H.G. Wells's 1898 novel on which this film is based basically birthed the modern science fiction genre. A classic it may be but the ending is still one of the worst cop-outs in the history of literature. That being said, I can perhaps forgive Wells seeing as that was 1898 and we didn't really know all that much about the makeup of our bodies or our planet (I mean, we only figured out that the heart was the organ that pumped blood through our bodies fifty years earlier). And maybe I could even forgive Spielberg for recycling that lame ending seeing as how he'd probably not want to enrage the people who want movies based on books to share as many plot points as possible. But nothing can forgive the last two minutes of the film in which Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier and his daughter walk down the picturesque and completely untouched upper class Boston neighborhood and find his ex-wife, her parents and his estranged son all alive and completely unharmed. No one else is anywhere to be seen. It's like a postcard. It's so ridiculously perfect that it should be a dream. But, unfortunately, it isn't. It's more of the same Spielbergian bullshit. Like John Anderton caressing his pregnant wife's belly at the end of Minority Report and David spending one last day with his mommy in A.I., this last scene takes everything that was beautiful and visually exciting (and there's plenty) that came before and rubs it in shit.
One great scene ruined by this ending (well, more precisely, ruined by the knowledge that this awful ending was imminent) finds Ray and his son fighting over the son's desire to witness the aliens' destructive power firsthand before he's killed and Ray's desire to stop him. The son, understandably, doesn't want to die hiding in a basement without ever having seen the awesome power raining destruction all around. And the father, also quite understandably, doesn't want his son to give up. They square off midway up a hill with the sounds and sights of nuclear catastrophe just over the ridge. It's a great idea for a scene and the execution is visual magic. But, and it's a big but, anyone even remotely familiar with a Spielberg film knows that there's no real danger. It doesn't really matter whether the son stays on the hill or goes with the father, they're both going to be fine because Spielberg doesn't have the balls to kill any main character ever. And frankly that just sucks.
But enough about the last half of the film, let's move on to the brilliant first hour or so. Some reviews have complained about the use of various touchstones from 9/11 and its aftermath that appear in the film (namely the dust that covers Ray after the aliens first appear, the posters of missing loved ones that line the walls of a subway station and the debris that rains down from the sky in the wake of the tripods). And while I suppose I understand being a bit touchy about it, as I watched the film I couldn't help but think that Spielberg had finally brought the events of 9/11 to film the way they should have been. I always felt, watching the actual footage, that it should have been filmed better, that we should have had a better angle on everything. Perhaps it's the long training I've had in the creation of emotion and nuance in film, but the images of 9/11 never resonated with me. Sure they were "real" but I've seen plenty of documentaries that manage to utilize a certain amount of film technique. And besides, I wasn't personally involved in that day's events and so they are no more "real" to me than the events of Hoop Dreams. But here, finally, a filmmaker with skill has tackled the events surrounding the collapse of the Twin Towers and done it in such a way that it gets to even me.
I suppose it's funny that a fictional film that draws its production design from real events would be more powerful than the images of the actual events. But in this case, Spielberg has so exactly portrayed the horror and grief of these events that even a person uninvolved in the whole mess can understand why this was how we dealt with the tragedy. And to those reviewers that are upset about the film's borrowing of 9/11 imagery, well, if youre mad about that you might as well be mad about CSI showing what happens to a body when a bullet passes through it or Law and Order when a woman who's just been made a widow starts sobbing uncontrollably. We learn how people deal with events only by actually witnessing them. Without the events of and around September 11, 2001, how the characters in War of the Worlds would have dealt with the catastrophic alien attack would have been conjecture based on the way people have dealt with catastrophes in the past. Post 9/11 we know how people deal with a massive tragedy. We've seen it. And there's not a decent filmmaker alive who wouldn't incorporate that into their film. But because Spielberg is so expert with these visual touches they resonant more than even the actual real events of 9/11 that were caught on tape. And I think that's where the betrayal these reviewers feel really comes from. Spielberg, at least for me, has, with this film, supplanted the images actually recorded on September 11 and replaced them with his own far superior ones. This is tantamount to sacrilege and cannot be allowed to stand (for some). But for me, I'm glad somebody had the balls to take this national tragedy and use it for some purpose other than misguided calls to patriotism or war. And I'm doubly glad that it was a filmmaker whose consummate visual skills achieved resonance with these images that the real ones never quite attained. If only the projector had broken when the film was an hour old and that goddawful ending had never unspooled and ruined everything that came before.
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