5/10

The following movie review is a copy of an email I sent to some fellow Sci-Fi fans

I enjoyed your Mars radio special a couple of weeks ago. The mix of Mars related sound samples was fabulous. I think you were too kind to the new movie. My vague review and comments follow in jumbled sequence.

Two weeks ago my friend John and I attended the 10am ‘cheap Tuesday’ session at Southland to see Spielberg’s War of The Worlds. I knew little about the movie, as there seemed to be a lot of secrecy regarding the trailers, even in the TV reviews on SBS and ABC. I never saw more that the same tedious teaser trailer that was on high rotation for several weeks and consisted of a rock-video style sequence of close-ups of horrified faces. The reviews on TV and radio by people I trust were generally good, so I felt some small compulsion to see the movie.

OK, so after 20 minutes of tedious and typical Spielberg character exposition we learn that Tom is a slob father with a precocious daughter, a potential deadbeat son, an ex-wife and various hangers-on. Then we meet his neighbour, his car mechanic, his poodle washer, etc etc etc, yadda yadda,

With merciful speed the storms arrive and things start to go spookily awry, with useful but unsubtle clues on TV that things are going haywire around the world.

The scenes where the buildings split and move under the rising machine were laughable, obviously set on a huge sound stage, probably wasting most of the budget and time, being the stuff of pumped-up ‘making of’ DVD extras.

Finally, the huge Martian machine rises out of the ground and starts blasting buildings and panicking people to ash with sweeps of the heat ray. I thought “Oh yeah! This is rock-and-roll, this is great, keep it coming”. I also thought now that Spielberg had broken out of his rut and was really going to let-it-rip.

I was wrong.

For the rest of the movie I have to suffer Tom and his screaming dysfunctional family in endless close-ups racing across the US in the only apparently working car in the country on a quest to go to Boston for no apparent reason other than because Mom is there. Somewhere along the way–for no apparent reason–a plane crashes on their house, they meet some journalists who give us more redundant plot exposition, a boat capsizes, lots of people scream, they meet Tim Robbins who wastes a lot of time and is mercifully killed, and they survive more deadly threats than Indiana Jones.

Interestingly, Tim says something like “I heard the Japs brought down one of these machines in Okinawa”. This made me sit up in my seat, as it was a real Sci-Fi tickler about something bigger happening, but it went nowhere.

At this point I’m thinking “Where are the Martians, where is the war, where is the world?” I’m getting really sick of the sight of Tom’s peanut shaped head and the screaming kid. I put my fingers in my ears many times during the movie to shut out the screaming, and so did John I noticed.

When Tom’s worthless son runs over the hill with a handful of soldiers to take on the Martians hand-to hand, armed only with his iPod (I presume), I figured that was the end of that pain-in-the-ass, but I was wrong again.

So it all pans-out, the Martians die as predictably as the Titanic sinks, there’s a bit of revenge thrown-in, and they all meet in Boston, even the prick of a kid who seems untouched after running head first into a flaming Martian death machine an hour earlier.

After coming out of this mess of a movie I attempted to discuss it with John over lunch, but we seemed to sit around going “Ummm! Errr!”. All we could decide was that the arrival of the Martian machine was fabulous, but the screaming kid drove us mad, the roaming adventures of the Tom’s family went for far too long, Tim Robbins was wasted and that prick of a son should have been toast.

Two days later I was discussing the movie with a friend who is a bit of a movie fan and has a hobby interest in the history of warfare. He pointed out that we never saw any significant military presence in the movie. The planet and the USA are being trashed, but we only see a couple of CGI jets fly over, a 2 second (at most) scene of a Cobra blasting hopelessly into the force field, and a small column of grunts on trucks heading into battle. This comment hit me like a slap. Yes! Where were the Generals, the think tanks, the nukes, the computers, the resistance with trip-wires, etc?

With an even greater slap I realised that I had been ‘Spielberged’ again, but it took me a few days to realise the severity of it. Good ol’ Stevo has made another blockbuster that is predictable and politically correct to the point of idiocy, which explains why we never see a single dead or injured US soldier or piece of wrecked machinery. 9-11 constipation hangs all over this movie.

At the end of the movie we have some scenes that contain what I call the ‘Doolittle Syndrome’, where in the face of defeat (as in the dreadful movie Pearl Harbor) we have to have a Doolittle revenge raid. So Tom drops a grenade into the machine, and the neat looking military guys at the end pump a few shoulder-launched rockets into a debilitated machine. So we know we’re going to win anyway, but we have to have some face-saving scenes of US military bravado and heroism to keep people cheering in the cinemas howling “USA still rules”.

I doubt if they were cheering even in the USA. This movie got lost somewhere. Spielberg did not have a clear picture of what this blockbuster was supposed to be. Was it a Sci-Fi movie about the invasion and destruction of humanity? Was it a story about a family wandering through a battlefield? Was it a story about a family? What was the point of it? This movie fails at almost every level to satisfy. I have seen single TV episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer that are more thrilling, thought-provoking and haunting that this ill-conceived big-budget mess.

There are parts of the movie that have a knuckle-whitening feeling of dread and horror, but they are short and lost in the mess. The Martian probe in the wrecked house is great, but it goes on for too long. The Martians look great, but we never learn anything about them, their machines or their motives. The visions of blood feeding are quite scary, but it doesn’t go anywhere. One wriggling victim is conveniently hidden behind a tractor as his innards are sucked out, presumably to keep the M rating. There was no real horror in this movie, only hints of it.

This blockbuster was a politically-correct, watered-down, pointless, visionless, unfocussed waste of time and money.

I learned last week that Tom has conspired with Steve to get half of the merchandising profits from the movie release, expected to be something like $400,000,000 (no, that is not the wrong number of zeroes, it’s almost half a billion dollars). God help us SF fans. When will someone use their budget to make a new startling SF movie, making us think and talk about movies like Alien, Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey did?

Cheers,
Greg

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