Friday, July 1, 2005

WAR O' THE WISP: Imagine, if you will, making a film of the 82nd Airborne Division launching a sneak attack on the local animal shelter. The victims helpless, the survivors witless, the outcome inevitable. Now, imagine having a budget of $185M to do it. And since you have a $185M budget, you might as well change the 82nd airborne to aliens and the animal shelter to the Hudson Valley, without losing any of the original drama. There, my friends, you have Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

[Spoilers, such as they are, follow]

Now, I enjoyed the movie. The death rays that turn panicking New Yorkers into a 300-grain fetid powder, while leaving their clothes to drift in the wind were brilliant. The aliens, although inexplicably radially symmetric on their lower torso while bilaterally symmetric at the head, were cool. The howling mobs were, I must say, pretty disturbing.

But as drama -- let alone as science fiction -- it utterly fails. The tripods have force-shields which protect them from even the most foolhardy of attacks. The audience knows the 10th Mountain or the Vermont National Guard is going to get vaporized. Nothing so far in the movie has suggested that an M-1A Abrams is even going to bust through the alien's limited damage waiver. So the audience is left to root for nobility, not success. That's not an unhuman emotion, mind you. Tea Leoni's single greatest performance was in Deep Impact during her scene as a six-pixel-tall woman facing a 1,000 foot wave. I was touched by that. And I hope that if I'm ever faced with aliens, or terrorists, or tsunami and I can die -- or die nobly -- I chose nobility.

But plot is so much more interesting than atmosphere. And this movie has no plot. Tom Cruise does nothing in this movie. Certainly nothing which affects the outcome. He runs. He grabs his daughter. And then he runs again. And runs. And runs, until such time as the aliens die of the common cold. If I wanted a pointless story about people I hate waiting for someone to die of consumption, I'd have gone to the theater and took in A Long Day's Journey Into Night.

What I wanted in War of the Worlds -- hell, what I want in any big budget alien invasion flick -- is pretty simple: (a) aliens arrive and prove hostile, much to humanity's disappointment; (b) aliens rout Earth's defenses for the rest of the first act; (c) during part (b) a few brave civilians or troops acting independently should do some damage to the aliens; (d) the information gleaned from the events of (c) should be used by a renegade group of civilians to bring that information to the authorites and finally, (e) the authorities should spread the war of the clever civilians to the rest of the world, thus (f) defeating the aliens.

Of course, in parts all parts (a) through (f), lots of cool shit should blow up.

This works in every movie from Earth v. the Flying Saucers to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes to Independence Day. The good guys acting against and -- by accident and design -- hurting the bad guys. Cruise does none of that. And the one place he does do some harm to the alien bad guys, it does nothing to advance the cause of humanity against the alien bad guys.

That said, this movie may represent the most realistic assesment of what first contact may be like. It's clear enough that if we ever do encounter aliens, they'll likely be so far ahead or behind us that we will scarcely notice one another, but if we do -- no matter how benevolent the intent -- the culture and societal shock will make the Trail of Tears look like a press junket with the Dalai Lama. Five hundred years after contact, humans will be resigned to busking street corner Wagner or Laurel & Hardy to make a few Galactic Domars to feed the wife and kids.

Maybe Tom Cruise knows a thing or two about aliens. Maybe he has this one close to the mark.
But he can tell you that we haven't been attacked by aliens for the last 75 million years. And waiting for the DVD won't hurt you.

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