You join me once again as I enter the final three days of Blogtober. This has been a difficult month for many as pandemic restrictions seem to be tightening almost everywhere and we approach what is sure to be one of the bleakest winters we’ve ever had…
But anyway today’s topic is about um… oh… oh I guess this is really quite appropriate for the times isn’t it?
It’s Steven Spielberg’s 9/11 allegorical interpretation of HG Wells’ seminal novel War of the Worlds. This was one of my favourite stories as a nipper and I went to watch this film in the cinema when it came out in 2005.
Tom Cruise plays a deadbeat dad, Ray, who has partial custody of his children who are visiting him for the weekend when a bizarre storm knocks out all the power, even to things not connected to a grid, like mobile phones and cars.
Ray goes to investigate an area a few streets away that saw multiple lightning strikes during this brief, strange storm and out of the ground rises an imposing tripod full of aliens that starts vaporising everyone in sight.
Ray runs home and manages to escape with his kids in a car whose battery was replaced. He takes the children to their mother’s house, but she isn’t there as she went to spend time with her family in Boston.
Ray finds himself suddenly burdened by responsibility he had eschewed his entire life to keep his children alive and safe. Wherever they travel, the aliens aren’t far behind so they can barely rest.
Their car gets mobbed as they enter one town and Ray has to give it up in return for the safety of his children at gunpoint. They board a ferry that gets capsized by another tripod and they manage to climb a hill where the military are making a stand.
Ray’s older child, Robbie, runs off to join the army in a fit of righteous anger, leaving Ray to believe him dead and look after his daughter, Rachel.
They find shelter in the basement of a house that’s being occupied by a man being driven out of his wits. The man nearly gives them away several times by his actions, and eventually Ray has to kill him.
They don’t remain undetected for long, however, and Rachel gets captured and placed in a kind of holding cell on one of the tripods. Ray follows her, allowing himself to also be caught, but not before finding some grenades in an abandoned army truck.
He manages to use the grenades to detonate inside the tripod, which uses some organic matter in an attempt to suck people from the cells inside to who knows what grizzly fate.
Having rescued Rachel, they continue their journey in Boston’s direction, with nothing better to do and discover the aliens and their tripods seem to be weakened by something.
The tripods start collapsing by themselves and it transpires the aliens couldn’t survive all the bacteria on Earth that humans have acclimatised to. Ray reunites with Rachel’s mother and somehow, Robbie is also there, so it’s a nice schmulzy Spielberg ending for all!
Many people have criticised the film’s ending as a bit anticlimactic, but the book ends in the same way, with the aliens succumbing to Earth’s diseases. All of the scary stuff happens well before, however.
Spielberg’s film is one of those rare things that takes a lot from the book, yet alters much as well. At no point, apart from the happy ending, does this film feel like it’s not HG Wells’ novel realised in film and yet Spielberg also does a great job of modernising it while making the foes similarly frightening.
I mentioned at the article’s beginning this film was an allegory for 9/11. You don’t have to look far to see the inspiration. Ray is covered in dust when he returns from the first encounter with the tripod, Robbie has the overwhelming urge to fight back against a foe that everyone can see is practically unbeatable and the man in the basement is a clear conspiracy-nut.
The realism imbued into the film from the real-life tragedy makes the alien antagonists far more threatening and the film has a creepy foreboding atmosphere right from the get-go to make it all the more chilling.
In one of the first scenes, a reporter is standing on the Ukrainian border with one of its European neighbours as the news puzzles over what could be happening in the country after the power goes and no apparent message comes from within.
The desperate reactions of other human beings to what’s going on, presumably inspired by 9/11 again, is pretty damning and bleak towards humanity, but the scariest portion of the film is in the basement.
Four things of note happen down there. Firstly, an tendril-like eye from the tripod looks around as Ray, Rachel and the crazy man try to hide from it, without making any noise.
The scene is completely silent and the tension is so sharp you’ll cut yourself sitting up. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but there is some fantastic acting from Tom Cruise when he silently begs the man not to attack the tendril with an axe.
Again, it’s all silent and the prospect of the three people being discovered is so alarming I don’t think I even breathed throughout that scene.
Secondly, after the eye has had a scout around, we get the first look at the aliens as they come snooping around, again mandating the trio hide. They come so close on many occasions that it could become laughable they weren’t discovered, but the odd shape and noise of the aliens, combined with the fear and silence from the humans makes this another pant-wetting scene after barely a let up from the tendril-eye.
Thirdly, after the aliens have gone, the crazy man, who is angry with Ray as he thought Ray would join him in a resistance, sees the tripods siphoning off the blood of human victims, which is being used to create red vines all over the surface. (In the book, this is the reason given why Mars is red.)
The crazy man loses it, and Ray pleads with him to stay quiet so he doesn’t give them away. He won’t, so Ray tells his daughter to close her eyes and sing a lullaby while he murders the crazy man. It’s not as downright creepy as the other scenes in the basement, but it’s a suitably dark statement on the kind of decisions one has to make in a desperate situation.
Fourthly, Ray and Rachel now finally believing themselves to be safe, they go to sleep, only for Rachel to wake up and find the tendril-eye staring right at her. The sudden shift from safety, as it felt that part of the film had been building up to a more optimistic conclusion, took me completely by surprise and I thank my lucky stars I went to the toilet before the film was screened!
I wanted to talk about War of the Worlds as it’s not really billed as a scary film, more a sci-fi/thriller epic, but throughout the runtime it shows how vulnerable and easily upended people and their lives can be.
Take Ray’s journey, for example. Ray clearly loves his kids, but has little interest in raising them, preferring to treat them like friends. He’s presumably scared of the responsibility he has to his children.
When the aliens attack, his driving thought is to get his children to their mother, both to alleviate his responsibilities, but also likely because he thinks they’ll genuinely be safer if they’re with someone other than him.
As the film progresses, he accepts his responsibility more and more, to the point where he has to let Robbie go and join the army so he can look after Rachel.
Due to the 9/11 inspired imagery and the themes of parenthood and trying to protect the innocent from an unimaginable power, this film might seem sad rather than scary, but just look at the landscape after they flee the basement – it looks like a Hallowe’en village!
Matt Hartless Blog 