and a quivering lullaby of the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe" that's almost as hair-raising as those giant, probing alien eyeballs.

While Spielberg and his writers generate an implacable sense of peril, there's always a bullet-proof scrim between Cruise and the destroyers. Neither he or his children are going to die, face it. This lowers the stakes, yet leaves room to enjoy all the other grisly instances of mortality.

The movie becomes pure primal thrill, humans reacting to the incomprehensible with raw vigor. Spielberg aids the rush with both kinetic and balletic camera moves — swoops of action. He creates sights that astonish, scenes of sometimes crazy audacity, such as the smoldering ruins of a downed commercial jet with bodies strapped to seats, or a runaway train speeding past in flames, or a sky raining human pants. It's this last one that encapsulates the movie's abiding mixture of wonder and weirdness.