Battlefield Earth

Stop, listen, what's that sound?: Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise, centre left) tries to protect his daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning, center right), from big bad aliens in War of the Worlds. Photo Frank Masi. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

It’s been hard not to think about Tom Cruise this summer. With nothing exciting happening at the movies, the season’s best entertainment has been Cruise’s free fall from vapid, benign superstar to kooky, proselytizing madman. The world’s biggest celebrity is about five minutes away from pacing the town square with one of those end-is-nigh signs covered in tiny black handwriting while Katie walks three feet behind him in a white robe, and that’s a more dramatically compelling transition than Anakin Skywalker’s.

And yet, in watching Cruise in War of the Worlds, the film that spurred him to proudly unveil his new, freakier self, something strange happened: I forgot about Tom Cruise. By this point, Steven Spielberg is such an effortless filmmaker that he can take material as dusty as the 1898 H.G. Wells book about aliens invading the earth and turn it into something erupting with new energy, terror and — here’s something in short supply most Julys — intelligence. In movies like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg worked hard to undo alien phobia, assuring us that some visitors just want to play music or eat candy. But meaner times call for meaner aliens, and Spielberg proves just as deft exploiting the base dread that animates the classic space invader story: foreigners among us!

He wastes no time bringing the chaos. Somewhere in New Jersey, and all across the globe, freak lightning bolts spit down from churning grey skies, setting off a kind of small bowel explosion in the inner earth. Cement roads rip and crumble like there’s popcorn popping beneath them. Soon, sky-high silver alien “tripods” with dangling tentacles and tear-shaped heads turned on their sides emerge from the chasms. (A mere difference in the angle of those teary heads transforms the gentle creatures of Close Encounters into menaces.) The aliens have been here all along, it seems, which means they’re probably surprised to discover how similar they look to all the other movie aliens that have appeared on screen in the past few decades. But with their spidery bodies shining metallically, these guys reflect Wells’ Industrial Revolution anxiety: no Alien slime here. As predators programmed to take over the planet, however, their methods could use some tinkering: the tentacles evaporate humans one by one, which seems fairly time consuming. Maybe their own F/X guys are working on a nice, efficient plague back at the lab.

But it’s the slightly old-fashioned tenor that makes War of the Worlds such a welcome departure from the ear-piercing rock ’n’ roll apocalypses in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Miniature Taj Mahals and Eiffel Towers do not explode. There is no manly president working out a noble plan to right universal order on the U.S.’s terms. In fact, Spielberg, whose Saving Private Ryan made the Second World War seem like a tiff between America and Germany, keeps his flag in the bag and directs the audience to where borders don’t matter: eye level to disaster, and the eye is Cruise’s.

Not out of the woods: Ray (Cruise) with daughter Rachel (Fanning) and son Robbie (Justin Chatwin). Photo Frank Masi. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Tom plays Ray, big machine operator and bad dad who’s been entrusted by his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) with his estranged offspring for a few days. Broken homes are Spielberg’s most beloved locations, but this home is more than fractured; within hours of the arrival of angry teen Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and precocious young Rachel (Dakota Fanning), the vinyl-sided neighbourhood is as gone as Cruise’s reputation.

From the moment that the tidy lawns scorch, War of the Worlds accelerates and holds at nightmare speed as Ray and his family drive through the chaos towards mommy, of course, and Ray’s paternal redemption. (Yes, it’s a little insufferable, but this is Spielberg, people, and he really does try to keep the sentimentality in check.) On the road, the only thing more threatening than aliens is humans. The desperation and futility of the throng as seen from inside a minivan is sickening — it’s like Ray and his children are underwater and the water is made of molecules of humans; these living dead are scarier than anything George A. Romero could invent because they know their fate.

Heroism is almost irrelevant within the collapse. Moments of bravery come in fits and starts, suiting the idealistic son more than the lazy father. Considering all his public righteousness lately, Cruise’s performance seems even more impressive; he plays uncertain. Ray is a man who does not know what to do, so he does his best.

In fact, heroism looks a little like madness when Ray and Rachel take shelter in a survivalist’s bunker. The self-appointed alien-slayer is played by Tim Robbins, who needs to get eyelids; he hasn’t blinked since winning the Oscar for not doing so in Mystic River. As a yokel hothead who’s lost his family, his plans to “fight the occupation” are understandable, but dangerous. (No real human villains exist in this War, just misguided ones.) In a surprisingly dark scene, Ray is pushed to his limits to stop the other man from reaching his.

The worst traffic day, like, ever: Blame the aliens. Photo Frank Masi. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

It’s been speculated that Spielberg’s obsession with home may come from a Jewish sense of isolation, an intimate knowledge of expulsion and return. War of the Worlds works so well because it focuses not on the aliens, but on the humans in panic, grasping their possessions, wandering the abandoned highways and back roads as if there is a place to hide. Ray tries to shield his daughter from these truths, literally, tying a bandana over her eyes and tucking her face into his shoulder as they run. But in one quiet moment, as sad as it is gruesome, the little girl encounters a slow moving river of bodies. Good horror taps into our worst fears, and every parent’s worst nightmare is being utterly unable to protect her child.

Perhaps dislocation imagery is a nod to 9/11, but Spielberg also borrows carefully from the Holocaust. How quickly a whole people can become artifact. The only time we catch a flicker of the director’s former incarnation as alien sympathizer is when a creature who leaves one of the tripods fingers a black-and-white photograph found in the rubble. The photo, like the empty clothing that floats prettily through the sky, is a relic of disrespected history, a signifier of the present’s vulnerability. Wells made the same point more than a century ago, but somehow, this straight-ahead, explosive crowd-pleaser, with its slightly tinny aliens doing their slightly illogical things — they move from vaporizing to some form of chewing and spitting that makes no sense, and the film’s ending is abrupt and silly — speaks also to images of the displaced wandering the planet wherever they do right now: the Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan. War of the Worlds invites you to pick your civilization under siege and imagine your place in it.

Famously, Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the Wells story set off a panic with a believing public in 1938. Spielberg isn’t asking for that kind of conviction, but he does make very real demands on our empathy, even while thrilling us. And if the spectacle of Tom Cruise the actor provides distraction from the spectacle of Tom Cruise the man, then War of the Worlds is truly the summer’s first deserving hit.

War of the Worlds opens across Canada on June 29.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.