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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Wednesday, June 29, 2005

COMMENTARY
Spielberg's Worlds

By Rene Rodriguez
Knight Ridder News Service

Here's a future Trivial Pursuit answer: Tom Cruise's face does not appear anywhere on the posters for "War of the Worlds," making this the first time the advertising materials for a movie starring this actor do not take advantage of his marketable mug.

A dockworker (Tom Cruise) and his daughter (Dakota Fanning) try to survive amid the alien invasion.

Paramount Pictures

This was not, as one might initially assume, an attempt by the filmmakers to distance the movie from the ongoing media circus surrounding Cruise's "I'm-in-love!" antics. The poster for "War of the Worlds," which opens around the globe today, was designed months ago and consists of a single image that cuts across all languages and cultures: a veiny, three-fingered, decidedly alien hand clutching a burning planet Earth.

It is a classic, elegant image that evokes pulpy, '50s-era science fiction and hints at a special-effects thrill ride,

a la "Independence Day." But the movie turns out to be something different and far more interesting. "War of the Worlds" is an all-out horror movie — a relentless, intense and deeply frightening fable about the end of the world. And although Cruise's lead performance is strong, the movie's undisputed star is Steven Spielberg.

Part of the reason Spielberg is the most famous living filmmaker is his everyman affinity for wonder and fantasy — he has the ability, like Walt Disney or George Lucas, to make the fantastical accessible and enthralling to everyone. Before he "grew up" and made dramas such as "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," Spielberg was often derided as cinema's reigning Peter Pan, a gifted filmmaker who made movies about his boyhood obsessions instead of grown-up concerns.

This was never truer than in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," Spielberg's two previous movies about visitors from outer space. In those films, aliens were benign, kind and simply curious about our planet. Whatever fear humans felt toward the aliens in those movies was quickly replaced by a blissful, communal joy — the thrill of discovery that we were not alone in the cosmos, and that our intergalactic neighbors just want to be friends.

That optimism courses through Spielberg's work: His movies are consistently humanistic and imbued with middle-class values and morals. Even in the horror movies he has directed or produced — "Jaws," "Jurassic Park," "Gremlins," "Poltergeist" — the American dream of a happy home and hearth always trumps nihilism.

When he asked screenwriter David Koepp to transplant H.G. Wells' seminal 1898 "War of the Worlds" novel to the modern day, Koepp says, Spielberg did not want to take the usual route of seeing famous landmarks destroyed. Spielberg wanted to tell the story entirely through the eyes of one family — in this case Ray Ferrier, a divorced New Jersey dockworker who spends the movie not trying to save the world, but trying to keep his two kids alive during the alien attack.

STEVEN SPIELBERG
At a press conference at New York's Essex House hotel, Spielberg denied he made "War of the Worlds" to repudiate his formerly beatific view of aliens. "There wasn't anything hugely changed in my life that made me do a scary alien movie," he said. "It's just something that I always wanted to do. I told Tom Cruise that I wanted to do this book since I read it in college, before I was even a filmmaker. It's just a great story."

It is also a story with resonance for the post-9/11 era. During the first wave of attacks, Ray's terrified 11-year-old daughter (played by Dakota Fanning) asks her father "Is it terrorists?" as destruction rains down on the family.

"It's amazing how many references there are in the movie to the world we live in," Koepp said. "But every time someone has dramatized Wells' novel, the metaphors applied to whatever the political situation was at that time. In the late 1930s, it was the rise of fascism; in the 1950s, it was the fear of communism. Today, it's our world situation. For people in the United States, it will be about the fear of terrorism and how we live on the brink of attack. For some people in other countries, it will be about their fear of an American invasion."

"War of the Worlds" contains several long, suspenseful set pieces of Spielberg craftsmanship, like mankind's first encounter with a hostile alien craft on the streets of a small town (shot in the gritty, realistic style of the Omaha Beach invasion that opened "Saving Private Ryan").

But the most disturbing moments in "War of the Worlds" are not just craft.

"Even though this is a fantasy, Steven wanted to take the loss of human life seriously," Koepp said. "He also wanted to show how great tragedies often bring out the best in human nature, but I feel great tragedies also bring out the worst in human nature. It's much more frightening what your fellow man will do to you."

"War of the Worlds" is at its scariest in depicting society's reaction to a reality too large or unreal to comprehend. Perhaps the movie's most nerve-racking moment does not involve aliens, but a desperate mob that hijacks Ray's minivan, threatening to separate him from his daughter.

"War of the Worlds" is unmistakably the work of a showman, out to give the summer moviegoing audience their money's worth. But it is also entertainment for an era whose innocence has been stolen.