Future's End: Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005)

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is more than an adaptation of H.G Wells's classic 1898 novel and more than a remake of Byron Haskin's excellent 1953 film. Spielberg and his screenwriters, Josh Friedman and David Koepp, have re-imagined Wells's apocalyptic story for an American audience still recovering from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the continuing violence of postwar Iraq. The result is a film that dares to criticize, subtly but surely, the patriotic fervor that has characterized the United States in recent years. For a film released just before the Independence Day holiday of 2005, this fact alone qualifies War of the Worlds as a politically daring, if somewhat schizophrenic, offering from a director who, despite his reputation as the premier creator of commercially safe and politically conventional Hollywood spectaculars, is one of the most inventive artists of his generation.

I do not make these claims lightly, but I feel that it is, at last, time to give Spielberg his critical due. The accolades bestowed upon him by sycophantic Hollywood organizations such as the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are well known, while Spielberg's box-office popularity is undeniable, with Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), its two Indiana Jones sequels (1984 and 1989), and Jurassic Park (1993) cementing his reputation as a filmmaker capable of grossing hundreds of millions of dollars in a single weekend. Spielberg is, however, just as often derided for his films' supposed bourgeois tastes—tastes that, his detractors gleefully note, glorify suburban lives, family values, and easy patriotism—as he is celebrated for his achievements. Is this not, after all, the man who has done more to endorse uncritical celebrations of America's World War II veterans than Tom Brokaw could ever hope to equal by inverting the traditional war-rescue picture to send an entire squad of soldiers to save one man in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and who, three years later, produced the ten-hour HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), adapted from the book by Stephen Ambrose, who, until his 2002 death, was perhaps America's greatest military mythmaker? Didn't Spielberg adapt Stanley Kubrick's treatment for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) into a film that arrives at not one, but three, separate climaxes, all of which drive home the point that even android boys love their suburban parents so much that they will sacrifice everything, even their mechanical lives, to please unappreciative mothers? Most objectionably, didn't Spielberg downplay the heroism of the African slaves in his 1997 historical epic Amistad by focusing too much attention on the efforts of noble white men fighting valiantly for black freedom and, just as perniciously, by sacrificing the development of Djimon Hounsou's wonderful character Cinque for too many close-ups of Matthew McConaughey? The list of academia's charges against Spielberg could fill whole volumes, and the contrast between his high popular appeal and low scholarly reputation reminds me of the now-unthinkable critical reception of Alfred Hitchcock, who, in his day, was regarded by many American, British, and French film scholars as a commercial hack whose absurd, illogical, and tawdry thrillers were barely watchable.

Hitchcock, I'm happy to say, has been redeemed, as even a cursory glance at the scholarship of his films reveals, but Spielberg has some distance to travel before his oeuvre will be as academically respectable as Hitchcock's. War of the Worlds, I pray, will begin to convince reluctant film scholars that Spielberg not only seems constitutionally unable to direct an unentertaining movie, but also, like Hitchcock, makes shrewd symbolic commentaries about the deepest anxieties of American culture. The film is a vibrant, terrifying, and observant examination of how American democracy, generosity, and liberty are the most precarious of ideas and institutions when under assault by alien aggressors.

The aliens, in this case, are insect-like extraterrestrials who pilot massive, deadly, three-legged walking machines that not only tower over all physical structures...