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| Saturday, July 2, 2005 11:26 PM |
| Wow! It's WoW! |
 by Fëanor |
As threatened in an earlier episode, ST, the bloginator, and I all headed out to the theater today to witness The War of the Worlds on the big screen. ST has already posted quite an excellent review of the film, but I'll add my two cents, just for the record.
Although some reviewers have complained that Tom Cruise doesn't hack it in the part of a working-class divorced Dad, I disagree completely. I think he plays the part very well, and the opening scenes establishing his character and that of his ex-wife, daughter (the amazing Dakota Fanning), and son are very effective and believable. Then the war comes, with jarring suddenness and realism, and the film becomes a spectacle and an experience, full of amazing effects and thrilling, astounding, terrifying imagery.
The problem comes in the quiet moments between the attacks, when things slow down and you get a chance to think, and you realize that a lot of the story makes no sense. (WARNING: Spoiler time.) Why would the aliens have buried their war machines on Earth thousands of years ago, only to arrive and activate them now? As Tim Robbins's crazy character points out, the aliens seem to have come to exterminate the human race, presumably as a prelude to occupation of the planet, but it seems to me they could have done that a lot easier thousands of years ago, when there were a lot fewer of us and we had even less of a chance of defending ourselves against them.
But let's say that the aliens have a way of sending their battle tanks ahead of them, at far higher speeds than they themselves can survive, and that the pilots must follow at a much slower and safer rate, perhaps in some sort of suspended animation. That would explain the huge time gap between the arrival of the tanks and the arrival of the pilots. But then how do we explain why humans have never discovered these battle machines, in all our thousands of years of excavating the Earth? Were they buried so deeply that we couldn't detect them and never came across them? It doesn't look that way; they come to the surface quickly enough.
Even putting that aside, there are plenty of other problems. Such as, why would changing the solenoids in a car "fix" the effects of an electromagnetic pulse? I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what a solenoid does or how it works, but I very much doubt that swapping one out would make your fried car work again. And is it absolutely necessary for Tom Cruise to figure out how to do everything, and tell people how to do their jobs? He's the guy who tells the mechanic to change the solenoids in the car; he's the guy who points out to the soldiers that they should attack the tripod because its shields are down. And why in hell's name during a horrible disaster like this would a pregnant woman with her kids miles away from her just stay where she is in her house and wait? Wouldn't she go to her kids? Or at least try to find some safe spot underground or something? And how in hell's name could Robbie have survived that attack and made it to Boston on his own?
But okay. I've spent far longer than I meant to nitpicking. The point is, like Signs before it (which itself was sort of a retelling of the War of the Worlds story), WoW is a highly effective, well-acted, well-directed alien invasion movie with a story that falls apart under any examination. My advice for viewing both movies is to try not to think about the story too much, and just enjoy the ride.
I should say a few words on the ending, I guess, before I sign off: Since I was expecting it (I saw the original movie, and am passingly familiar with the plot of the book), and since I like me a happy ending, the (literal) deus ex machina conclusion did not particularly bother me. The fact that Robbie survived, as I mentioned above, rankled a bit, since it seemed so unlikely, but not that much. The problems of story logic bother me more. I think the movie would work better if there was no attempt whatsoever to explain why and how the aliens invade.
But whatever. The point is, most of the film is quite entertaining (if "entertaining" is the right word--it's actually quite intense), and War of the Worlds is certainly worth a viewing. |
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