A cohabitant of a movie discussing message board accused War of the Worlds of being undercut by Spielberg’s now-apparently-unabating drive to not backtrack on his post-Schindler’s List “maturity.” Without meaning to inadvertently tar a bunch of films I have a lot of respect for, Worlds is the first film I’ve seen from the director that is almost completely free of Oscar-worthy pretense (swiftly lampooned by Armond White in reference to Cinderella Man… strange how tolerable White is when not battling the quick-cementing of the film canon at year’s end) since The Lost World… only Worlds doesn’t just boil down to Spielberg spinning plates as per the dino sequel. White seems to infer from Worlds a megabudget purgation of the tacky immorality of most effects showcases. A fairly porous argument, I’d guess, considering how many shock effects Spielberg goes for (and achieves) but yet one that makes a lot more sense when taking into consideration the seeming lack of mainstream textual givens such as character prototypes, and furthermore the undiluted absence of human authority (even most of the disaster movies that stand shoulder with Worlds in their depiction of panic and disaster, like Earthquake, use crises as spikes of momentum from which to string examples of mankind’s survival tactics like a maypole). Indeed the only two sequences where Tom Cruise shoulders all responsibility for the events on the screen are the scene in the cellar dealing with a paranoid Tim Robbins and when he plants a grenade in the bowels of the tripod. On the one hand, the first scene uses the normative “relief” of human-centric control as a red herring, a false lull that reminds the audience after an hour-plus-change of unbroken atrocity that whatever might bring the terror to its conclusion, it won’t be from human hands. On the other hand is a chokingly hilarious one-up on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut gay-bait of Cruise, in which he saves the day by bucking the fuck up the puckered rectum of the tripod, planting his explosive load and retracting back, covered in the damp froth of his conquest. Tripod pauses, shudders, goes limp. It’s Cruise’s most virile moment in the film, if not his career.

Movie Reviews | No Comments »