Out of touch
Mark Steyn
War of the Worlds 12A, selected cinemas
Hollywood is in the middle of its worst box-office slump in decades. Well, they hope it’s the middle, if not halfway through the seventh reel. And no one can quite figure out why this should be. The non-blockbusters are no better or worse than their equivalents of a few years’ back. What’s gone wrong?
Here’s one thought. The other day, before the new Bewitched (don’t ask), I sat through a trailer for Stealth. This is a hightech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane. That’s right: an unmanned computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is — stop me if this rings a vague bell — a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.
This is the pitiful state Hollywood’s been reduced to. The Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears was about Islamic terrorists, so naturally the film version made them neo-Nazis. The Nicole Kidman snoozer The Interpreter was about Islamic terrorists attacking New York, so naturally they were rewritten into terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. But doubtless some studio exec panicked that, what with all this Live8 business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let’s make the plane the bad guy. In the Eighties and Nineties, upscale Brits like Jeremy Irons and Gary Oldman made a nice living playing the exotic foreign evildoer in Hollywood, but, unless Jeremy’s been practising going brm-brm and taxi-ing down the garden path with outstretched arms, I don’t think he’s going to be getting many roles as the psycho aeroplane. That’s my theory on why the box-office is down: in ‘interesting times’, Hollywood is making films about nothing. That’s also why War of the Worlds is such a damp squib. Unlike H.G. Wells, who wrote his novel at the height of Mars fever when various observers were reporting ‘canals’ and strange lights on the Red Planet, Steven Spielberg seems to be using Mars as a refuge from anything topical or ‘relevant’. Wells realised the power of the story lay in its sudden devastating demolition of normality: hence, his decision to set it in the epitome of stable, placid, tamed English civilisation, the Home Counties. ‘What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton’ is one of the all-time great chapter titles — because of that juxtaposition of ‘destruction’ and ‘Weybridge’. Orson Welles certainly understood. His famous 1938 radio adaptation found an aural equivalent in its dramatic, supposedly ‘real’ opening, with its urgent announcer cutting in: ‘We interrupt this programme of dance music ... ’ I don’t know whether you can create that same sense of disruption in a visual medium, but nevertheless Spielberg and his journeyman screenwriters make two decisions that doom them from the start: first, they begin the movie in New York; and, secondly, they cast Tom Cruise. We’ve seen New York getting walloped by monsters a gazillion times, and the minute you stick Tom Cruise in the lead you’re telling everyone relax, it’s just a piece of Hollywood product. Spielberg works hard at making Cruise a regular working stiff, a bluecollar schlub, a hard-hat unloading cargo at the docks: the director brings on the bluecollar stiff’s ex-wife’s wealthy yuppified exquisitely tailored second husband mainly to underline just what a regular Joe the $25 million leading man is. But it doesn’t help. Without verisimilitude in the earthlings, you don’t buy the aliens.
Spielberg’s adaptation manages to be very literally faithful — he recreates H.G. Wells’s original giant tripods, for example — while missing completely the point of the story. You can’t see the overall forest but there are very many pleasant computer-generated trees — Cruise emerging from a suburban basement into a blasted wasteland, a driverless train roaring down the track with every carriage ablaze, a mob suddenly swarming his lone vehicle. But they’re generic moments unrooted to any real narrative.
Worst of all is the director’s angle on the material. Cruise plays a dad disconnected from his teen son and younger daughter until, happily, the aliens start slaughtering millions of people and provide our absentee pop with the perfect growth experience. For much of the film, it seems the obliteration of mankind is just a swell excuse for parental bonding. As Cruise traipses up the Hudson River and swings east to Boston, bickering with his alienated son and whiney daughter, Spielberg seems to be reversing the priorities of Casablanca: this crazy world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans next to the problems of three little people. Cruise’s character doesn’t have a lot to do, except run while holding his daughter (and even then he gives off the vague air of a somewhat disengaged child-minder), and he only belatedly turns into any kind of an action hero after being holed up in a cellar for a couple of nights with loopy survivalist Tim Robbins, which admittedly would drive anyone bananas. Otherwise, Spielberg’s entire take on the story is suffused in a fey passivity.
Every effective War of the Worlds is of its time: the Orson Welles dance-music interruption anticipated very precisely how most Americans would hear of Pearl Harbor three years later. But this War of the Worlds has nothing to do with our world at all. Recently I had cause to immerse myself in the politics of Hollywood leftists of the Thirties and Forties: they were wrong about everything, but even so they were engaged with ideas in a way that seems beyond the numbingly homogeneous limousine liberals of today. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a lavish nullity: the industry’s slump is set to continue.
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