The Tease of Things I Don't Need

End of summer movie artifact

The summer blockbuster movie season was too little run out too quickly in the end. Almost inexplicably, back during the July 4th weekend, I found myself running on at length in an email to a friend concerning War of the Worlds. I hasten to add, it wasn't in much of a positive way - the friend had no intention of seeing it and we'd each, briefly kicked around the anticipated formula elements of both a Spielberg and a Cruise film, so this was more a flip exercise in confirmation than anything else. It likely takes more time to read than it did to knock out, as I largely just mind-dumped the film into text as part of a note late the night Nick and I went out to see the movie.

Now more than two months old, I had occasion while replying to a note from Anders (who'd just received his copy of Legends and noted my shorter review of the movie in there - largely the same as I posted here) and thought, why not? If you don't care or are waiting for the movie to his DVD, Pay Per View/On Demand or some other stop down the media line, just skip this bit. [Content advisory: Long and likely tedious. Like a night of binge drinking, it was fun at the time but difficult to defend afterwards.]

War of the Worlds 2005

Cruise's character is the selfish, self-absorbed divorced dad we expected. Quick with a grin and obviously both liked and respected in his neighborhood, he comes from his job moving shipping containers at the docks (where we quickly learn he's the best he is at what he does via a shift supervisor who tries to get him to come back for an extra shift) in his classic Mustang, tires squealing recklessly around corners.

The ex-wife (pregnant) and her pleasant, non-aggressive, well-to-do and ultimately zero of a character husband are waiting outside his working class rowhome because they agreed to turn the kids over at 8pm though Ray (Cruise) chooses to remember it as 8:30. Robbie, the 17-ish son, is a shaggy-haired high schooler, dressed in dark clothes and dismissive of his father, tunes blaring over his headset as he walks past ol' Dad, heedless of anything he says. Daughter, Rachel, is 9-ish, and plainly is being raised in an indulgent, overly-analyzed life of psychobabble, complete with a pedigree of picky personal complaints concerning food allergies, back problems and being used to having TiVo in her room. But, at least she talks to dad.

Cruise's two-story house is cluttered with junk, plainly a bachelor's place and revealing his hobby of working on engines, as there's one sitting in the kitchen/dining room.

Ray attempts to connect with his son via a game of catch, but it turns nasty and Ray opts to go off to bed, as he'd just come off a full workshift when they showed up anyway. He leaves them to order food from some local place and heads for bed. He wakes up later to find Rachel eating hummus (which he samples, half-awake, choking on it and only then questioning what it was she ordered) and Robbie gone, having taken off somewhere in Ray's prize Mustang. As Rachel cycles through channels we see on the TV reports of freak lightning strikes in other parts of the world, knocking out power and all electronics.

Ray goes out into the streets to look for some sign of where Robbie is, when he sees everyone looking in his direction, up over the row of houses. A dark line of clouds with a spiral effect going on in the center is the attraction. Forgetting Robbie for a moment, he goes to the back yard for a better look and then ends up getting Rachel to come out and take a look. The winds kick up, but they're blowing towards the stormfront rather than away from it. Lightning begins to issue from the center of the cloud donut, striking what we later learn (via Robbie, who was a few streets over and near the spot) that it struck 26 times in the same spot. Ray notes that while the lightning has its own blasting crack there's never any actual thunder. He initially puts on a "nothing to worry about" attitude, but after several strikes he gets as scared as Rachel and they end up inside, huddled under the kitchen table.

The storm dissipates as quickly as it arrived.

Ray goes out alone to check out a few streets over to see where the lightning struck, and he attracts the attention of several neighborhood types including a garage mechanic (everything with any electrical components, including vehicles, stopped working when the lightning strikes happened) who takes Ray's suggestion to replace the solenoid - all of which is to let us know once more that this is his neighborhood.

He runs into Robbie along the way, who he ultimately sends home to stay with his sister.

An intersection has a pit blasted in it about the width of a basketball, with the street cracked and sloping around it for a diameter of two or three yards. Rumblings are heard beneath the street long enough for the local cops and people to establish that there's no subway under there, and not even any water mains, before rippling upheavals begin to tear up the street and crack buildings in half. The pit expands in almost liquid waves, then drops enough that an SUV slides into the pit. Dust and smoke from the upheaval and building splits - the face of a church breaks off while remaining for the moment intact. Something massive is plainly moving below.

The SUV is hurled an easy five stories into the air, crashing down on another vehicle in the street. A huge machine is revealed rising from the pit, though at first we only see almost organic tendrils, then glowing faces of machinery, and finally something like a mechanical man-o-war on three legs. A couple more tendril-like arms emerge with crescent heads on them that begin to glow. Heat rays (fairly obviously masers) begin to cut down targets in the street. People who are struck but it appear to almost instantly boil and explode into ash and vapor, though most of their clothing appears to remain as intact as it would if the people wearing it just exploded and vaporized of under some internal power. Ray and the rest are on the run. We are not supposed to notice during all this that one of the bystanders somehow has a working video camera when even Ray's battery-operated wristwatch was fried. The need for Spielberg to have a video shot within a shot supercedes any need for reason.

Ray makes it home, initially in shock, covered in the white ash of his former neighbors as he ran for his life through their spot-cremations. He comes enough back to himself to tell them to pack food and things because they're leaving in 60 seconds. The alien machine (no reference to Mars is ever made in the film, btw, as that would be silly at this late date) has apparently not been moving or doing much of anything for the past few minutes. Ray gets his handgun out of a lockbox in his bedroom and sticks it into his pants at the small of his back, flipping his shirt and jacket over it.

He tells his kids to come and they head for the mechanics place down the street, a brief prayer passing his lips as he stares down the street and ignores the questions of his kids, gets them in the mini-van the mechanic had replaced the solenoid in, which the shop owner is only to happy to let Ray know was just the trick. Ray tries to get him to get into the van with them while the guy - apparently unmindful of the carnage just a few blocks over - tells Ray in decreasingly friendly tones to get out of the van. Then everything off to one side begins to explode. Ray speeds off in the only working vehicle to be seen for the rest of the movie that isn't either a military one or a news van.

Daughter Rachel becomes increasingly intolerable during all of this, shrieking insistently in a way that has me wanting to award Ray a medal for his restraint and generally helped steer me toward the "Kill Rachel" headline I gave the piece in my July 3rd entry.

Speeding away, out onto an expressway littered with dead vehicles spaced with a wondrous convenience that allows a minivan to always find a path of egress without once having to leave the road and cut out onto the shoulder or median. They outrace the destruction, heading North.

Since the mother and her yuppie zero impregnator had headed towards Boston for the weekend to visit her parents (though we're not supposed to wonder why they'd go to the grandparents' for the weekend and not take the kids...) that gives Ray and his kids a direction to head in.

They reach the kids' home on the way, thinking that mom and stepdad might have returned there for some reason, but no one's home. The power's still on, though the house (and apparently the neighborhood) is seemingly deserted. No one in the group thinks to turn on a television or radio, though. Ray decides to get them set up in the basement, explaining that it's like what one would do if there was a tornado warning. Soon, though, sounds and flashes like the lightning strikes occur somewhere outside, though these have a different edge. They move deeper into the house, into a space set farther into the foundation where the water heater, etc. are, and weather the tumult. Ray awakens first, emerging to find the house largely destroyed, along with the neighborhood, though the primary cause appears to be a commercial jet which crashed into the upscale, suburban neighborhood.

Ray sees a huge section of the passenger portion of the aircraft, top torn off and tilted at a 45+ degree angle. Someone's working his way down the aisle, dragging something. It turns out to be a guy who's part of a news crew, reduced to foraging for drink and even airline food. Ray learns from the woman in charge that they were watching in New York and (somehow) managed to videotape one of the lightning strikes through the entire process. Letting us watch it in slow motion, where we can see that each bold of lightning carried some sort of small craft down into the earth, was much too important a plot point for us to see, apparently, as it was supposed to be enough for us not to question how any of this (not to mention all of the electronics in the van) survived so massive an EMP surge that it blew out every other piece of electrical equipment. She also informs him of how the aliens have a protective shield that detonates shells before they strike and otherwise protects the machines.

So, now we know that the huge alien machines were apparently buried on earth millennia ago, waiting until now for the crews to arrive. Ah, the unfathomable alien minds...

Ray and family continue their trek northwards in their miraculously untouched minivan (keep in mind that the house was largely destroyed and Ray found part of a wing and a jet engine easily as large as the van on the property), which prompted me to conjure music from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

A sudden rest stop out in farm country finds Rachel exposed to the scene of dozens of bodies floating downstream, then sees Robbie overtaken with a wave of vengeful, adolescent, patriotic fervor as he tries to get a passing military unit to take him with them so he can fight back. Ray tries to reason with him and fails, and for once Rachel's shrieking serves a purpose as it underscores how his leaving would be abandoning her. During this Robbie vents on his father, accusing him of only going towards Boston so he could dump them on their mother and go off to fend for himself again.

They go on, making it into another town where oddly enough the lights are on but the vehicles don't work. A mob wrests the minivan from them, Ray loses his gun in the process, and they join the trudging mob on foot, heading for a ferry. Ray runs into some woman he knows, along with her daughter, and they briefly become a quintet.

Alien tripod appear over the hillside, roaring as they do before they commence a slaughter, and rather than doing something sensible like trying to take his children and cut to the left or right, he fights their way onto the ferry despite it being such an obvious and easy target for the alien machines. The gal pal and daughter don't keep up and are left behind.

Another of the tripods was apparently buried under the riverbed, and emerges at just the time and place to flip the ferry. Ray and his kids make it to shore and scramble off. They see an armored military force heading for a ridge, and Robbie once more runs off to do what a man's gotta do. Shrieking, lead-weight Rachel proves unable to keep up, so Ray sets her by a scraggly tree as he goes to stop Robbie. While those two struggle a well-intentioned woman tries to drag Rachel to safety, and Ray has to make a choice. He lets Robbie go and goes down the hill to reclaim his daughter. Robbie follows the tanks and trucks over the ridge, with armored, missile-firing helicopters passing overhead. The far side of the ridge explodes in flame, a flaming truck riding back over the ridge past Ray and Rachel, who run and are given refuge in the rustic basement of a farmhouse owned by an increasingly plainly disturbed man named Ogilvy (Played by Tim Robbins.) From there they see that the aliens are apparently feeding on the humans, though part of the process appears to be a rather wasteful pureeing of them. A spray of blood in the air is all that's really important to the filmmaker in that instance, I suppose.

We also see that a red weed, looking like an exposed circulatory system and growing at a cartoonish rate, is spreading over everything.

We get to see some of the three-fingered aliens as they come into the basement to look around and have a drink. Ray and Ogilvy become locked in a silent battle as Ray tries to keep O from attacking them with his shotgun and thereby giving away their position. A short time later, a frantic and entirely too loud Ogilvy is killed by Ray.

Another alien machine comes around later, wakes Rachel up, her briain-piercing shrieks waking Ray up. She runs off while he hacks the elongated metal eyestalk off with an axe. He tries to follow her, only to soon find her and him captured - though not before he finds a belt in an abandoned military vehicle with grenades on it. Ray's hoisted into the air and placed in huge, hitherto unseen, podlike cages nestled underneath one of the machines. As the aliens feel peckish a tendril reaches in through a sphincter snares one and brings him up into the machined to apparently be put into a giant, unseen blender set on frappe. Ray finds himself so selected, though a quick-thinking soldier grabs his arm and gets others to grab onto him in turn, and they manage to pull Ray back down. Ray opens one hand, revealing two grenade pins, and no sooner does the "everybody down" command escape the soldier's mouth than the machine above begins to be wrecked from within. The cage drops into a tree and they all get away.

Ray and Rachel make it on foot into Boston, and Ray notices that the formerly blood-red weed, covering cars, statues, etc., is turning white and brittle. It's dying, as are the martians, their machines staggering in circles and collapsing into buildings. Just to let us see the US military take one of the suckers down, Ray points out to a soldier that a newly arrived machine (which appears to be actiing clumsily, but is also plainly about to go into attack mode) has birds sitting on it. The shields are down. So, one shoulder-lauched missle later it's going down in flames.

Dad and daughter stagger up a deserted street, seeing mom standing in the doorway, watching for any sign. Mother & daughter reunion, a silent "thank you" from mom, a bedraggled but intact Robbie follows from inside the building - somehow having survived and making it to Boston ahead of them - and even calls Ray "dad" as they sop up the sentimentality. Grandma and grandpop emerge wordlessly, letting us old timers see that it's Gene Barry and Ann Robinson - stars of the 1953 version - cast in those roles, and best of all for all we can tell stepdad Tim didn't make it. Now that Ray's discovered his family and proven himself to them and even his former mother-in-law (an early reference in the dropping-off-the-kids scene let us know there was no love lost between them) the way seems clear for original family to reform.

Choke back the tears of joy - okay, well, that's what the're hoping for - and roll the credits.

Oh, jeez. So, are you more sorry you asked than you are happy you didn't go?

I went in with my expectations set low, and got the summer spectacle I was expected, so it worked out for me. If there was something more I wanted from it it would have been more scenes of the military trying to fight back but being defeated. A scene like that with the Thunderchild - a military group fighting at peak form and managing to take down one of the machines, only to be destroyed in turn by one or two others would be a good for instance.