The Chris Moeller Archives

Total devastation

I don't know what horrendous thing Steven Spielberg said to his father in childhood for which he will never forgive himself, but he's been begging for Dad's forgiveness ever since.
No one has ever doubted Spielberg's skill with a camera or his ability to push an audience's buttons, but let me just also say that his fellow international superstar, Michael Jackson, has received a disproportionate amount of acclaim as possessor of Hollywood's biggest 'Peter Pan' complex. Arnold and Leah Spielberg's little boy is a worthy contender for the crown.

I saw an advance screening of "War of the Worlds" tonight, and I can safely report that if you've grown pleasantly accustomed to Spielberg's tales of paternal redemption smothered in the latest CGI special effects, you won't be disappointed. The movie is packed with 'splosions, aliens, death, and destruction. The world is collapsing before our very eyes, and Tom Cruise's character still can't get a hug from his son.

Peter Bogdanovich, an auteur and critic of the highest caliber, was on television this weekend saying that "The War of the Worlds" story always returns to the culture during times of great national peril-- World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terrorism, etc. It penetrates this time, he says, when a character in the movie asks the question, "Is it terrorists?"
Yet, I defy you to find any thought or emotion expressed in the film remotely relevant to current world affairs. It's devoid of any political expression or social commentary, and that's a remarkable waste, based on the timing of the film's release. The original work- the book by H.G. Wells- has been criticized by some as xenophobic, but the themes have shown a remarkable elasticity through multiple reincarnations, most notably the radio play in the 1930s directed by Orson Welles. Such as has always been his style, Spielberg has rid his film of any whiff of controversy or potential scandal. He has sanitized it, presumably, to add to his already staggeringly impressive box office legacy, and he's populated the picture with the top mega-watt star of the day, Tom Cruise, a man who's only been fascinating in his career for his ability to cultivate his own celebrity, and a man about whom critic Tom Carson once wrote, "Fundamentally, (he's) an entrepreneur; he'd have less to talk about with Brando than Bill Gates. And more to talk about with Barney than either, since he's his own product."
It says much about both Spielberg and Cruise that they both still go to such extraordinary lengths to be top box office draws. In their separate but equal desperations, Cruise chases young women creatively before the media, while Spielberg has turned to star vehicles more than ever before. The director who once cast neurotic Everymen like Richard Dreyfuss to play opposite his special effects creations now works almost exclusively with the Toms, Cruise and Hanks.

Like with "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," Spielberg seems to believe that the choice of darker source material projects upon him greater maturity, but sadly, it's still that same little child of divorce behind the camera with each new theatrical release, arrested in development at 12-years-old and attempting to show the adult world what he can build with his new toys. In "Schindler," we never see the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers (except in a hideously dishonest scene in which the Jews are sprayed with water,) and none of the characters we're made to care about meet their mortality in the Concentration Camp. I won't give away the ending of "War of the Worlds" except to say there's a logic-defying family reunion very near the end.

Fundamentally, the largest problem with the film is it's implausibility. Not the aliens landing on Earth. I recognize that suspension of disbelief here being part of the fun. But little of the human behavior, outside of all the running, matches what would really happen, to say nothing of some of the continuity problems.
A teenage boy, for example, would not leave his family on "the battlefield" to fight attacking aliens. A scene in which hundreds of people attack Cruise's family's car is beyond preposterous, as well as description, and most importantly, Cruise's kids would let bygones be bygones with their Weekend Dad about two seconds after they've seen bloodthirsty aliens shoot lasers.
Perhaps, Spielberg felt he had extended license to stray from modern realism because his source material has the stature of being more than a century old, but the audience was hooting with disbelief at a couple key junctures.
I remember doing a version of Welles' radio play on stage in eighth grade, and without recalling specifics, the theme of the performance seemed to be the fears and the relationships between the people. (Also, Mr. Wichtendahl's production allowed you to imagine your own aliens-- for budgetary reasons.) In Spielberg's picture, only the supporting character played by Tim Robbins ever comes close to touching on some of these underlying themes, and even then, Spielberg derails the exchange between Cruise and Robbins, turning the encounter into an elaborate CGI hide-and-seek game between the humans and a probing alien.

Oh, but did I mention? Morgan Freeman provides the narration. That's a fresh idea. At the end, I expected him to tell me whether or not Tim Robbins ever tunneled out of his alien hideout. (Get it?)
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An additional note: Attending this advance screening was an education in Hollywood's modern fear of outsiders. On the day the Supreme Court reinstated a copyright-infringement suit against two on-line file-sharing services, all the attendees of tonight's film went through a metal detector and a pat-down. We were told to take our cell phones (camera phones or otherwise) back to the car or have them thrown into a bin to be picked up after the film. Then, during the projection of the picture, local security hired by Paramount and/or Dreamworks panned the audience with binoculars looking for violators.
What did all of this mean for me?
It means I had to work my ass off to get these images.

That was a joke.
But seriously, don't forget to vote Albert Pujols onto the All-Star team.

posted by CM @ 1:21 AM