War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds is one of Steven Speilberg's best films.  Unfortunately overshadowed by some of Tom Cruise's antics at the time of its release, it still managed to have one of the biggest box office opening weekends of all time.  Still, it was with mixed feelings that I put it on my Netflix queue.  If I wasn't such a buff of end of the world fiction, I'd have skipped it altogether.

I'm glad I didn't!  Besides the expected visual beauty of the film, its storytelling was impeccable.  What I liked best about it:  point of view.  No cutting to the alien ship to give us a glimpse of just what's going on in the aliens' minds.  They remain terrifyingly inscrutable.  We experience the events just as Tom Cruise's character does (not my favorite actor by far, Tom Cruise does a good job here as a clueless dockworker dad who really steps up to the plate as the movie progresses).  Survival is not based on the usual movie-morality of heroics or superior cunning.  People are vaporized to the right and left of Tom Cruise's character and on several occasions he survives through dumb luck. 

The other thing that's wonderful about this movie is that it does a great and subtle job of setting up the thing you absolutely know you don't want to see happen... the drop-dead point at which you know all will be lost... and then makes it happen.  I routinely refuse to watch violence in films because I don't want those images seared in my brain, but in this movie the scene I couldn't watch was an excruciatingly long scene in which the aliens are exploring Tom Cruise's character's dank and dark basement hideaway while he and his daughter move stay quietly one step ahead of them to avoid detection.

Apocalyptic fiction, when done well, actually shines a light on what it's like to live on this Earth.  It makes you think about society as it now exists.  Would you, for example, know how to get food if all the supermarkets were to suddenly close? (I know I couldn't).  How dependent are we on technology?  Would you hold on to your ideals of fairness and human rights if survival was on the line?  What is that spark of life that goes on even as everything you now tell yourself you need for happiness is gone?

Of course people have been surviving the end of the world as they know it for thousands of years and living to tell the tale.  One needs only to read Victor Frankl's stunning Man's Search For Meaning to remember that.  Still, War of the Worlds makes it all new again, giving you not just a white knuckled ride but leaving you pondering about our world, ourselves and the fragile interconnection of all things.