Warning: full of spoilers, not even readable unless you have viewed the movie.
Lexicography has a weakness for blockbuster science fiction special effects films. Sometime after our college cinema course we realized that modern movies were little more than thrill rides. They were “art” or “theater” only in the metaphorical sense, as in “he raised nose picking to an art.”
In the distant past you could watch screwball comedies or talking head dramas. Today the filmmakers have fully explored the powers and limitations of their medium. That is why there are car chases, explosions, guns and gunshot victims in every movie that comes out. They could remake “Little Orphan Annie” today and there would be a handgun introduced in Act II.
One can work within the constraints of a medium and still convey or hint at a higher message. I think the makers of “War of the Worlds” tried to make more than a summer thrill ride. This is a film with a message.
I have to confess, I missed the message. I left the theater perplexed. Why were the alien craft buried here centuries ago instead of arriving by meteorites? Why do the alien war machines sound like jet engines up close? Why, when the family first starts to run and stops overnight does it appear and sound like an alien attack, but turn out in the morning to be a passenger jet crash? Why, with the entire world under devastating attack in a film set in the United States where people are fairly religious, does not one single person on screen exhibit any prayer or other religious observance? Why do the aliens not drink blood, as in the book, but shower it on their red weed-like plants? Why does the son keep trying to join up with the military by the side of the road, when he has no training, no skills, no possible contribution, and the military is totally ineffectual against the aliens? Why was the movie nasty, making me feel bad and squirm in my seat as it went on?
Well, I discovered the answer to all this and more through the Internet. WOW is not a movie with plot problems; it is a movie with a message.
Here is my reading, enlightened by the many reviews which are out there. I feel that where there are changes from the Wells book or the prior film, there is a reason for the change.
The opening minutes contain mucho “in” film jokes, plus, unimportant and farcical family drama. Please note that the family we are watching eats humus – a fact underlined by the filmmaker. You will not exit this movie without knowing that the stars eat humus.
The Alien Death Machines are buried underground among us. This is a plot device to add relevancy and echo sleeper cells. Instead of invasion we have pre-placement – but do not think that means that through out the film the Aliens are the sleeper cells or the terrorists.
A street cracks. A church breaks apart (the only religious iconography in a film about apocalypse) and out of the church comes the Alien Death Machine. Now this is total invention, there is nothing in the source material which addresses this scene. The church window references the earlier film adaptation of WOW put to an entirely new meaning. The Alien Death Machines are Crusaders, coming out of the church to sow death and destruction.
The machines are relentless and horrifying. In conveying this, the film is effective.
Yet the machines sound at times like jet engines. The filmmakers could have made any sound they desired so the multiple moments of equivocation, is it an Alien Death Machine or a passenger jet, must be intentional.
Lame joke when the TV news crew gets its meal off the remains of a crashed passenger jet. Lowly TV people live off the disasters that befall people, literally getting their daily sustenance right out of the disaster scene.
Son tries to join the US military; jingoism.
While in the Wells book the aliens drank human blood, in WOW the aliens remove human blood with a drilling like device and spray the blood on a field of their plants.
Why did I think “blood for plants” sounds like a leftist slogan? The aliens come here to take our blood to feed their plants. American soldiers go to Iraq to take their oil (metaphorically, blood), not to drink, but to feed our plants (our industrial base).
Here, the star blindfolds his daughter. No one living through the last three years can view an innocent person blindfolded without thinking about the hostages taken and exhibited endless sly in the Middle East. Here, it is the star, us, doing the blindfolding, and it makes sense in the extreme conditions forced by the Alien Death Machines. Of course, one must blindfold an innocent; any good person could find themselves in the same position.
When the star exits his hiding place and walks over the field seeded with blood, what does his first find? An SUV sprinkled in blood.
Moving quickly now, Cruise becomes a suicide bomber, taking an explosive device from his defeated military and trying to destroy an Alien Death Machine by holding the explosives while entering the machine. By this time the audience so identifies with him that they feel suicide is fine if he can just hurt the bastards.
The greatest problem I had with the movie while in my initial unenlightened state was the ending. Wells had a deistic ending, humans survived because God put microscopic pathogens in our world. We thought the pathogens were evil and incomprehensible. Why should so many children and adults die of disease? Yet the microbes turned out to be a defense against even greater horror, defeating an enemy capable of wiping us out. Greater intelligence and all that. It was a little weak in Wells (though he must have been pretty satisfied with the device). It was incomprehensible in a modern Hollywood remake. Religion to Hollywood is not microbes which cause seemingly senseless suffering and death, only to turn out to be a wise planet-wide defense mechanism designed by God. Religion to Hollywood is ignorant misguided superstition catering to the basest human fears. Why retain Wells ending? Because it could be read in an alternate way.
Think of it. The elite say messing in any other country will turn into a quagmire, not just as a military operation, but as a general distasteful mess, with beheadings, civilian murders, &etc. The basic story is that the pathologies of these places are so great that we can do nothing other than turn away in disgust and withdraw. The diseases that they suffer from, tribalism, corrupt governments, willingness to kill uninvolved and nonmilitary parties, brutality, intolerance und so weiter are so great that the place is toxic to people like us. As with the Aliens in WOW so be it with the American people. We will succumb to the diseases of the region.
That is my reading of the movie, on hindsight.