Critique : War of the worlds

Let's be crazy and venture to criticize Steven Spielberg, on the precise website where the director was granted a whole dossier. Just a few nasty thoughts about his works, which will look wanton at first sight, but true in the end. Let's spare his carefree times – during which the hero wagged his whip – and focus on the period everyone agrees to call adulthood, or even the age of reason, a period we shall call here: the geriatric era.

Indeed, you cannot help considering this part of his works – which is rooted in The Color Purple (1985) and based on Schindler's List (1993) – as one which tends to lapse into mouldy sentimentalism and Hollywood mush. Those tears shed to the detriment of the child's eye allowed Spielberg to assert a pseudo-maturity which is in fact at best an uninteresting, at worst a stale look on the world. The Terminal certainly was the climax of this trend: a silly lampoon about the American dream which transcends the borders of its genre without even breaking them. You can thus easily imagine how long-awaited War of the Worlds was.
Fortunately, in the credit titles, Steven Spielberg erases any prejudices and casts a clever glance backwards. A warm, slightly ironical voice, which seems to come directly from the 50's serials – it is in fact Morgan Freeman's –, tells the audience about the extra-terrestrial menace in a peremptory way. In a great move, the director replants the roots of the adventure movie and gives his film a retro appearance. Without contradicting this first feeling, the rest of the movie adopts a modern and topical standpoint on the world.

By the way, this choice of a single point of view cocks a real snook at Independance Day and its heroic, split action. Seeing the invasion through the eye of the average man is the greatest – and maybe the only – strength of the film. Tom Cruise is a common man, a divorced crane driver, and a poor father, and he perfectly embodies those parts, more at ease in this sudden thickness. There are two trends in War of the Worlds. Though Spielberg used to play on the transition from news item to pure fiction (see Saving Private Ryan and the aesthetical difference between the landing and the bridge capture), the alien invasion certainly is his first story that parallels two visions. In the background, true adventure and scenes of alien attacks you have always dreamt to see. In the foreground, a family drama perfectly told, clear and fascinating. When the two sides meet, the film is sumptuous.

From the small eye of a realistic vision of an unrealistic attack, Steven Spielberg develops an odyssey in incredible apocalyptic scenes. The crushing, destructive invasion is shot with force. Bits of actions appear and strengthen the reality of the end of the world for suburban people. No heroism is highlighted, all that matters is surviving and travelling through this wide-awake nightmare (you will never look at a train in the same way again). Spielberg's care for realism finally pays in great adventure.
When Spielberg stops his amazing cinema feats (like an incredible sequence shot on a motorway), the film's rhythm slows down and lets room to tension and fear. The director thrills the audience with a drama held in camera. Then comes back Spielberg's geriatric trend: he stops being maudlin and gives lessons with the assurance of someone who has thought about life for a long time. Spielberg did not deny that he wanted to show the American audience what refugees' lives were like, whoever they were, and what were the consequences of the bombings by the US liberation army. He keeps this realistic point of view and refuses heroism.

The film ends with the same voice-over delivering a religious, patriotic speech – taken from the film, but also present in the book, if I am not mistaking – and Spielberg shows the neo-classicism of his thought, an inheritance of the Pilgrim Fathers. The problem is not really this religious assertion included in War of the Worlds but its link with a parable about refugees, for it tends to clear human responsibilities and displays a strange trust in God. You have to believe, because there is nothing else to do. To understand truly the subtleties of his thought, you have to pay close attention to the fate of Tim Robbins' character, as well as to the voice-over.

Finally exhausted by two hours of action and reflection, you will be pleased that the director shows his true face in the end, and in a movie that he masters perfectly. This is the reason why War of the Worlds may be the best film of Spielberg's worst period. Which is rather interesting.

Traduction faite par Cécile Colinet