LICC - connecting with culture - war of the worlds

Shortly after Jeff Wayne released his musical version of War of the Worlds (selling over 13 million copies), Steven Spielberg introduced us to the initially awe-inspiring but ultimately cuddly aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They lit up the skies with Christmas lights, and used a five-note serenade to convey messages of peace, not war, to planet Earth.

Then came ET – Spielberg’s alien messiah who healed the sick before dying and being raised back to life; ET not only welcomed the little children, he chose to live among them. Spielberg’s science fiction, critics have often remarked, invites us to see the universe with awe and wonder through the eyes of a child – even if it’s a robot child, as in AI.

So, it’s unusual that Spielberg, through this adaptation of War of the Worlds, is now suggesting that there’s something out there to be feared rather than revered. The Christmas lights have been replaced with death rays, the alien serenade with a doom-laden, fog-horn blast issuing from the tripod machines of the invaders.

H G Wells’s original 1898 story attacked the ‘gun-boat diplomacy’ of the European empires which cowed less developed nations into submission through their superior technology. Spielberg echoes this theme in his film: “foreign occupations always fail,” declares Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), leaving commentators to deliberate about the parallels with Iraq and the so-called ‘war on terror’.

‘The point here,’ writes the Guardian’s John Patterson, ‘is that if Bush has lost Spielberg, who for all his shortcomings remains the presiding cinematic visionary of Middle America, he suddenly looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson in 1968, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, the reassuring uncle of the nation, turned publicly against the war in Vietnam.’

This is certainly a film against war, terrorism and violence of any kind. The depiction of the relentless onslaught of the Martians and the innocent victims caught in a struggle for survival serves to remind us of the kind of disregard for life we witnessed in London last week, and which is happening every day in Iraq and elsewhere.

The film ends, as it begins, by zooming in on the microbes that bring about the invaders’ downfall; Spielberg is still trying to invoke the awe and wonder of old, but this time it’s not just for the universe we live in - but for the miracle of life itself.

Jason Gardner

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