"War of the Worlds" -- a Freeper Review (SPOILERS)

Just got back from the new version of "War of the Worlds." In short, this is an epic remake of the nifty 1953 version done by George Pal (later of "The Time Machine" with Rod Taylor, 1960). The FX are spectacular, of course, but the film just doesn't quite pull it off.

The story is shot through the eyes of Ray, Tom Cruise's character, so it lets a lot of action occur off stage. This tactic can do a lot for a story, but in Cruise's case, it doesn't work. His costars, including young Dakaota Fanning, are excellent, but ... we've seen it all before. Cruise looking desperate and put-upon. Fanning running the different shades of panic and dispair. Tim Robbins as a crazy pedophile (ok, this may just be good type-casting). A cast of hundreds of real extras and thousands of CGI people being vaporized -- neat, but again, we've seen it before, especially in the 1953 version.

This latest Spielberg version is just too full of logic and continuity holes to hold together. The alien Tripods have been buried here on Earth for tens or hindreds of thousands of years until they are activated today. WTF? Were the aliens waiting until we could fight back to launch their invasion, instead of easily taking-over 50,000 years ago? The aliens themselves ride lightening/EMP bolts down from space, arriving underground with the baggage of several thousand Gs. Can you say Puree of Alien? As in the 1953 version, the Tripods have protective force fields that deflect anything thrown at them. But when the aliens catch colds and start to die, they also conveniently manage to turn-off their shields so the remaining National Guard troops can take them out with Stingers and small arms fire. The EMP strikes fry all auto and machine electronics but leave cordless phones and video cameras running.

Even though this is a war movie, we get Hollywood's Guns are Bad! rap. When Cruise goes on the lam with his kids he takes his .357 with him, although he hides it from the kids because, you know, guns are 'bad.' When his car is hijacked and his family nearly killed, another character takes his gun and promptly murders a third with it (yes, guns are 'BAD,' even when you are trying to save your kids from being killed).

The aliens' death rays are wonderful eye candy, turning people into (antiseptic) flaming ash while leaving their clothes intact. Another WTF? Very 'green' and all. There are a lot of annoying gripes. A local ferry boat captain in one battle scene is wearing the cap of a US naval officer -- and the eagle is looking left -- something the US Navy changed in 1941. Oops X 2. Couldn't Spielberg do better than that?

As pure popcorn munching, the movie is fun and the tension holds up at a certain visceral level, but the mind is never engaged -- a requirement for the best movies. The major sets are great: a downed 747, horribly empty of bodies because everyone was vaporized in flight by that neat antiseptic death ray which, like the evil Neutron Bomb, kills people while leaving structures intact (apparently the Aliens like our architecture). The scene of the first Tripod breaking through the street and incinerating people is also a wonderful realization of set design. The cast does ok (although Fanning's wonderful horror expression is starting to get overused in movies), but again, with so many CGI people being vaporized, it all starts to glaze over. With the camera on Ray 100% of the time, his costars don't get to do very much. When Ray grabs some hand grenades, you know what he's gonna do: bring-down a Tripod that is trying to turn him into Soylent Red with which to fertilize Alien Kudzu (I am not making this up). It's kinda neat to see mashed humans being sprayed across the landscape like the operation of Lawn Doctor's evil twin, but human blood to fertilize plants from the planet Koosbane? Cummon! When the action finally moves to Boston, Spielberg is too lazy to recreate a view of Boston and we get action in what appears to be downtown Los Angeles. Maybe he just got tired.

My Freeper Rating: Hype: 9/10. Movie: 7/10. Spielberg could have done far better than remake a 52-year-old film that was pretty neat in its day. But then, most movie goers never saw the 1953 version. Their loss.

>That was in the back of my mind also. I wouldn't put ANYTHING past that group

Mystery Scientology Theater

They came from within: How War of the Worlds anticipated the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard

by Jessica Winter
June 28th, 2005 12:21 PM

The ominous tagline in early trailers for the alien invasion blockbuster War of the Worlds was "They're Already Here"—but any learned Scientologist could have told you that long ago. As you may have heard, WOTW star Tom Cruise is a 20-year veteran of the Church of Scientology, which reportedly teaches that human beings contain clusters of "body thetans," or spirits, of aliens who died 75 million years ago in an intergalactic purge of overpopulated planets by the evil overlord Xenu. In Scientology-speak, these "BTs" adversely influence our thoughts and behavior, and must be "cleared" through "auditing," a form of confessional therapy. For Scientologists (whose Hollywood ranks now include John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson), battling creatures from space isn't just the stuff of allegorical multiplex spectacle—it's nothing less than the path to self-fulfillment.

War of the Worlds (opens June 29) is hardly Cruise's Battlefield Earth, but Steven Spielberg's film does make one Scientology-friendly tweak to H.G. Wells's 1898 novel of Martian attack (the aliens' war-making infrastructure has been implanted on earth for millions of years), and it's no wonder Cruise chose the movie as his first production to benefit from an on-site Scientology tent. "The volunteer Scientology ministers were there to help the sick and injured," Cruise told Der Spiegel, like a battle-weary soldier extolling the Red Cross; no word on whether the film's agon incited sympathetic revolts of BTs among cast and crew, though we can all cross our fingers that Katie Holmes's resident aliens, unbound by earthling non-disclosure agreements, will one day pen a tell-all book.

...

In his 1902 lecture "The Discovery of the Future," Wells endorsed the forward-thinker, who "thinks constantly and by preference of things to come," just like the "Clear" in advanced Scientology, who has rid himself of "engrams," or disabling imprints of past traumas. In Wells's War of the Worlds, Martians labor incessantly, with no apparent need for sleep or sex, and communicate telepathically; the Scientologist has a Calvinist work ethic, keeps his motor clean, and having reached the rarefied "Operating Thetan" levels (Cruise is allegedly an "OT6"), can learn to read minds. According to Hubbard, ailments ranging from the common cold to leukemia could be classified as merely psychosomatic; in Wells, the Martians have eliminated illness entirely. Were Wells's aliens the proto-Scientologists?

One of the more ironic aspects of Hubbard's—and now Cruise's—crusade against psychiatry is that Dianetics simply repackaged the basic Freudian concept of psychic determinism, whereby conflicts within the unconscious spill out into the open through irrational behaviors and psycho-somatic symptoms. Dianetics differentiates between the unconscious or "reactive" mind—"a single source of all your problems, stress, unhappiness and self-doubt"— and the "clear" mind, scrubbed of neuroses, with an enhanced IQ and near perfect recall. (Perhaps Katie will be able to remember exactly where and how she met her fiancé once she's further along in her auditing sessions.) A Scientologist reading of Wells would identify a sadly asymmetrical battle between Reactives and Clears, as wailing herds of hysterical humans respond to alien predation with mass panic while their cerebral, workaholic visitors calmly go about irradiating them.

Wells's narrator observes of the Martians, "The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers and hardened their hearts"—three for three on the Hubbard scoreboard. The Nation's 1950 review of Dianetics worried over "its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 percent efficient mechanical man," because such unaffiliated self-sufficiency "does not exist except in a psychotic state" (cf. Cruise's character in Collateral). Such concerns were apt regarding Hubbard, who would later declare that perceived enemies of the notoriously litigious Scientology organization could be "tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed," and who once wrote that a solution to low scorers on the Dianetics "tone scale" would be "to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow"—a notion Wells, a sometime advocate of eugenics, may not have found altogether abhorrent in other contexts.

On Hubbard's battlefields, you are either with us or against us, but the most grievous attacks are usually launched from within; paranoia is endemic, a perpetual night of a thousand engrams. In conjuring the angry viral ghosts called body thetans and mutating sci-fi into Scientology, Hubbard might have taken inspiration from Wells's shell-shocked narrator at The War of the Worlds' end, wandering a scorched and ruined London: "About me my imagination found a thousand noise-less enemies moving."

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