Review: The War of the Worlds

Having had the chance to catch some of the original film on Friday, I was all set to make comparisons between the two.

I must confess, the 1953 original has aged very well indeed, so the perceived gulf between the two films that you might imagine to exist really isn't the case.

With that in mind, I was please to see that Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, who played the lead roles of Dr. Clayton Forrester and Sylvia Van Buren in the original get cameo appearances.

Also, with the golden brown tones of Morgan Freeman as the narrator, who delivers the opening a closing passages of the film, as taken from the original film, which I presume were in turn taken from the by H.G. Wells novel, we are treated to a wonderful nod to the original film to keep people like me happy that someone has at least some appreciation of the original.

Gone is the bluish wash of the likes of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, and also gone was the very well choreographed battle sequences, which were played out in a very disorganized and slip-shod fashion, with civilians and military personnel clambering up a hill to observe and face off the enemy respectively.

Even with that momentary lapse, there was still plenty of room for some relentlessly scary sequences, where you as the viewer are thrust into the predicament of wondering just what you're going to do and where you're going to run when threatened by a towering, gangling, monstrous machine intent on your demise and the demise of everyone else.

In the initial scene where the machines are revealed, Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise seems to run around with little purpose, when I could see every parent in the cinema screaming to themselves: "Go and get your bloody kids, man! What's wrong with you?"

So while the realism of fear and terror existed, parental instincts were set aside for tension.

But these are minor quibbles, and to be honest, while I can think of other examples that I and my friends all voiced on the way out of the showing, they remain minor non show-stoppers that are all to be filed under "Suspended Belief".

I must confess to being very struck by the growing and mesmerizing talents of miss Dakota Fanning, having first seen her in Taken, another Steven Spielberg endeavor and then more recently in Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, I predict a wonderful career for this astoundingly talented young woman, assuming she steers clear of the bottle, the pill and the needle.

It's interesting to spot the themes that only Spielberg seems able to intertwine in such film genres, most notably that of the humanity and how he explores the way people might react to the unimaginable.

Thankfully, gone are the days of people all talking over each other, such as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws, which just annoyed the hell out of my dad .. which was funny!

As is always the case with any film these days, there are the predictable stock plot devices. In this case, not-so doting Dad has to win over his brood if he wants to save their lives .. blah, blah, blah. All not very interesting, but serving as the backdrop and the vehicle for the film.

But there's no doubting Spielberg's ability to make real the improbable simply through how people react, rather than pure special effects, with buildings falling and cars exploding, which, let's face it, we've seen before and you'll no doubt see much of in this film.

Another theme was when columns of deshevled, dirty, beaten people fleeing the horrors of the alien machines, were seen walking through a narrow green valley, populated by small farmsteads, a river and a road. A location that I'm sure looked deliberately anonymous, and could in fact have been anywhere in the world, maybe even somewhere in Europe.

Clearly an idea borrowed from some other war scene, and borrowed to good effect.

OK, so I have one more complaint, but again, it's a small one and only to be shared with those as needlessly observant as I am. How much did the aliens in this film look like those from Independence Day?

Only in the face, mind. But maybe not even a real complaint after all.

So why did the aliens invade?

Why it is the eternal purpose of the invader to take the land of their enemy. But this really wasn't covered in the film, which doesn't bother me personally, but I'm not sure if that would have sat well with an American audience who often seem uncomfortable without knowing a reason, with the exception of George A. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead.

But then there was a sort of visual narrative, alluding to their very own final solution for the problem of the humans inhabitants; as they pass through an area, they begin the process of terra-forming the planet for their own needs.

And again, here is where Spielberg delivers a horrifying vision, not simply of mechanical genocide, but of processing and cold, clinical resource management, where humans are nothing more than living fertilizer.

I could say that I have a final complaint about the ending, but I don't, although others do.

What was interesting was that as the various methods of communication broke down as the invasion began, rumour and hear-say took over. One person saying one thing, only to be contradicted moments later by someone else.

We're taken from a small world where everything to be known is only a moment or two away between news casts, to a disconnected, isolated and hostile series of disjointed and often factually incorrect tales spread as people flee the ravages of the enemy.

And I'm sure this was the idea behind the seemingly abrupt ending; that no news had broken through and that the end came as quickly as the beginning had started.

Such is life...