I saw War of the Worlds tonight, opening night, and it is visually arresting, relentless and brutal. This Village Voice review by Michael Atkinson has a couple of interesting takes on the film. The iconography of 9-11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center is certainly exploited in the film’s depiction of mass catastrophe, and the reviewer is right to caution those with first-hand traumatization from ground zero to see it at their peril. But it doesn’t seem so much political allegory as attempted exploitation of our experience. The trouble with attempting to burrow deep into our post-9-11 psyches to tap into our visceral traumatization is, I suspect, that many people are just not that caught up any more in the trauma of 9-11, for at least two reasons to which Spielberg is not oblivious to judge from allusions in the film. The trauma of the terrorist attacks has been detoxified partly by our numbing (more of that below) but more profoundly by the caricature of fear the buffoons running the country have produced with their ludicrous War on Terror® ever since. As they flee the initial alien attack in Bayonne where the film opens, Spielberg has the daughter figure plead with her father, Tom Cruise, to tell her if it is “the terrorists” they are running from. Spielberg throws that in our faces not once but several times to be sure we get how laughable and pitiful it is that that has become our kneejerk standard in threat assessment. If he is attempting to exploit our deepest fears, he is doing it not without irony.

The film not only traumatizes nonstop but, collapsed onto one character, the daughter, we have a decent cinematographic portrait of traumatization per se, both the psychic numbing and the hyperreactivity that come from being exposed to something beyond the pale of what humans are meant to endure. Her father has a sense of what she is going through too. Again, not once but several times during the film, he shields her eyes and firmly instructs her not to look at what they are passing through. Shouldn’t this be seen at least partly as an allusion to American obliviousness to where the real threats are coming from in our world?

The funny thing about the daughter’s traumatization is that she is not shown rising above it at all; she gets more and more numb, passive and nondynamic as the film proceeds, to the point where it seems she barely has any lines in the last third. But, then again, H.G.Wells’ story wasn’t about transcendence or the indomitable human spirit either. [Spoiler ahead, stop here if you don’t already know the story.] The virtually undefeatable invaders are done in by earthly microbial infection of course, not human valor, in what has seemed to me ever since I read the novel in my childhood (no, I wasn’t around for Orson Welles’ famous Mercury Theater radio broadcast!) to be an unsatisfying deus ex machina despite Wells’ epilogue (done very nicely in the film by Morgan Freeman’s voiceover) about it saying something about humans’ exerting their will — and their right — to survive. (Independence Day has already been there, done that, and, as you know, it is much more of a two-hour-long cliché.) Perhaps this is another ironic twist by Spielberg as by Wells: it will be a miracle if we persevere despite our stupidity and arrogance.

What Cruise shields his daughter’s eyes from, at least as much as the mass carnage the invaders wreak, is the rampant human cruelty and inhumanity which erupts with the breakdown of social order and mass panic. This more mundane inhumanity which erupts after a ‘terrorist’ attack can be seen, of course, as a commmentary on our post-9-11 existence as well, although we are left to believe that, just as on the family level the daughter is sinply reunited with her mother in the climactic scene (or, should I say, anticlimactic?), everything is now going to return to the prior status quo on the societal level after the aliens’ demise. Everything except Cruise, of course, who goes from a caricature of a deadbeat father to find cheap and somewhat inexplicable redemption. I’m sure it is written into his contracts that this must be the case with any role he takes.

Which brings me to the Voice reviewer’s more curious contention, in his last paragraph.

Certainly, the rise of the long-dormant threat is a new twist Spielberg has introduced and a departure from Wells’ story line. I don’t know enough about s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y to comment on any similarities with its “alien occupation backstory” but it is Spielberg’s film, not “Tom Cruise’s War of the World”, despite the frequency with which it seems to be referred to that way in the media. Although Spielberg has apparently been quite tolerant of Cruise’s proselytizing while they promote this movie, I am not convinced that, no adherent of s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y himself, he would plausibly give away artistic control of the worldview his film expresses no matter how big a star he has in tow. Could you see this as an allusion to the ‘sleeper cells’ al Qaeda supposedly planted here eons ago, instead? And of course Spielberg’s friend George Lucas did just release that anti-Bush film, Revenge of the Sith.

But…was I thinking about any of the above as I sat in the movie theater? No, I was riveted and scared witless with, except for one glaring continuity glitch, my disbelief totally suspended.