War of the Worlds : Spielberg and Wells on War, Revolutions, Occupations, and Christianity

War of the Worlds: Steven Spielberg and H.G. Wells on War, Revolutions, Occupations, and Christianity

The new Tom Cruise vehicle titled War of the Worlds is not only a tense portrayal of the terror and horror of war, particularly for those on the losing side of a modern one, but also a deeply political film. Director Steven Spielberg has gone to great lengths to "spin" this classic story with contemporary political allegories. What else should we expect from a film directed by Spielberg and co-starring Tim Robbins? Indeed, we should expect nothing less from a movie version of a book written in 1898 by H.G. Wells, who was a famous socialist (briefly Fabian Socialist), met with Lenin, rejected Stalinism, and was a vigorous proponent of a single world government. Wells’ original critiques of empire (British) and class warfare themes were set aside for the famous Americanized film version of 1953. Along with a more chilling sound effect for the alien tripods, Spielberg has updated that film by incorporating some of Wells’ original themes. We shall explore here if Spielberg is also reviving, in this age of the International Criminal Court (something Wells would have welcomed) and both environmental and "globalist" activism, Wells’ advocacy of a world government, attacks on nativism and conservative politics in general, and even Wells’ critique of Christianity. The following is only one man’s attempt to decipher the "back story" to this film.

First off, Tom Cruise’s character is clearly a representation of a working class guy from urbanized New Jersey. Cruise actually manages to pull off "average Joe" after a few scenes. He has an early scene in which he jokes he can’t meet the rich-kid demands of his children, who now live in comparative luxury with "Tim" and his ex-wife (and who are only being dropped off with their real "Dad" for the July 4 weekend [in a related critique of "American" social values in this age of "empire"]). The class rhetoric of the film doesn’t become wholly transparent until, after seeing the full impact of the war on his home and family, we see Tom Cruise walking with co-star Dakota Fanning towards a fancy townhouse of Boston (the mother’s house of his character’s ex-wife) that is the only building he’s seen since before the war that hasn’t been destroyed. The wealthy elites of Boston got to effectively sit it out, while the whole world collapsed around them, and Cruise and others had to walk through Hell (complete with alien blood-soaked weeds) and valleys of death. The only benefit to Cruise's character was that the war itself eliminated the corruptions of money and selfishness in his relationship with his children. It was Wells’ intent, reflected in this latest film as well, to illustrate that the costs of war and occupation are the burden of the working class – whose blood litters the soil of empires and fuels their spread of influence (like weeds), while the rich "capitalists" generally find ways to avoid the direct consequences of war and terror, and/or profit from them.

An early scene showing Cruise working on a dock seemed contrived towards that end, that is, until one sees the tripod machines and considers that Tom Cruise’s character was just shown driving a huge rig like that. The "alien" tripods are shaped like the aliens themselves (three-legged), and with a tricorner (Minuteman hat-like) head (and triangular command pod), with mechanical arms flailing about like so many slung/holstered weapons for a soldier. When viewed in the context of Dakota Fanning’s character talking about her body pushing out a splinter in due time, like the tripods emerging from the ground, it becomes clear very quickly that the viewer is being asked to consider that the tripods are a painful part of nature, much like the viruses we "earned the right" to live with through a billion deaths (reads narrator Morgan Freeman at the end), and an extension of something that is inside us – as Americans. The aliens force us to face the horror and terror of what a war between "men and maggots" (of the technologically superior vs. the occupied) feels like. That is, we are seemingly asked to consider what it must have felt like for those in Tasmania in the 19th century (in Wells’ original book), Poland in 1939 or Iraq in 1991-2005 – in hiding, with much of the war’s duration spent peering out through small slits in basements and bunkers. There is even a scene in a bombed out house with Tim Robbins, who plays a creepy man that Cruise’s character eventually has to kill, desperately trying to dig a spider-hole like the one Saddam Hussein was found in – all the while proclaiming that "occupations" always fail. Actually, he’s "dead set on" being wrong about that last claim, but that’s a history lesson for another time and place.

Herbert George Wells’ views on Christianity rear their ugly heads in this film – literally, in the form of a tripod that Cruise gets to watch coming up from a street right next to a church. While approaching the site of lightning strikes – the preferred method of travel for the occupiers, who appear out of the sky, Cruise’s character is approached by a local who immediately says (to paraphrase from recollection):"God is punishing the people of this neighborhood." Gee whiz, what happens next is that the machine comes up from the ground at the corner of "Merchant" (the aliens are good little capitalists, after all [how does that saying go?: it never hurts to be too thin, too tall, or too rich?]) and "New..." streets and topples the steeple of a Christian Church. In the 1953 film the director had the evil uncivilized aliens torch a priest. In this adaptation, the aliens appear transformed into symbols of the church – rising up from the roots upon which modern Christianity and the church were founded. One couldn’t help but notice that church steeple – the Old North Church? -- still standing behind the characters in the last scene in which Cruise appears on the streets of Boston. It was the only tall thing left standing in Boston after the tripods were finished.

The tripod itself is a symbol of what Wells argued was the primary fault in Christian faith – the adoption of the doctrine of the Trinity. This was a theme he was famous during his life for debating publicly, and addressing in God the Invisible King (1917) and his Outline of History. Wells’ take on faith was that God is an "Invisible King," whereby personal redemption or salvation with the help of any Church was not in the cards – so why bother? It was all in God’s "hidden" hands, and in particular via Darwinian natural selection (a theme central to Wells’ original War of the Worlds, where the aliens themselves are scrawny and come to represent what will become of man after eons of technological supremacy). Thus, the "tripod" is not some "natural" symbol or random "choice" for the aliens – it was a loud and booming critique of Christianity and all of "God’s creatures" affected or transformed by it through social Darwinism.

Here, in War of the Worlds, the theme is one of human "power" and nation-states being utterly powerless in the face of God’s hidden hands. Those hands come in the form of a superior race of tripods (with "legs" that operate like three-fingered hands), both living and machine, that have been here on Earth long before man ever built a road (to bury the machines a "million years" ago says Tim Robbins’ character). Those tripods, of course, symbolize Wells’ hatred for the Holy Trinity [Wells himself, the ardent socialist, later published a non-fiction work purporting Christian roots for modern totalitarian nightmares called "The Holy Terror" (1939)]. Little wonder they first pop up beneath a church. They are a "natural" power that can wipe out the greatest power and nation-state on earth in a couple of days. Hence, the U.S.A. seems to bear the brunt of the attacks in this film. Talk about what is going on in other parts of the world is purely speculative and contradictory, as shown in the march to the dock sequence.

Spielberg seems to be driving at a point here -- about American empire. First, the film is set on a July 4 weekend, released on a July 4 weekend, has Tom Cruise exclaim that the lightning, God’s Darwinian wrath we learn later, is like a July 4 fireworks show, has real U.S. military troops and equipment as extras in some spectacular battle sequences (probably on the debatable premise that the film is a patriotic one), and then ends in Boston around a statue of a Minuteman (not a real one, but one tailor-made for the film). The most important scene is the one involving the statue, covered in dying red weeds, which is the film’s climax, since it appears right next to the first fallen tripod. Cruise’s character tears away part of the dead weed strangling the statue and crushes it in a scene framed with the Minuteman statue behind him, while he proclaims that "they" are dying.

Who are "they?" THEY are destroyers in nature, part of God’s plan (but who face God’s wrath in a Darwinian turn of events at the end of the film), the spreaders of influence fueled by the spilled blood of man, technologically superior, but utterly without morality (showing no mercy or remorse as the aliens in one scene become curious about the photo of a woman in a bombed out house, that is, a photo of a creature they had either just drank the blood of or sprayed like fertilizer in a "war of extermination"). THEY are the aliens with heads like tricorner Minuteman hats. Perhaps "they" are metaphorical Christian American imperialists triggering a natural reaction in the form of devastation and chaos that mirrors the War on Terror (a standard radical Left-wing explanation of 9/11). Indeed, the reaction, like a rash of splinters being pushed out of God’s hand (His Earth), launched by the aliens comes in the form of an attack in which Cruise is covered with ash and soot, much like survivors of 9/11 in New York City, followed by another near-miss on "Tim’s" house by a crashed airliner.

So who or what is dying? A left-wing cinematic and Sci-Fi vision of American empire is dying. The same empire that former President Martin Van Buren slowed the spread of by blocking the annexation of Texas. In the opening "torch" sequence, Cruise is seen running past a street named "Van Buren," which is likely named after the famous New Yorker and President (1836-1840) Martin Van Buren. It’s the aliens (American imperialists) that want none of that, and blast through Van Buren street in the following sequences. Coincidence? It is the technologically superior Americans who have grown too comfortable with their supremacy, and who have lost sight of humility and humanity while spreading their weeds, tentacles, and empires to the loud boom and chorus of the Holy Trinity. As H.G. Wells wrote about often (in more than just World of the Worlds), it is at the very moment of an animal’s or empire’s supremacy that nature, God’s hidden hand, finds a way to ensure its complete overthrow. Rome, Britain, the Soviet Union, and many other empires have experienced that fate. The same thing could happen to our "empire," or is happening to our "empire," is the propaganda message of this film.

War of the Worlds has been broadcast and told in many variations, often in a very timely and prescient manner (from 1938’s radio broadcast on the eve of World War II to the 1953 Cold War version [with an anti-nuclear theme] for the theaters). Here, in this version, the "evil" is a Sci-Fi (a very "American" approach in its own right) spawn of American empire. Spielberg’s explicit allegory is France trying to civilize Algeria. In this film, Cruise’s character has a son with a school report due on the French experience in Algeria, which they repeat over and over in different contexts. We got the point already! Yes, our war in Iraq is like France’s attempt to subdue Islamic radicals in Algeria, and they failed. We know that. That is, most of us, with the apparent exception of Bill O’Reilly, who published a review of this film that tried to "spin" it as a rousing battle against alien al-Qaeda (a simplistic interpretation that ignores countless other allegories in the work, and Wells’ original intent). Let’s move on. When we see Tim Robbins exclaiming how occupations always fail, it becomes clear that the audience is supposed to be considering what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the wars in Iraq (with left-wing propaganda in the real world purporting that it is on the level of an "extermination").

So who really saves the day? In Spielberg’s version, the anti-imperialists are hardy revolutionaries coming up from the "Underground," from under houses and Tim Robbins’ "subways" for "resistance" (Cruise ends up taking a machine out after he finally gets the guts to fight back) to Cruise’s direction of a counter-attack from under an enclosed concrete walkway. They are the heirs to the spirit of the Minuteman statue breaking free of the strangling grasp of the red weed. In that respect it is a universalist, anti-imperialist and anti-war (left-wing) "patriotism" motivating the resistance. Breaking free, that is, to control their own blood, and not have it sacrificed for some destructive imperial force. Finally, the film ends with what appears to be a geographically impossible shot of a tree with a small green bud filled with our naturalist "allies" in the counter-attack against environmental destroyers -- the viruses (and the birds who spread them, like the flu, to the aliens and red weeds they feast on). Residents of Boston may have noticed that the final sequence, which shows the former Fleet Center and Bunker Hill Bridge in the distance, has a vantage point comparable to that of the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. That is, it is the view of Patriots who held the line and delivered a stunning blow to the British empire – and, here, its allegorical heirs.

Only this time, the anti-imperialists are out-matched. The great power of our nation is not enough. Even the intense desire of the son in this picture to "get back at them" is pointless. They cannot win the war alone. It is the globalists (one-worlders), our environmental friends (birds and viruses, and all of God’s creatures), who really save the day.

With all that having been said, this film was not entertaining in the least. It was enough to give nightmares to small kids and fits of apoplexy to adults sick and tired of Left-wing propaganda as "back stories" to Hollywood spectacles. I suppose if one just ignored the symbolism and allegories, it might seem like an "enjoyable" ride -- through Hell. Perhaps that explains why there was not a single clap after the end of the film (not even in victory) in the crowded and large theater that this reviewer saw it in: a theater located in a suburb of Boston roughly the distance from the city that you see the people marching towards down a highway in one scene.

I have my own interpretation. The aliens are Liberals and other anti-American revolutionaries wearing the camouflage of the Trinity and tri-cornered hats, and as cold-blooded as the creatures and weeds drinking the blood of patriots to keep warm. They wrap themselves around our country (and our patriotic monuments) like weeds. After all, it is the radical Left that made 9/11 possible with "open borders," political correctness in the FBI, and opposition to wars of preemptive extermination. Maybe it’s time to push those splinters out.

You idolize the past greats too much at the expense of connecting them to the present. K had the same flaws as SS actually. Sentimental and schematic to a fault. I maintain that SS is as good a director of action and spectacle as any film maker who ever lived. Eisenstein and Kurosawa included. I'll agree with you on your Scrosese/Spielberg take though.

I agree with what's up! Batman Begins was an anonomous genre movie with no personality to speak of.

First, the film is set on a July 4 weekend,

Um...no it isn't. The film is clearly set in the fall. Is the author confusing this movie with Independence Day?

Anyway the film of Starship Troopers was a satire. On that basis it was brilliant.

Oh please. Bill the Galactic Hero is a satire of Starship Troopers.

The movie was a lame hacky attempt by a pathetic self aggrandizing liberal hollywierd screenwriter (or a comittee of the same) to overlay his own pathetic ideologies and weak criticisms of a work he neither understood, nor probably even read. Calling it a "satire" is just an equally lame attempt to explain away the crappy insult to the audience (not to mention R.A. Heinlein) that resulted. It was hardly "brilliant" by any definition.

I don't idolize the past greats because I don't see them as "past." Their work still lives and remains vital. Citizen Kane is still a great movie. Faulkner is still a great writer. And I expect as much from movie makers and writers today as I expect from those who lived 50, a 100 or 400 years ago. Guys working today may have a different written or visual vocabulary, but I refuse to accept that art has to devolve under the burdens of money and international markets.

I found it dull. I think that thing that zoned me out early was the emphasis on the Eastern mysticism stuff with Liam Neeson (not a favorite actor of mine tho that's beside the point) which I find tedious.

And it seemed lifeless thereafter as well.

I understand that fans of the novel didn't like it. But director Paul Verhoweven is a satirist. The whole thing was made in the form of a fascist propaganda movie. It's a big goof. The characters were played by blond blue eyed bleached Aryan types. All by design. It's also a formally adept piece of filmmaking. Remember the same director made Robocop.

I saw the movie two nights ago. Special effects were great. The little girl drove me nuts to the point of almost leaving. I had huge expectations for this film as I still love the original flick and generally like Spielberg and his work.

I do not regret seeing it, but I was dissapointed overall. Maybe I was just expecting too much.

I couldn't have said it better. That first act in Bhutan was painfully dull. And Nolan can't stage fight scenes to save his life.

I don't know it's a stupid term. So is 'Hollyweird'. Do they talk about the New York elite or the Chicago Elite?

And while I'm at it, what the hell does "hollywood elite" mean, anyway?

You're kidding, right?

I'll quote Laura Ingraham:

Elite is a state of mind. It doesn't mean working in a particular profession, living in a special place, or making a certain amount of money. When I talk about the elite in New York and Hollywood I'm talking about people who believe that America's traditional values are a thing of the past. The part of America outside their orbit is considered ignorable, merely fly-over country.

Actually I wasn't kidding. What some people on this board call "Hollywood elite" are actually some of the most scared and timid people you would ever hope to meet. They're in a profession that is not only fickle, but in which you get to make very, very mistakes.

On the other hand, I would say -- from my limited experience -- that many in Hollywood have either an inflated idea regarding the salt of the earth nobility of flyover country folks or harbor the petty ugliness of a superior attitude that comes from growing up among the country club set in flyover country.

What didn't you like? It was very faithul to the novel.

Hardly so when the script has the tripods buried around the earth in prehistory.

I thought the movie was ok. I live in the UK. My girlfriend is Swiss/Italian. We saw the film together.

One line in the movie had Tom Cruise explaining to his son that the tripod had come from 'somewhere else'. His son replies with his own question- 'Somewhere else- like Europe?' We both thought that was hilarious.

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