Blech.
It is frackin' HOt here, and painfully humid -- so humid that the fans
barely work, as the air is too thick and heavy to move. The only
comfortable place is in the bedroom with the AC cranked, but that costs
way too much money, so, I sit and sweat.
In the good news, I'm back to game writing. 5K words today, in a way
combining too former projects -- neither of which I can mention, due to
NDA. But I am returning to one of my favorite topics, which is a good
thing, and I get to reuse material from an old campaign of mine, albeit
heavily modified. Only one comment: To the poles!
Wow. What a weekend. Friday night -- War of the Worlds, new Harry
Potter book and the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. Lots to
talk about, for once. WARNING: This post contains major spoilers for
the first. Other reviews forthcoming.
First off, the War of the Worlds. This adaption was truer to Wells
original in many ways than the 1950s version, though it still fails in
one key respect. The original was utterly inhuman. It was an
anti-imperialist rant in which England got to suffer the same fate as
the nations it had conquered -- to be crushed under the heel of an
implacable, alien, and technologically superior enemy which had no
interest in negotiation or peaceful coexistence. The narrator was
basically a cipher; he existed to wander the blasted landscape and
report on it. He (like most of Wells' characters) really had no
existence or story arc of his own.
This movie, however, focuses on a divorced dad learning what it means
to be a father. The alien invasion is just the impetus for him to bond
with his children. The fact is, he is a really crappy dad in the
beginning. He is irresponsible and incapable of properly relating to
his kids, and you get the impression they're better off with Mommy and
New Daddy. (We also learn that Hollywood has NO CLUE what a working
man's house looks like -- this dockworker has a HUGE house in Brooklyn,
complete with a back yard(!) and a wall full of electronics. He makes a
snide joke about not being able to afford a TiVo (less than 200
dollars) which is utterly belied by the place in which he lives and the
amount of stuff he owns. Anyone who lives like that can afford a TiVo.
But I digress.)
In any event, if Wells' novel was about imperialism, this movie is
about terrorism. (Indeed, the ubiquitious 10 year old asks "Is it the
terrorists?" when Bad Things begin to happen -- a chillingly logical
question for any 10 year old to ask, these days.) The 9/11 parallels
are obvious and plentiful. For example, Tom Cruise's character is
covered with ash from people vaporized by the martian heat rays,
similair to the ash which rained on Manhattan when the towers
collapsed.
By a somewhat contrived set of circumstance, Cruise has access to the
only working vehicle (the rest were disabled by EMP) and sets off to
Boston, in the hopes of dumping the kids back with their Mom.
(Honestly, there seems no other likely reason to choose that...if
aliens attacked, I'd head for the wilderness, on the grounds they'd be
scouring the cities first.) On the way, they get to witness one
horrific incident after another, from a ferry being upended (leading to
some especially chilling footage of people trapped in their cars as
they fill with water) to a tense encounter with a probing martian
tentacle in the basement of a ruined house. The 'TV eyed' martians of
the 1950s version are gone, replaced by CGI creatures whose bodies are
disgusting but whose actions seem curiously human...they are eager to
learn more about the odd beings they're exterminating, poring over
bicycles and photographs with an air more childlike than scientific.
In the end, biology triumphs, the martians die of the chicken pox, and
the children are somewhat implausibly reunited with their mother, who
is justifiably amazed that Dumbo Dad managed to get them through alive.
At least Spielberg didn't do what I dreaded he would do -- hook up Mom
and Dad halfway through the movie and have them reconcile by the end.
The film is quite intense, sparing little of the horror of the
invasion. The river choked with corpses, the blight of the red weed,
the blind and self-destructive panic -- all are handled effectively.
The blending of CGI and set has become perfect -- the opening scenes
seemed to be filmed on location, until the buildings were decimated in
the first wave of the Martian attack. Spielberg knows how to direct,
when he's not giving in to his urge to over-sentimentlize, and he keeps
that urge at arm's distance for most of this picture.
Sure, Cruise is a loonytune who believes all of humanity's ills are due
to the ghosts of dead space people who were blown up in volcanoes 75
million years ago, but, objectively, it's no sillier than any other
religion's premise. So see the movie.
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