June 28, 2005, - 12:05 pm
“War of the Worlds” Spielberg-esque Message: Don’t Fight Terror
By Debbie Schlussel
I’m violating Steven Spielberg’s review policy for “War of the Worlds” and telling you what I think ahead of tomorrow’s scheduled release date. I saw the movie at a press screening, last night, and was disturbed by the message: Don’t fight terror, and everything will work out. (In contrast, Spielberg definitely fights for his own interests. Security was literally tighter than that for going to the White House to meet the President. No purses allowed. Three wandings by security.)
It’s bad enough that Steven Spielberg is adding “balance” and factual inaccuracy to the story of the Israeli Mossad’s efforts to assassinate terrorists who killed Israeli Olympic athletes–in his upcoming film, “Vengeance” (I’ve detailed that ). It’s bad enough that his message in “Vengeance” is that fighting terrorists and killing them is bad and doesn’t work. But his similar message in “War of the Worlds” is arguably worse–because the movie, with fantastic special effects, is likely to be one of his bigger hits.
Spielberg said “War of the Worlds” is a parallel for 9/11 and serves as a “prism” through which to view 9/11, the War on Terror, and our presence in Iraq. The movie makes that very clear. People running from exploding and falling buildings, walls and kiosks covered with “missing” signs and pictures for those looking for lost relatives, people giving blood — these are all 9/11 references.
But the message is: Don’t fight terrorism. It will miraculously go away if you leave it alone and it breaths our air and culture. Puh-leeze.
SPOILER ALERT: Not a big spoiler, but stop reading here, if you don’t want to know about a part of the movie.
Soldiers, with their tanks, hummers, and assorted weapons are wasting their time fighting the alien terrorists. Their hummers come back empty and on fire.
For a significant part of the movie, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his daughter are holed up in an old basement with Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). Robbins’ character wants to fight the outer-space invaders or at least die trying. Ray doesn’t want to. He just wants to be silent and wait it out. Because he and Ogilvy are at odds over the strategy to fight the alien terrorists, Ray murders Ogilvy. And magically, the invaders eventually die and go away at the end of the film because, as narrator Morgan Freeman says, they could not handle the bad things in our air, our environment, our culture. Our “spirit” won out over them.
But “spirit” alone does not beat terrorists. Fighting them does. And that involves going on the offense. Terrorists don’t just give up and disappear. They are not aliens who can’t handle our air. Hello? They live among us–they’re of the same species.
Screenwriter David Koepp says, “Certainly, there are a lot of political undertones and overtones. The political tones of this movie will emerge for themselves. In the ’50s, ‘War of the Worlds’ was, ‘My God, the commies are coming to get us.’ Now it’s about fear of terrorism. In other parts of the world, the new movie will be fear of American invasion. It will be clearly about the Iraq war for them,” Koepp told the Chicago Sun-Times.
This outrageous statement is the Hollywood thinking. Yes, we evil Americans are like the murderous aliens in “War of the Worlds” to the people of Iraq. Forget about guys like Capt. Jon Powers, 27, who spent 420 days in Iraq, but instead of going home after he left the Army, is still there–on a mission to help the street children and orphans of Baghdad. In contrast, there are no kind aliens in Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.”
Then, there is Tim Robbins. His character, Ogilvy, says occupations “never succeed … . local insurgencies always bring you down.” Gee there’s no agenda there, right? Isn’t this the same Tim Robbins, universal sensitive man and girlfriend to Susan Sarandon, who has tiraded against Bush and the War on Terror everywhere that will have him (excluding Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame, thankfully)? Why, yes, it is.
Robbins says the movie’s message is “how any kind of terror can change a peace-loving person in an instant.” So now we are “war-mongers” because we’ve chosen to fight terrorism, instead of giving in to it, like the lucky idiots, a la Tom Cruise, in this movie?
That’s exactly what Spielberg, Robbins, and their “War of the Worlds” want you to think. Ignore terrorism. Don’t fight it. Stop being so “militant,” and it will go away.
Tags: Army, Baghdad, Bush, Captain, Chicago Sun-Times, Cooperstown, Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame, David Koepp, Debbie Schlussel, Iraq, Israeli Mossad, Jon Powers, Morgan Freeman, Olympic, President, Ray Ferrier, Screenwriter, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, the Chicago Sun-Times, Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise, Vengeance, War of the Worlds, White House
Well Debbie,..
It pays to do a little research, and with the story, “The War of the Worlds” having been written over 100 years ago, you don’t have an excuse here. Zip. Zero. Nada.
Heck, even the first adaptation of the book is more than 50 years old (George Pal’s War of the Worlds), not to mention the notorious radio play by the same name, orchestrated by the great Orson Welles in 1938.
Spielberg has no such message here — “Don’t fight terrorism”, as you assert. You are as uninformed here as any knee-jerk liberal out there. Writer David Koepp adapted the novel by H. G. Wells, who wrote the book as an allegory for British imperialism.
Orson Wells and his Mercury Theatre hurriedly put the radio play together, never anticipating the response — “The night that panicked America” — in the foreshadows of World War II. Producer George Pal based his movie very loosely on the book and tied it into cold war paranoia.
I’m no fan of Spielberg beyond his movie making, story-telling abilities. But he has said repeatedly in interviews all over the web that this novel is something he has wanted to do since college and he tried to do it about 10 to 12 years ago — long before 9/11. He and the writers stayed very true to the book, written long before Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of World War I.
In Spielberg’s, Pal’s and Wells’ productions, the terror comes in and dies out in much the same way. Author Welles’ point was that man is not always the solution to his problems, hinting more at divine intervention than international resolve in his story.
If anything, Spielberg will leave a lot of movie-goers walking away, relating very much to the character Tom Cruise plays and asking themselves, “Am I that much of a jerk?” “What would I do for my family in a crisis?” “Am I going to stay like that?”
Maybe someone will come away seeing a renewed importance of family and personal responsibility, something Spielberg has talked about here in interviews. Yes, he admits he “borrowed the world” and has deliberately set these events in the shadows and fears from 9/11 (as Pal did with the cold war and Wells with World War I/II). Good for him — he made it that much more real and sister, it works.
And as for it being a ‘prism’ in which we view 9/11 and Iraq, etc., it is. So is Batman Begins — someone wanting to do something about injustice. And then there’s the prism of Bewitched — we can try to remake/rebuild something, and in the process, we find something there we didn’t expect.
(I could go on, but I won’t, lest we fall into “Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”)
Sure, Spielberg and his ilk are big libs. I know that, and it’s easy, even tempting to plunge his motives into the barrel of “liberal bias” when it comes to this film. Me, I’m just going for the production values.
So please. Enjoy the movies for what they are. As Dan Quayle once quipped to Al Gore: “Al, you can’t believe everything you watch on TV…” likewise, you should be careful in interpretting what you see in the movies.
In this case, you just plain blew it, and I trust you’ll correct yourself to fend off further embarrassment.
Cheers!
Jodeo
Nashville, TN
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Movie Info:
1953: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046534/
2005: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407304/
Radio play info:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930s/a/warofworlds.htm
Jodeo on June 28, 2005 at 2:55 pm