I've long thought that the opening paragraph of War of the Worlds is one of the best in any novel in the English language. So it was with no small amount of pleasure that I heard Morgan Freeman supplying it by voice over at the beginning of this summer's second exceptional extravaganza (and if thou hast not yet seen thy Batman Begins, then get thee to the cinema, and forgetteth not thy copy of Batman: Year One, which didst serve as the holy writ and bible for Chris Nolan, Esquire).
Not everyone has liked WotW. Spielberg lost Roger Ebert the moment the tripods appeared, and like many readers of the novel, Ebert wonders, "How could the Martians be smart enough to invade our planet but dumb enough to die like that?" And like most people who ask that question, Ebert is Missing The Point.
War of the Worlds and the War in Iraq, below the fold.
War of the Worlds is not a story about aliens invading the Earth. Well yes, it's about that. But what it is really about is man's inhumanity to his fellow man, it's about the Colonial powers of Europe and their conquest of Africa. Wells' genius is the way that he turned the European definition of Invasion on its head: now it was the genteel English whitebreads who were made helpless and terrified when machines they could not understand ran roughshod over their military, their culture, their civilization. Now it was the Martians sucking out the lifeblood of England, instead of England (or, perhaps more timely, the Belgians) sucking the life out of Africa. Once we terraformed the "Dark Continent", making it more like our European home; now the Martians laid down "red weed" that turned cities and towns, with all their steeples and factories, into a strange, savage, wilderness. And just in case we didn't realize what was going on, in case we weren't frightened enough, the Martians howled out a deep-throated, all-vowel war-cry like some wild animal, an interplanetary version of Kurtz' "the horror ... the horror."
Spielberg gets this. He sets his updated version of Wells' story in the early 21st century instead of the late 19th, and this may just be the perfect time for it. Now it is America which is the colonial power, now it is we who invade a foreign land with our high tech weaponry, our de-Bathification. When George Pal made a film called War of the Worlds, he was looking for an excuse to put flying saucers on Hollywood Blvd, and all subsequent film remakes of the "book" have really been remakes of that film. The last was Independence Day, in which Earth is invaded by tentacled aliens who wreak untold devastation before they are defeated by a virus. (Transmitting the virus by Macintosh instead of by blood is what we call, in the film biz, "adaptation".) Spieldberg sets his film on Independence Day as well, not only because it is a huge weekend for film releases in America, but because of the irony, and because this film is a real adaptation of a novel which the makers of Independence Day didn't even have the guts to credit.
The protagonist of War of the Worlds is not a brave man. He spends most of the story -- book or film -- first running and then hiding. Through his eyes we see the worst in human society; we see people denying the threat, fleeing in terror, then tearing each other apart, then going mad, then simply absent. The only talk of a "resistance" or "fighting back" is so ludicrously spoken that it cannot be taken seriously and just further emphasizes man's crushing defeat. There are occasional moments of heroism -- the brave martyrdom of the Thunder Child as a steamer pulls away from England, the rare artillery barrage. In the long run, they are no more effective than Saddam's tanks, his fortifications, his air force, his scud missiles. Spielberg eliminates the notion that the Martians are drinking our blood, in favor of a shot of them drinking black and gurgling water. The Martians, it seems, went to war for a vital fluid found in the dark recesses of the Earth, a fluid they have long since used up, but which they cannot function without.
But the vampirism still exists; the Martians of Spielberg's version still capture innocent people, but use their blood for fertilizer for the Red Weed -- bloodletting all over the land, till the very ground has turned red. None of this obscures Cruise's performance; it takes guts to turn in your action hero chops for the part of a self-absorbed coward. He does a fabulous job. The child actors also put in amazing performance, and no matter what Ebert says, I happen to like the tripods.
In the end, the biggest obstacle to any telling of War of the Worlds is the end. It ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, and that is very odd for Hollywood. Spielberg yields to the urge to "explode-ify" the end only a little; he remains largely true to Wells' vision of an invader who failed in its invasion not because of a lack of armed might or technological know-how, but because it failed to understand the world it was invading, or plan for what it would do after the initial invasion was done. The martians lost their war because it sickened them.
It remains to be seen if America will do the same.