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.

No. When it became apparent that Heinlein fans were going to be royally pissed off by the crap they tried to turn his book into, they weaseled out by calling it a satire.

Once again: Bill the Galactic Hero was a satire of Starship Troopers. Bored of the Rings was a satire of The Lord of the Rings. Note that in these actual satires, the satirists had the intellectual honesty to at least give their derivative work a different name and did not try to pass their parodies off as the original. No such case with the Starship Troopers movie. It wasn't a satire. It was an insult.

And even if your point were actually true, it still begs my original question: Why is it that when hollywood makes a movie based on a work of a libertarian like R.A. Heinlein, they allow a hacky scriptwriter to butcher it, but when they base a movie off a work of a socialist like H.G. Wells, nothing is so important as "staying true to the book"?

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.

So Spielberg thinks aliens would have more respect for the homes of the rich than they would for the homes of the poor?

How utterly moronic.

The fact that US troops were used doesn't bear on the film. The essence of the military element was to display futility. Even at the end of the film when they hit the tripods with shoulder launched missiles, the aliens are already faltering and crashing without military opposition. In sum, they're clueless cannon fodder. As I said before, Spielberg makes his seminal point about the military in the screaming exchange between father and son about the foolishness of fighting (i.e., the military response). This is further underscored with Spielberg's symbolic portrayal of civil resistance in the Tim Robbins character.

The use of the military by Hollywood is hardly an honor, although somebody in the Pentagon has wised up in the last couple decades enough to read the scripts they're asked to participate in. In this case, some might simply conclude that the military element was heroic in going up against an implacable foe. That's true, but in the context of the rest of the film the meaning was much more about futility and mindlessness.

In the past, his portrayal of the military was of the same sort (again, other than WWII). Mindless, faceless drones just doing, as you said, "their jobs." Where have we heard that before?

In sum, my comments still stand. Spielberg's disdain for ordinary American life, morality, civil authority and all the rest of the enchilada are pretty much the usual drivel inculcated in the boomer g-g-generation. This film bore little resemblance to the original Wells novel and like most products of Hollywood only served as a framework on which to hang their nihilistic postmodern socialist dreck.

Save your money and stay away from this dog.

Why is it that when hollywood makes a movie based on a work of a libertarian like R.A. Heinlein, they allow a hacky scriptwriter to butcher it, but when they base a movie off a work of a socialist like H.G. Wells, nothing is so important as "staying true to the book"?

Ed Neumeier wrote the screenplay. He worked with the director on Robocop, so you can assume that the director brought him in.

What comes off well in books often doesn't come off well on the screen. Heinlein would be a laughing stock if translated straight from book to screen. He was very much of a particular era, i.e. Farnham's Freehold.

Spielberg's disdain for ordinary American life, morality, civil authority

Preposterous when talking about someone who's virtually the cinematic Norman Rockwell. You obviously don't think Hollywood cinema is a positive attribute of our culture. I do. And the theme of the film is human futility. Everyone. The Military was doing their job to the rest of their ability. Besides no single character was delineated all that much. Even Cruise's.

The essence of the military element was to display futility.

I disagree. There is a specific line in the movie in which it is noted that the military knows it cannot defeat the machines, yet is attacking anyway in order to slow them down so the refugees will have time to escape. Futility is fighting with no purpose, knowing you will be killed. Heroism is attacking with the purpose to save civilian lives, knowing you will be killed in the effort. That's what Spielberg shows.

Boy, that article tells us a lot more about the author than it does about War of the Worlds. I saw WOW on Sunday and it was exactly what I expected - a popcorn flick. It was pretty much on par with Independence Day but had better special effects and worse acting. Both WOW and ID had plot holes big enough to drive a truck through, but, so what? These movies are just to entertain you for a couple of hours and then be forgotten. (by the way, does Tim Robbins have any acting style other than mumbling and shuffling? Robbins is without a doubt the most overrated actor in Hollywood)

What comes off well in books often doesn't come off well on the screen.

A true point with many examples. The Lord of the Rings, as written, would also make for a very boring movie (all that tedious elvish and whatnot).

But the screen "adapter" of Starship Troopers didn't even try. He just cobbled together a hackneyed collection of his own ideas and prejudices, loosely glued on a stripped down summary version of the book's plot, and dishonestly tried to pass it off with the Starship Troopers title. And then called it "satire" when fans weren't taken in by the butchery. Note that they only stared calling the movie a "satire" after they found they'd pissed off a lot of R.A.H. fans with their crappy little movie.

If hollywood really wanted to do a satire of Starship Troopers, they'd have given the project to someone like Sam Raimi. He'd at least have the honesty to call his film something other than Starship Troopers. That, or why not make a movie of Bill the Galactic Hero if they're so desperate to make a movie satire of Heinlein? Bill would have made an excellent film with only minimal "adaptation" (especially the fuse room scene). I have no problem with honest satire. What I can't stand is a dishonest slash job.

Heinlein would be a laughing stock if translated straight from book to screen. He was very much of a particular era, i.e. Farnham's Freehold.

Some of his plots are definately dated. But the themes and ideas he presents are pretty damn timeless and universal. Many of his short stories (i.e. Tunnel in the Sky) would make for damn fine movies.

But hollywood simply can't be bothered to read, understand, or even stick to works of science fiction except where it suits their ideologies (such as when the author is suitably socialist). Just look at the steaming pile they tried to pass off as I, Robot.

With 'I Robot' Harlan Ellison (who wrote a brilliant screenplay adapatation that Asimov loved) said it best on his own board:

"The I, ROBOT opening next Friday is the awful retrofitting of an old screenplay called HARDWIRED that had been lying around for years, until it was picked up by Proyas. At that point, lawyers (or someone) who were slightly less illiterate than the usual movie gang, pointed out that the script used as its core the 3 Laws of Robotics that were clearly the creative property of the estate of the late Isaac Asimov. And so, properly fearing a lawsuit, they scampered fast as their asses-needing-covering would permit, and they bought the rights to the title of Isaac's classic collection of robot stories from an equally ignorant rights&permissions functionary at Doubleday. They changed the names of a few characters, they stuck in as little of the Asimov material as they could, and they used the idiotic robot-amuck CGI-festooned HARDWIRED, now retitled I, ROBOT."

Hyperbolic? Try reading Wells' books on the topic or transcripts of his then famous debates over the issue with leading clerics and figures in England. It was as important in his left-wing life as it is in the basic plots of the films...The director of the 1953 film obviously knew he had a problem with the fact that WELLS, not Hollywood, per se, and this basic story were part of Wells' anti-Catholic crusade. That's why we see a priest in a saintly attempt to stop the war and the people finding sanctuary in a church in the 1953 version. As for this version....

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