“War of the Worlds” – Steven Spielberg’s Version

“At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone … gave way to panic.  She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth.  She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar. … Her great idea was to return to Stanmore.  Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore.  They would find George at Stanmore.”
–H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, book I, chapter 17

Where would you run to, if an alien invader were laying waste to your world?

The hapless Mrs. Elphinstone, about to flee across the Channel to France, balks at going.  She’d rather head for the safety of Stanmore and her husband.  (It doesn’t occur to her that George is probably dead, Stanmore in ruins.)  Near the end of H. G. Wells’s novel, the unnamed narrator sets out for Leatherhead, where he left his wife when the Martians first attacked, hoping to find her there.  And in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film War of the Worlds, the main character’s struggle, amid the devastation inflicted by the aliens, is to get himself and his two children to Boston where his ex-wife is.

I think it was sometime in 2004 that I first heard that Spielberg was doing a film version of War of the Worlds (having dropped the opening “The” from the title).  The news struck me as faintly ominous.  The first major iteration of the story was published by Wells as a magazine serial in 1897, as a hardcover book in 1898.  This was 16 years before the War of the Worlds gave way to the World War–granted, not an immediate prelude to that mass horror, but close enough to suggest that Wells was picking up on some looming evil in the collective spirit of the time, about to erupt in an orgy of slaughter and destruction.

The second, the Mercury Theatre radio play starring Orson Welles, was broadcast in 1938.  And I don’t have to tell you what broke out less than a year later.

Now a third retelling; what might it portend?

For one reason or another, maybe the reviews which seemed tepid enough that I didn’t feel I was missing a classic, I never got around to seeing the Spielberg film.  But really, if you’re going to talk about The War of the Worlds in its several incarnations, you can’t leave out a movie by one of the great cinematic geniuses of our time.  This week I finally went ahead and watched it.

You probably know at least the movie’s main features.  Its protagonist isn’t a freelance intellectual like the narrator of the Wells novel, or a professor like the Orson Welles character, but a Brooklyn dock worker named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise).  He’s divorced, apparently something of a Casanova; his two children, teenage Robbie and 10-year-old Rachel, live with his pregnant ex-wife and her new husband.  The kids are staying with him for the weekend while their mother and stepfather go to visit her parents in Boston.  Then an uncanny, unnatural lightning strikes, bearing with it alien beings that animate monstrous tripods buried underground.  These emerge and begin their rampage.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on the challenges that confronted Spielberg in trying to retell Wells’s story.  Martians were out.  In 1898 and again in 1938, it could be made to seem plausible that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings who might come to invade our planet.  By 2005, it was clear that wasn’t so.  So the aliens had to come from somewhere outside our solar system, and the kind of clunky space vehicles available to them in 1898–metal cylinders fired into space from a great gun–couldn’t have carried them at anything like the speed of light.  The lightning was apparently a way to get around this.

But this now creates problems of its own.  Who buried the tripods?  Why?  We’re told at one point that the tripods were there before there were humans–“they’ve been planning this for a million years.”  Planning what?  World conquest?  But if the aliens dominated Earth a million years ago, why didn’t they just stay here?  Why go away, let us build our civilization, then come back to destroy it?

In Wells’s novel, the Martians’ motive is clear: their planet is freezing, dying; they need a home closer to the sun.  (It’s a side benefit that, for them, human beings will serve as breakfast, lunch and dinner.)  The motives of Spielberg’s aliens remain murky.

And another problem, less fundamental but perhaps more telling.  If Wells’s Martians were to invade Earth today–heat-rays, “fighting-machines” and all–they wouldn’t last two weeks.  We’d finish them off with our smart bombs before they could do any but the most marginal damage.  So Spielberg has to invoke the force-field shields that make them invulnerable, like the aliens in Independence Day.  (And, I think, other alien-invader movies as well, though I can’t name examples.)

Not a great difficulty–for the movie.  But how tragic for the human race, that we’ve progressed so far down this path!  And that it seems beyond imagining we could ever go back.

---

How much profundity does one look for in a movie like this?  If the director weren’t Spielberg, and if Spielberg’s alien-visitation masterpiece weren’t the deeply evocative Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the answer would probably be: nil.  And I suspect that, beneath the dazzling but hackneyed special effects–buildings destroyed, a ferry overturned in dark waters, cars lifted up and crashing down to earth, a tentacle with an electronic eye at its end exploring a dark cellar–the answer for War of the Worlds is close to that.

But it seems to promise more, and perhaps this is why, at the feel-good ending (“For neither do men live nor die in vain,” Wells had written, and these or very similar words are voiced by Morgan Freeman at the film’s end), I felt empty and rather depressed.

Is there significant symbolism in the emerging tripod’s first act of destruction, the toppling of the spire of a Hispanic Lutheran church?  This is a detail taken from Wells (“I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin”), but why does Spielberg adopt it?  To express the symbolic castration of the human race?  Or is it that the alien invasion shatters and reveals the vanity of our religious hopes?  God’s descent on Mount Sinai was accompanied by “thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount … and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly“ (Exodus 19:16, 18), and here also, celestial beings descend in lightning and a trembling and splitting of the earth.  They come, however, bearing no Ten Commandments upon which a civilized society can be built.  Only chaos and destruction.

And the emergence of the long-buried tripods from beneath our feet–is there something here beyond a not very effective attempt to solve the problem of how they manage to cross the gulfs of space?  When the film was made, the memory of 9/11 was still fresh; did Spielberg feel us to be at the start of a new world war, with Islamicist terror in the place of Nazism?  I’ve seen the suggestion made a number of times on the web, that the buried tripods are analogues to terrorist sleeper cells.  At one point, as Ray and his children flee New York in a van that’s the one functioning vehicle in a sea of disabled cars, Robbie asks, “Is it terrorists?”  Of course Ray’s answer is no, it isn’t terrorists.  But the association has been made.

Or is the symbolism deeper, more psychological?  Freud spoke of “the return of the repressed,” the impulses and memories we’ve buried in our unconscious, which re-emerge in disguise to control and often blight our lives.  The fragility of human civilization before the power of the resurgent tripods will then be the fragility of the conscious ego, and the story of menaced humanity will be the story of each one of us as an individual.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, which never much appealed to me.  But if I recall correctly, his images of supernatural horror include “the Old Ones,” who were here before us–“a pantheon of dead alien deities buried inside the Earth,” the “H. P. Lovecraft Wiki” calls them–and before whom, when they’re aroused from their deathlike slumber, humans are helpless.  Do Spielberg’s aliens, in sharp contrast to Wells’ Martians, belong in the Lovecraft tradition?

If so, the question of their motivation becomes irrelevant.  They’re evil, for evil’s own sake.

---

And what are we to make of the ending?

Ray and 10-year-old Rachel have at last reached Boston.  They trudge into the city–not destroyed, badly damaged–their van long since abandoned and Robbie long since disappeared, having apparently gone with the Marines to fight the aliens.  They’re part of a stream of refugees, directed along by police (“keep moving, keep moving”); civil authority, it would seem, is still functioning.  The aliens are visibly dying, though their tripods are capable of wrecking buildings as they collapse.  And then Ray and Rachel reach the home of his wife’s parents.

It’s in a tranquil neighborhood, apparently untouched by all the horror around it.  How is this possible?  The old couple and the young couple (Ray’s wife and her new husband) are well dressed and clean, calm and cheerful, as though the war were thousands of miles away.  How is this possible?  Robbie is there with them; how is this possible?  Rachel runs into her mother’s arms.  Robbie, formerly sullen and estranged, runs to his father and they embrace.

Just like Stanmore, as Mrs. Elphinstone imagined it.

What’s going on here?  Has Spielberg simply nodded off, failed to notice how incongruous all this is?  Or is he saying something I don’t quite get?

Is he saying the alien invasion has been nothing more than a protracted bad dream, and that the serenity of the Boston neighborhood welcomes Ray and Rachel back to stable, comforting reality?

Or, more likely, that this serenity is itself a dream or fantasy?  Ray has made a shambles of his life, even before the tripods–emblematic of his past bad choices?–rear themselves out of the ground.  He and Robbie have been openly hostile to each other.  Near the beginning of the film, a game of catch between them turns murderous; Ray works out his rage by throwing the baseball through his own window.  (A foreshadowing of the aliens’ subsequent window-smashing?)  The lunatic violence that follows will then be a projection of the internal violence that’s torn this family apart.

To be resolved, magically, if they can only make it to Boston where Mom and Dad are.  Where, as at Stanmore, all is well and safe.

So is this what Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is about, at its deepest level?  A state of out-of-control interpersonal dysfunction, resolved through a reconciliation fantasy so obviously counterfeit that it undermines itself?  No wonder I came away depressed and without energy.

Give me Close Encounters of the Third Kind, any day.

by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on  Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog?  (Now listed among the “Top 75 UFO Blogs and Websites about Unidentified Flying Objects.”)  Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.