Spielberg's "merciless" 9/11 references throughout War Of The Worlds

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

That War is the bare-fanged evil twin to Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a given, but the movie's relationship to 9-11 is more troubling. Clearly, our experience in 2001, televisual and otherwise, has taught the F/X wonks a few things about massive catastrophe (a lot more smoke and dust, for one thing), but Spielberg explicitly alludes to the WTC attacks in dozens of ways: missing-persons postings, fallen airliners, reflexive questions like "Did you lose anybody?" etc. The references are merciless, and firsthand veterans of ground zero should approach the movie with tongs. Is it exploitation of our experience, or is Spielberg forming a statement? At the very least, the presumption, pace Roland Emmerich, seems to be that we have, after a four-year rest cure, regained our consumer's appetite for destruction. You may have.

War of the Worlds is, in the end, more modest than its first half suggests; the screenplay has story-meeting paw prints all over it. (Justin Chatwin, as Cruise's surly teenage son, decides halfway through that "I have to see it!"—what?—and disappears for the rest of the running time.) Close to a half-hour is spent in a farmhouse basement with Tim Robbins as a half-baked militia man. But there are moments of uncommon, distressing beauty: burning Jersey trees, a river of floating corpses, a crowd waiting at a railroad crossing as a burning runaway train barrels by, a snowstorm of tattered clothes excreted from human-consuming alien vessels. Other images, like a loaded Hudson River ferry turning over matter-of-factly, dumping cars and people, can too easily steal your dreams.

And what of Tom? He's on the edge, in the movie and out of it, although Wells's simple story has been molded into a passional for Katie Holmes's bubbly-headed Heathcliff to prove himself trustworthy and man enough. But there may be more to the psychodrama than even Oprah anticipated: Wells's Martians-arriving-in-meteors paradigm is subtly altered, so that now the genocidal ETs are delivered by lightning bolts into the dormant ships buried underground for eons—kind of like the time frame for Scientology's alien occupation backstory. Could Tom be thinking he's finally produced a Dianetic cinema? Does it qualify as a faith-based initiative? As Wells said elsewhere, I look about me at my fellow man. And I go in fear.

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