It begins with news reports of freakish lightning storms from around the world, huge electrical events that do the impossible: Strike the same place – twice. Then three times. Again and again.
As dockworker and divorced dad Ray Ferrier watches the light show, standing in his New Jersey backyard with his daughter, he thinks it’s cool. Until it’s not.
Then he – and the press audience sitting in an electrified Manhattan theater watching Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” – becomes deeply unnerved.
Trees burst into flame. Humans vaporize. Planes crash into suburban McMansions. And as the terror starts to hit home, young Rachel Ferrier screams an impossible-to-ignore question, “Is it the terrorists?!”
Not since “Independence Day” has the onscreen world – by way of the United States, of course – faced quite so brutal a beat-down from invaders. Yet in the time since that 1996 blockbuster’s release, the American landscape has changed. Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, we became a nation at war, the result of an attack that many Americans felt arrived out of nowhere, so alien was the vehemence that led to the deaths of 2,973 people.
Nearly four years later, it remains a charged atmosphere. We are ripe for an up-to-date version of Wells’ novel – itself no stranger to political interpretations – but are we ready?
We can be sure Spielberg, as ethical and optimistic a filmmaker as we have, won’t project destruction on American soil without acknowledging the still powerful images imprinted on the minds of many us because of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center’s twin towers. But the question is: Can “War of the Worlds” wield its visions of mass destruction without merely quenching our thirst for mass distraction?
“Some people were giving me grief this morning about certain images they felt were exploitative,” says screenwriter David Koepp, sitting in a hotel room south of Central Park. “I feel that’s the world we live in.
“It’s unrealistic if you don’t write it,” said Koepp, who has lived in New York for seven years. “What’s exploitative is if you don’t take it seriously.”
The devastation in “War of the Worlds,” opening Wednesday, begins when massive alien tripods erupt from beneath the streets. They rise and begin a cold, methodical sweep of our tiny world with devastating heat rays. It was deadly enough for London and its environs in H.G. Wells’ groundbreaking 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds.” It’s just as lethal for Jersey and beyond.
Images likely to evoke painful memories and/or controversy include the posters of the missing that start to multiply in the wake of the alien attacks. Then there are also rivers of Americans survivors on the move.
At an afternoon press conference featuring the director and his star, Tom Cruise, someone asked Spielberg about those rivers of the displaced. Was he trying to discuss the refugee crises?
“This is partially about the American refugee experience. It’s about Americans fleeing for their lives, about being attacked and having no idea why and who is attacking them,” Spielberg said.
Seeing this depicted on our native soil is unsettling.
“We don’t often see images of American refugees except after disasters like hurricanes,” he said. “Of course the images that stand out most in my mind are of everybody from Manhattan crossing the George Washington Bridge in the shadow of 9/11. It was a searing image,I haven’t been able to get out of my head.”
When directors can’t shake a vision, they share it.
“Looked like a movie”
Eyewitnesses to the 9/11 attacks told reporters that the destruction of the twin towers looked like a movie. Many of us believed we knew which one.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s “Independence Day” was almost gleeful in its destruction of the world – whoops, there goes the White House!
Not called “Independence Day” for nothing, it celebrated the rebel spirit of a multicultural band of brothers led by Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum but fortified by a trailer hick played by Randy Quaid.
Still, from its scene of hopeful greeters getting zapped to its global destruction, “Independence Day” borrowed from Wells’ novel.
Emmerich and Devlin didn’t stick with the down note of Wells’ ending, where the Martians don’t succumb to human gumption but are vanquished by a far humbler comeuppance. Instead, the co-writers gave their flick a rousing climax that reasserted man’s – and America’s – gift at combating those who would subject us.
When Spielberg and Koepp began work on “War of the Worlds” they reined themselves in with some hard and fast rules. Some were meant to distinguish their alien invasion flick from the many that had come before: no political leaders, no landmarks getting demolished. “No shots of Manhattan getting the crap kicked out of it,” Spielberg said. “No scientist with a pipe,” Koepp said, laughing. “No one with a pipe.”
Other rules, like hewing to the novel’s essentially first-person account of the attacks, were intended to make the story personal, and it is hoped, more emotionally universal.
With the exception of an interlude in which the narrator recounts what his brother witnessed in London, Wells’ novel is told almost exclusively from a first-hand account. So the filmmakers, with some very minor exceptions, limit the film’s view to only what Ray sees. Said Koepp, “That was why the only time we get this big global view was when (Ray and his two kids) swim across the river and they climb that bluff. You see the destruction. But that’s because the character went on a hill.”
Koepp knows this might frustrate some moviegoers seeking surer ground. “People might want to know why the aliens came there,” he admitted. “Well, they didn’t say. They’re not here to negotiate. Obviously they have some problem with us but not with our planet.”
Never just entertainment
There are reasons why two versions of Wells’ science-fiction classic – Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast and the 1953 American film – continue to have historical importance.
“The War of the Worlds,” after all, was never simply entertainment. For one thing, it was Wells’ visionary use of a new genre to comment on man’s failings in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. (It also dealt with the waning of the British empire and the waxing of German military might.)
The visceral fright night produced by Welles on Oct. 30, 1938 pushed a panic button. This was due in part, says radio historian Bill Nadel, because in the late ’30s, the remote radio broadcast was “coming of age.” The on-air tricks Welles and his Mercury Theater ensemble employed – on-scene reporting, the interrupting of musical shows, the abrupt use of silence, the scene atop a broadcasting building – “this was all exciting stuff and later we learned from remote reports that war sounded just like that.” (Next week multimedia company Mediabay launches a downloadable version of that chilling broadcast, along with extras like a conversation between Wells and Welles that took place the day after the infamous airing.)
The 1953 Technicolor movie attests to a different anxiety: the Cold War. It takes liberties with Wells’ novel by offering a more churchgoing resolution to America’s plight. Spielberg’s version brings down a house of worship in the early moments of the attack.
“What’s interesting about the book, is that it was very political at the time.” But only later, Koepp said, was it understood how much so.
“People might use this version of ‘War of the Worlds’ as a mirror to reflect what they already believe,” Koepp said. “Some people will look at it and say it’s clearly about post-9/11 American paranoia: terrorism and our fear of terrorism, sleeper cells waiting to be activated. Some people will feel that because Americans already feel victimized and threatened.
“People elsewhere in the world might who also feel victimized and threatened, might say it’s about Iraq and their fear of an American invasion.”
A brief holiday
For a spell, the attacks of 9/11 seemed to force some discipline on Hollywood, and filmmakers appeared to be observing a kind of decorum. It seemed the only things being slain with abandon were the already dead – zombies. Blowing stuff up quite so spectacularly just didn’t feel right. That particular vision of death took a holiday, albeit a brief one.
The mass invasion of “War of the Worlds” on multiplexes this week suggests that we might be ready to witness anew visions of the worst – at least onscreen.
If Spielberg, Koepp and Co. achieve their goal, “War of the Worlds” won’t merely be a tale of “E.T. gone gangster” as Cruise joked at the New York press conference.
Perhaps in the midst of summer popcorn season, it’s a bit humorless to wonder if movies have any moral obligations to be mindful of the dead and dying as they depict human disasters.
Something in Keopp’s response suggests otherwise.
“The things that struck me when I saw the film three weeks ago was how acutely you feel the loss of life,” he said. “It really takes it seriously.
“Then you start to question is this entertainment or is this catharsis? I guess it’s catharsis.” He pauses.
“And that’s OK too.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
