War of the Worlds

The storylines for all would-be movie apocalypses begin by answering a couple of key questions.

1) What macro-anxieties will be addressed? Outbreak, Deep Impact, Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow all set out to fuel new fears for the post Cold-War generation, while the mortal threat posed to human civilisation in WOTW arrives in the form of off-world beings that would treat us the way we treat vermin. For a long time these sort of pitiless, predatory aliens were surrogates for political otherness (specifically communists at the time of the famous Orson Welles broadcast). Spielberg's problem is that he has tackled this story at a time when it doesn't seem to have that many possibilities for resonance beyond itself. (Though perhaps his intent was to evoke a more diffuse nightmare of devastation.)

In Spielberg movies murderous creatures intrude into already fragile domestic environments. And family politics is the essence of the extra spin that Spielberg has given to H.G. Wells' classic tale. Which brings me to the second big issue for these (almost) end of the world scenarios...

2) What perspective should be adopted? Should globally-calamitous events be viewed through local, domestic close-up as in M. Night Shylaman's Signs? (or indeed Night of the Living Dead) Or should the societal/governmental level of the catastrophe also be shown? And what about those other folk that live outside the USA? Do they matter? (Usually not much)

The Day After Tomorrow and Deep Impact attempt to weave all the different levels together through character relationships. A common technique is early Sci-Fi was to start local then expand out to the White House level in time for the big showdown.

Spielberg opts to limit our view to the experience of one family, but by sending them on a journey, he allows us to pick up information incrementally about the developing extermination. The crashed airliner and subsequent encounter with a TV newscrew is the most contrived of these points of contact.

This technique at times makes the movie seem cheap - as when the battle between the tripods and the US Army (a tank and several humvees) appears to be taking place just over the top of a hill unseen to the Ferriers and to us the cinema audience.

Independence Day's salvation was kitsch. WOTW's premise is in some ways even flimsier, yet it wants to be taken seriously. It does however share one important quality with Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow - powerful, memorable images of human and material destruction - such as the burning train and the tattered clothes of the vapourised floating down through the trees. If there is another apocalypse that Spielberg is attempting to resonate with here, it's surely the one he tackled in Schindler's List.

V and I played at anticipating the "Omi..gaad" moments - she won after she correctly called the one from the ferryboat skipper.

She also thought it was amusing that the first thing the gringos would want to do when the world ends is find somewhere to eat and sleep. But judging from my own experience of what happened here in London on July 7, it clearly is in our nature to seek the nearest point of comfort and normality when the world appears to be on the blink, and it can be very hard for the person on the ground to grasp the enormity of their situation without immediate access to news and other communications.

So in the end the aliens get the pox and die. Spielberg gives us a 'happy' ending when the family is reunited, or at least returned to its previously disunited state. Ray Ferrier has some lucky in-laws. He has reached this rather artifical end point having performed both classically heroic and darkly unheroic deeds. The future can't exactly be bright for any of these people.