War of the Worlds
| State of body | Simple, small, greyish, and conical. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | A small-scale slice-of-life family drama was an interesting and nicely daring choice for an alien invasion film, but it falls perilously close to being “a bunch of stuff that happened”. |
I looked down at the slab, and then up at Dr. Winston. He grinned at me.
“What’s this?†I said.
“War of the Worlds.â€
“What am I supposed to do with it?â€
“What you always do.†Dr. Winston made slicing motions with his hand.
I looked down at the cadaver, and then up at my lovely new sharp scalpel. My normal procedure was to do a once-over visual inspection, and then carefully slice down through the main plot line to inspect the carotid arteries leading to the heart of the story. But I had a feeling this might be tricky in this case.
Dr. Winston pulled out his notebook and pencil. “Ready when you are.â€
“The subject,†I said, “is… you’ve got to be kidding. This is all there was left?â€
“It’s all we could recover.â€
“The subject,†I said again, “appears to be a small pile of ash.†I stirred it with the scalpel. “Fine ash. Piled in a neat cone on a Petri dish.â€
“What would you say was the cause of death?†said Dr. Winston.
“I would say the cause of death was being a smart-arse,†I said. “Oh, I see. You mean War of the Worlds. Are you quite certain it’s dead?â€
Dr. Winston nodded. “It’s not breathing, and I couldn’t find a pulse.â€
There wasn’t a lot I could do. I sifted through the ash, looking for clues, but the only real information – whether it was Martians or self-immolation – would have to come from pathology.
“That seems to be about that,†I said.
Dr. Winston nodded and shut his notebook. “Right-oh. So you don’t want to view the videotape?â€
I stared at him blankly.
“Showing its last moments. On a DVD.†He waved a disk.
After I had disposed of Dr. Winston in the appropriate containers, I watched the DVD. It was decently visceral and scary, but was rather unfair on the Martians. The Martians had a perfectly fine plan to destroy humanity and enslave its population, gradually turning everyone into a fine red mist, but were all kinds of stupid about pathogens and had a really obscure way of invading the Earth. We get the dramatic revelation that the War Machines had been on the Earth all the time, and that the Martians were just burrowing down into them via lightning-strike pods.
I kept waiting for an explanation or elaboration of this idea. It seemed provocative. It was one of the few real plot changes from the original story, so surely it was there for a reason. Perhaps I missed some cleverness, but I don’t think it was ever explained, and it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. What advantage would the Martians get from sending the War Machines to Earth in advance? When did they do it, and why couldn’t they have invaded at that time instead of later? Why haven’t any of the War Machines been discovered until the invasion? Sad to say, I think the only reason for this is so that the Martians can come burrowing out of the ground in the middle of the street, a more cinematic revelation than the cylinder in the crater of the novel – and thematically, to give the vibe that the invaders were there all along, evoking volcanos, earthquakes, plagues, and other simmering threats.
As tempting as it is to try and make sense of this, I’d be just as happy to delete it altogether. There’s nothing wrong with emphasising that the invaders came from out there and if that means putting a bloody great sucking chest wound of a crater in the ground instead of the bruised puncture wound of the movie, then so be it. You can even compromise: there’s no necessity for the craters to be the kind of craters that would be created by a crash. The Martians have cool technology. We could see big lightning strikes, and then suddenly, flush with the ground, or in a shallow pit, there’s a gleaming metal disc, red hot. If we want a cool surprise for later, why not show a page-8 article in the newspaper showing spectacular volcanic activity on Mars? I doubt any science news other than “Here’s a real picture of an alien†would make the front page. Our main characters probably didn’t even read about it.
There’s a lot to like about “War of the Worldsâ€, but by the time I got to the end, I was surprised to find myself completely unmoved. I loved that the Martians used electro-magnetic pulses to wipe out electronics everywhere, and it was a sensible move to set the film in modern day, just to remove the last fig leaf of security that setting it in the 19th century would have done. And it was a bold decision to make the hero just an average survivor. He does some brave things, but the film (as with the book) is essentially a travelogue, an exercise in world-building (or rather, destroying). We get to see the progression of the invasion, and the fact that it’s with the same characters from moment to moment is almost secondary.
Almost secondary. We are clearly supposed to care for them and to feel “what if I were in their place? What would I do?†But Spielberg never quite makes us scared enough for it to matter. There are plenty of effective moments – the town being disintegrated as he drives away, the burning train, the ferry – but there are equally as many bits that don’t quite work, particularly the scene with Tim Robbins’ lunatic, and the army battle that immediately precedes it.
In the latter case, the problem is simply that the film sets us up for a big battle scene and then doesn’t show it to us. Monty Python were particularly fond of this kind of tease (the ending for Holy Grail comes to mind) and it can sometimes be effective – what we are forced to imagine can be more vivid that what we directly see. However, in this case, I felt cheated. The events were happening just over the other side of the hill, Tom chasing his son as he attempts to join the fight, and because it would be so easy for him to go a few steps forward and see, we are expecting him to do so. Just how are the humans dealing with the Martian invaders? What new death rays are the Martians using? The moment felt like it was leading up to a glimpse (however brief), and we never got it. If Spielberg was intent on not showing us, he should have had Tom further back. It is clear that the movie is told closely from his point of view (occasionally going to his children) and if he were further from the top of the hill, we would not have the expectation that we would see what was there.
More annoying was the scene with Tim’s lunatic. They were careful to present the paedophile angle ambiguously – was he, or was Tom just being paranoid in these paranoid times? – and that was good. However, the climax of having Tom kill Tim didn’t work, especially since the pressing reason for the murder (that Tim was just too noisy a housemate) was utterly pointless from the scenes that followed. It might have been better if the fight had happened while the war machine was scoping out the cellar – Tom strangling Tim to prevent him from making a noise or attacking it.
My biggest problem was the sudden anticlimax of the end. The scenes with the War Machines collapsing were good, but to follow up with the perfectly preserved terrace house in Boston, complete with his son being perfectly OK, made me wonder whether they had just suddenly run out of budget. Why hadn’t the Martians flattened Boston in the way they were destroying New York? I suppose once again it’s a niggle that would be fixed by having the house half-destroyed and covered with decaying red weed, the survivors emerging from the cellar, son nowhere in sight.
It’s another niggle that the climax had the Martians die off from Earth bacteria. It should even be a positive element. Faithfulness to the book is not usually something I see as a downside, and it would certainly have been a radical departure for the protagonist to come up with something that destroyed the Martians (“They’re allergic to salt-water! Spray ‘em!â€). In the second series of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen†comics, they retell the War of the Worlds story, and the conclusion is that yes, the Martians die from bacteria, but it is biological warfare from the humans, not an oversight from the Martians. That was a satisfying conclusion, a nice twist. The story here is too small, too personal to do this twist in the same way, but we could do a variant. Perhaps we could see more sick people as our characters go through their journey, and it is revealed near the end that the military has deliberately been spreading this sickness. The War Machines are shown sucking up people’s blood and spreading it around to seed the red weed – perhaps, in this case, it is that very action that dooms them: by killing sick people, they are spreading the virus that eventually kills them. To support this, we could have a couple of scenes with soldiers deliberately allowing themselves to be picked up and killed, or soldiers attempting to inject people with the disease. Near the end, our protagonists might even be chased by the soldiers as well as the Martians, until the Martians start to succumb.
I think, honestly, it’s niggles that prevented “War of the Worlds†from getting anywhere near my top ten films for 2005. I had great expectations of it, but it didn’t sustain the intensity or evoke enough “That could be me!†moments for me to really get into the story. Besides the conclusion, it was mostly small moments that pulled me out: the airplane crashing directly on the house they were hiding in; the Martians wandering around the cellar for no reason other than to show what they looked like; that the Martians had not nearly enough tentacles and certainly didn’t do any seething or pulsating; and the other problems I’ve already mentioned. It’s unfair to say that the cadaver was a small pile of dust, but considering the resources and skills of the people behind it, I thought the film was a significant failure.
January 16th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
[...] and talked and watched through Anna’s raw footage. I also managed a bit of work on War of the Worlds and finally finished it off and posted it, despite mild misg [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 11:01 am
I thought the first half of this movie was the first half of a very good movie- I especially liked the way the hero was shown to be an appallingly reckless driver and a general idiot *before* the alien stuff started going down, so his actions later in the film were completely in character. I would stop the film at about the point where the long line of military vehicles first appears, and before #1 son begins to gabble.
I would like to suggest a resolution for the ‘Martian’ vessels appearing under the ground:
(1) The invaders are really from somewhere much further away than Mars. They broadcast a signal, nothing more, to Earth.
(2) This signal interacted with the Earthling’s electrical devices to cause massive atmospheric disturbances, generating a great deal of energy at the alien’s disposal.
(3) Other information in the alien signal caused the electrical discharges to occur, these containing energy + information
(4) This energy + information was used to produce nanomachines at the point of discharge
(5) These nanomachines then generated both the ‘shiny hardware’ and ‘biological’ components of the ‘Martian’ invaders from components in situ.
Because the aliens had made no previous observations of Earth, they could not take any precautions against Earthly microorganisms. But they did not care, since everything in their invasion was constructed on the spot and was not really them. And the same thing will happen next year, when the Earth is in the right spot to intercept the signal again…
I suspect it was not really a serious alien invasion, just a coupla-orders-of-magnitude greater version of a computer worm written by some alien geek in his pyjamas…
January 21st, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Ha ha ha. Great response Vlogmid.
February 24th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
My biggest problem with this movie was the ending. “Oh, I almost died to deliver my daughter safely to her mother…..only to find their house compleatly unharmed, along with my son, who charged into a battle where trained US soldiers ALL DIED, but no, he’s okay. And then they hug their mother and ignore me. I feel good.”
…wtf.
February 24th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Yep, I think you’ve metaphorically hit the nail on the top bit of the nail with a hammer. What was deeply unsatisfying was that the film pretty much had a reset button at the end: everyone important is OK, and if you squint and don’t look left or right, the world is roughly as it was before the invasion. It might have been nice to see the beginnings of What Happens Next. Would there have been riots? Man’s reversion to base instincts, such as we saw in the cellar, or the film Basic Instinct? Or cooperation, people offering food and blankets and the use of undestroyed houses. I can see why they didn’t show any of that – the aliens had *only just* died – but a good grace note might have been a whole bunch of survivors in the ex-wives house – say, instead of meeting outside the house, he goes in, and there are dozens of people inside, huddled and waiting for their doom, not yet realising they are saved. I guess my main problem with the end is that it was so clean. Having the ex-wife being more affected by the chaos would have helped mitigate that.
February 24th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Vlogmid – I really like your comment! That alternate reading didn’t occur to me, and I’m kicking myself because I’ve thought of the nanomachine thing before myself, but as a way for humans to colonise other planets, rather than the other way around.
February 25th, 2006 at 11:57 am
I had very high hopes for this retelling of the War of The Worlds, even wondering what evocations of terrorist acts/minds could be attribiuted to the martians, or the “fre” humans.
Alas, the only such evocation was the photos and posters showing the “Have you seen him?” motif repeated over and over.
For the rest, it was simply the Tom Cruise Show re-re-re-dux. For all that he is on film for such a short period of time the Tim Robbins chracterization is so much more vivid than any others.
Cruise’s characterization is set in the first few minutes in the film with his bickering with his ex-wife and the engine block on the kitchen table. ANd he doesn’t grow beyond that point. And for all his adventures, *he* never realizes a real loss — his kids and family, at the end, are hale and healthy, and Cruise’s character doesn’t even learn from the attempt of sacrifice of his on-screen son, but the character is just as much an empty, unrealized shell as at the beginning of the film.
February 27th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Bad:
If they can fly from Mars and plant ships thousands of years in the past, they darn well ought to know about sterilization of fluids and air.
If you’re going to strangle Tim Robbins for that reason, you should do it waaaay earlier, before he’s done all his hollering and banging around.
The son going over the hill scene is symbolic of Tom letting his son go to live his own life. Except it’s not symbolic. They spell it all out in the dialogue and setup.
Good:
Morgan Freeman rocks.
The train and flotilla of corpses were truly eerie.
February 28th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Craig – dammit, I’ve never been much good at character development (either spotting it or writing it myself.) I suppose the nearest we get to development for him is killing Tim Robbins, but we don’t see much of how that changes him. Is he haunted? Does he consider how useless the death was, given that they were out of the house not long after killing him?
Part of the problem is opportunity: Tom’s character doesn’t spend much time with anyone else, except his daughter. There’s very rarely even an opportunity for him to talk with anyone in a sustained way. Interaction with other people (whether through dialogue or not) might have helped with that.
It would have been a bit of a departure, but perhaps Tom is fundamentally more suspicious of people after killing Tim. This could come to a head with him attacking someone else who (say) talked to his daughter, killing them too. Then we would have the more traditional redemption structure to follow.
More relevently to your comment, I don’t think he needs to actually suffer real loss to progress, though I wouldn’t have objected if he had discovered his son really had been killed. The fear of loss seemed to be almost as important, or perhaps the reluctance to let go. Having Tom going through the feral stage and back up into humanity again might have worked against that. He loses his car earlier; perhaps he steals one back later, kills some more people as mentioned earlier, and does whatever it takes to protect his daughter at the expense of everyone else. Hell, although it’d probably work to have him realise the Error of his Ways, it could even end with him heavily armed, advancing on the house, knowing that the aliens are dead but not even thinking about the aliens, and us not knowing just what he’s going to do any more…
February 28th, 2006 at 12:44 am
Strangelander – I liked Vlogmid’s response to the micro-organism complaint, but that one might be a little difficult to explain in this particular film, given that we don’t get a chance to visit a high-tech lab capable of working out what happened. Perhaps we are shown that the aliens *are* careful, that they wear suits when exposed, but that there’s something else they don’t foresee – this may be cheesy, but what if they didn’t anticipate just how much things rust on Earth? It needn’t be as bad as the water thing in Signs, but perhaps their precautions are inadequate – the thin layer of rust-protectant on the war machines gets scratched, the war machines and environment suits rust enough that the martians are exposed to the bacteria and die.
I s’pose that doesn’t explain why the red weed dies off, though.
August 19th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Very interesting analysis, most of which I agree with. However I would repspectfully like to suggest a different ending.
For me, one of the key phrases in the whole book is “…slain, after all man’s devices had failed…” The whole message of the book is that humanity is utterly, utterly defenceless in the face of the invaders. Therefore for humanity to be pro-active in any way in defeating the invaders, even if it is in using biological agents, runs counter to the spirit of the book.
I accept that it is a very abrupt ending, particularly when audiences like their plots to be adeqauetly signposted and meticulously set up, but I believe that there may be suitable structure.
The invaders target hospitals as a source of food which will put up very little resistance. This sets up the fact that they are ingesting disease, as well as portraying them as merciless killers. For those who like their final act grand set pieces, the military have set up a “last stand” around a hospital, where the protagonists have found themselves. However…the humans LOSE, are over-run and the invaders start to feed on the patients. Maybe a final scene where an invader chases the protagonists on foot through the hospital, but starts to exhibit symptoms of infection, which is the clue-in that the invaders are being struck down by bacteria.
August 20th, 2006 at 12:41 am
You’re quite right! It rather subverts the intent of the book and film to have people be too responsible for the deaths of the aliens: the underlying message must be that we are not the masters of Earth. The hospital scenario is a fine one: it could be made clear that the arrival of the Martians have caused outbreaks of contageous diseases, as the masses of humanity run and mingle and die together, weakened as refugees by poor food and terror. Everyone thinks the disease or plague was caused by the Martians, but it’s revealed in the end that the link is not directly causal. As such, it doesn’t even (quite) have to be a hospital; rather, a road (or many roads, all around the world) choked with dying refugees would serve just as well.
Excellent suggestion!