War of the Worlds

A lot of sci-fi flicks are over-the-top space operas that not even kids of moderate age take too seriously, but I have to warn parents, Stephen Spielberg's new War of the Worlds, based on the classic H.G. Wells tale, is not a good movie to bring small kids to. I'm not kidding when I tell you it's not just sci-fi, it's horror as well and at times it's pretty intensely horrific.

At the same time, it's a movie with a heart. It's about a guy (Tom Cruise) who is not a very good dad. Self-centered and inattentive to his kids, his mid-teens boy (Justin Chatwin) hates him and his 10-ish but wise-for-her-age daughter (Dakota Fanning) seems as much his mother as his daughter. His ex-wife (Miranda Otto, who may look strangely familiar because she played the lovely but forlorn Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings) seems to feel a mixture of contempt and pity for his lax way of living.

The first 15 minutes is used to outline the characters and then BOOM! strange shit starts happening, including a brooding storm with lots of lightning, cracks appearing in the pavement, and the first appearance of the Alien machines (and in case you don't know, what you have seen glimpses of in the previews are not aliens but their killing machines).

Now, you know those movies where they save the clear view of the monsters till near the end of the movie? Well, this is not one of the movies! By 25 minutes in, the machines are on the rampage, destroying people, buildings, and just about anything that smacks of "human." The way people are killed is likely to be distressing to small children and there's a lot of killing. The Fanning character is terrorized much of the time and I suspect this terror will be contagious to kids young enough to relate to her.

The tripods (as the killing machines are called in the movie) are definitely alien-looking, being mechanical while looking organic at the same time. Design elements seem to have been borrowed from automotive design on the one hand and crustaceans and mollusks on the other. The tripods walk on three legs, but the legs are snakelike and not very mechanical looking. The machines' appendages resemble the tentacles of a squid. And, did I mention how gigantic they are?

There is also a sound effect that will terrorize the kids (and not a few adults). Based, I believe, on the air horn of a very large ship, it is used to announce the presence of the tripods and, it's implied, as a way the tripods communicate with each other. It's loud enough and low enough that you may feel it through your shoes as well as your ears.

The movie isn't without flaws. Early in the film the aliens stop all kinds of electronics. Electricity gets stopped. Watches stop. Cars stop dead in the street. It's strange that Cruise and family end up stealing just about the only functioning car in the world. Sure, we know he told a mechanic to try changing the solenoids to make the car start again, but nobody else got their car started? Also, there is one guy whose vidcam still seems to work for some reason.

The tripods walk around on three legs. There is a reason legs come in multiples of two. Three legs are great for stools, not great for things that need to walk around. In fact, in a lot of ways, two legs are far better than three. A dog can lose a leg and get around, but it won't get around better than it would if it had all four.

But that's nit-picking. A much more serious problem is how this movie which starts off as a seeming juggernaut of mind-boggling action gets bogged down in a slow and pointless interlude in the basement of a half-crazy survivalist (Tim Robbins). It felt like a half hour was spent there just to pad the movie, which is actually somewhat shorter than most feature films. Of course, it's understandable because there isn't really much plot there: Aliens show up, start killing people, Cruise's family runs from the aliens, the aliens die. The bad father subplot pads things a bit more and is more interesting than the basement interlude.

Another thing that strikes you if you start thinking about it is that supposedly, this invasion was planned a very long time ago. The tripods were laying dormant underground in our cities, but they must have been planted there before there were cities. But if they were there that long, surely many of them would have been discovered by earth movers and tunnelers as the cities' water, sewer, electrical, and subway systems were built.

Dakota Fanning is good in almost every role, and this one is no different, though I personally would have wished for less screaming.

In the end, this is as much a story of the Cruise character's redemption in the eyes of his children, as it is a sci-fi story, which is a big departure from the Wells tale.

What may disappoint many people is how the story ends, but what they may not realize is that the rather wimpy and uninspiring ending is one of the parts of the movie most faithful to H.G. Wells' book. It's an ending that works better in a book, and it would have been better had Spielberg had taken more of his liberties here than elsewhere.