FINAL CUT: When Worlds Collide

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The fine folks at Spectravision (or OnCommand or whatever the hell the hotel in-room movie service is calling itself now) presented War of the Worlds to us the other night for a nominal fee. My wife had been resisting seeing the movie because of her unwillingness to help bankroll the freakish ravings of Tom Cruise. I tried wearing her down by reminding her that it wasn't fair to punish all of the other people who worked on the film, who probably didn't realize that Tom Cruise was about to go totally batty. Eventually, I guess I won out, because she agreed to my movie pick.

Does "intense" adequately describe the movie? Probably not. After a few minutes of exposition, the funny storm appears, the lightning strikes, and the first alien machine crawls out of the ground. And there's a brief hesitation...and then they get right to slaughtering the masses. From that moment, the movie never lets up, as Tom Cruise and his precocious daughter and irritating teenage son run from place to place trying to escape the obliteration of the human race. No clever one-liners, big cheers. Not even any moments where the characters stop and say, "Okay, let's just catch our breath and take stock of the situation." The film is relentless, constantly tossing the leads from the frying pan to the fire and back again.

At the end, Clair and I were exhausted. I turned to her and said weakly, "Yay. Summer blockbuster."

Out of curiosity, I swung by Rotten Tomatoes to gauge the critical reaction to the film. Much of it was similar to mine: a fantastic production, but grim and unsettling. Several reviews suggested that director Steven Spielberg had lost his touch, asking, "Where's the fun?"

That's when it hit me: maybe it's not fun on purpose.

I think the lust for what New City critic Ray Pride calls "apocalypse porn" began with Independence Day. There was something very bracing about the previews for that movie that came out six months in advance. Right there in the trailer, they blew up the White House, they blew up the Empire State Building, they basically blew up the world. So you watched that, and you said, "Damn. This is a movie that's not screwing around." And it worked to the extent that, when I saw the movie, I was able to completely shut off my brain and ignore the veritable flood of inconsistencies and unlikelihoods that drove the film's story forward. It was all "whoa" and "cool" and "dang!" The movie served the same role as a rollercoaster: it simulated the experience of being in mortal danger without the actual peril. It was thrilling.

Soon enough, movies had to have that thrill. And special effects made that possible. Explosions could be bigger, and we could get closer to them. Cataclysm became a good formula. It was hyper-real, and it seemed as if we might no longer recognize the real thing. Which turned out to be true on...say it with me...September 11.

That so many people commented that watching the actual terrorist attacks was akin to watching a Jerry Bruckheimer movie illustrated just how dependent moviemakers had become on the threat of utter disaster to involve an audience in their stories. That a special effects ploy had become quite real made the fake thing seem terribly hollow.

At the time, Steven Spielberg rejected the idea of making a movie about September 11. It was too painful, too horrible to consider turning into popcorn entertainment. And he made a movie about the Holocaust, so he should know.

One thing that has always made a Spielberg movie stand out from, say, a Michael Bay movie, is that no matter how fantastical the elements of the story, it's always personal. Yes, aliens are visiting the earth, but it's not about scientists or soldiers. It's about a boy in the suburbs, or a utility worker who keeps seeing Devil's Tower. So yes, he's made his share of popcorn entertainment. But with a human heart.

Except for The Lost World. That had no heart. And it blew.

So I'm trying to imagine him getting the script for War of the Worlds. Here's a guy who re-created a concentration camp for the screen, who re-created D-Day for the screen. He assumed the mantle of Stanley Kubrick to complete one of the great director's last projects. He's not the same guy who made Duel.

Anyway, here comes the script for a movie about aliens destroying the world. Killing millions. Wreaking havoc. And what I'm thinking is, Spielberg flips out. "Are you kidding?" he says. "We just watched our country brutally attacked, we're watching our own soldiers dying regularly in a Middle Eastern desert, we're scarred by current events. And you want people to laugh and cheer and death and destruction?"

And then it hits him. "I'll show them," he says. "They want to see explosions? They want rampant killing and people running for their lives? Sure, I can do that." And he does. And he shows it for the misery and despair and gut-clenching fear that it is.

War of the Worlds is the response to every stupid piece of apocalypse porn the film industry has produced. It's the end of disaster movies. It's Spielberg taunting the audience. "This is what you want? Fine. I'll give you what you want. But unvarnished."

I really think he's trying to punish us as viewers. Consider that one of the first people to be killed by the aliens is a man filming the event with a camcorder. We have seen the machine rise up over the remains of a destroyed church, and people have wisely backed away. But they still linger to watch, gaping at the destruction. And one has a video camera. And the next thing we see is that camera cluttering to the ground, its owner reduced to ash. The lesson: don't rubberneck.

Reinforcing my take on this movie is the way Spielberg peppers the film with 9/11 iconography. Oh, September 11 is everywhere in War of the Worlds. People running from explosions. People covered in dust and ash. Refugees dotting highways and clamoring to get on ferries. Bodies falling from the sky. Pictures of the missing taped to fences and walls. Timothy Noah of Slate noticed it, and he called it offensive, saying Spielberg had no right to appropriate these images for his entertainment.

The thing is, I think Spielberg doesn't intent to use these images for entertainment. I think he's taking them to leach out whatever entertainment we might find in the rampant destruction he is depicting. He's trying to attach consequences to an outlandish event. Blowing up the White House had no real impact, because it was cartoonish. But War of the Worlds refuses to be a cartoon. The 9/11 references make you queasy. Stop enjoying this, Spielberg seems to be saying. Grow up.

Unfortunately, screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp undercut this message with the character of Robbie, the teenage son of Tom Cruise's Ray. Robbie is irritating in that way that teenagers are, but he becomes an essential character the first time the family encounters troops on their way to engage the alien enemy. Robbie's gut reaction is to join them, to take on the invaders. In a way, he echoes the thousands of men who joined the military the day after Pearl Harbor. He is impulsive but brave, wanting to confront the aggressor head-on.

Ray rejects this notion, constantly trying to avoid death and protect himself and his children. And the movie seems to side with him, since virtually every person we see who attempts to stand up to the aliens -- or even stops to look at the aliens -- is pulverized. And it certainly looks like we've seen the last of Robbie when he finally breaks away from his father, telling him, "I have to see this." He wants to be like us. He wants to see the death and the destruction first-hand. He wants to rubberneck. And Ray lets him go.

So comes as a real surprise at the end of the movie when Ray has finally dragged himself and his daughter to Boston, where he hopes to find his pregnant ex-wife. He finds her alright. She's alive, her boyfriend is alive, her parents are alive, the entire neighborhood looks completely undamaged -- and there's Robbie. Unscratched. It's as though Spielberg wanted to make us suffer for the sin of looking at death, but finally couldn't pull the trigger himself. It undercuts the lesson. To say nothing of not really making sense. "He's alive? What?!?"

If I'm right, and Spielberg really does intend War of the Worlds as a corrective to crap like Stealth, then I don't think it's going to work. People seem drawn to explosions and catastrophe. We can't help it. Maybe it makes us feel a little bit superior. "Hey, I'm not dead in a plane crash." Maybe we need the vicarious thrill of seeing disaster without being in disaster. But his movie does go down like strong medicine. We have seen man brought down to his knees by forces we cannot stop or even comprehend. And it turns out not to be very much fun.