War Of The Worlds

What a fucking hoopla. Between Tom Cruise aggressively marketing his forthcoming merger with Katie Holmes and the furore surrounding Paramount’s preposterous (and frankly unethical) embargo on the appearance of film reviews prior to War Of The Worlds’ day-and-date planetary release, by now, odds are you’ve heard all about Mr. Spielberg’s latest venture.
Such studio preciousness, it must be noted, is normally reserved for known howlers and turkeys, but hey, it’s Spielberg and H.G. Wells, what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a bit as it happens. True, War sees behemoth invaders zap unfortunate New Jerseyites into dust particles with digitalised aplomb; ferries capsize magnificently at the mercy of metallic tentacles and the scary theatricality of the set-pieces would surely have impressed even Orson Welles, whose 1938 radio version gave New York a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.
Standing at the centre of this apocalyptic razzmatazz is the Cruiser. Essaying a Joe so average he might well have wandered in from a Bruce Springsteen song, his divorced docker is forced to take cover from the cosmic hordes with his stroppy teenage son (Chatwin) and cute precocious daughter (played by, well I never, Dakota Fanning) in tow.
As a human drama, it makes for fairly humdrum viewing – think Jurassic Park Spielberg not Schindler’s List – and one tends to feel more for the fleeing masses than the movie’s dull identikit family. Still, there’s plenty of crash-bang-wallop by way of compensation and an impressively unnerving post-9/11 sensibility. Sweeping waves of terror and panic are followed by blood-drives, the erection of murals depicting photos of lost loved ones and cops struggling to maintain order.
Of considerably more interest, however, is Spielberg’s about turn on the extra terrestrial front. Cinema’s representation of alien invaders invariably lends itself to political allegory among those who sit around thinking about such things (that would be me then). If the red paranoia of McCarthy’s purges famously fuelled the flying saucers at contemporary drive-ins – including Byron Haskin’s original 1952 version of War Of The Worlds – what then should we make of Spielberg’s film?
Until now, he’s always seemed rather taken with the notion that we are not alone, but live in a universe pulsating with Bambi-eyed M&M eaters and well-intentioned atonal space rustlers. War’s mothers from another planet have little use for such getting-to-know-you chit-chat.
“Are they terrorists?” screeches Fanning's trembling moppet, as the relentless aliens hit phase one of their crash, kill and destroy plan. Tom shakes his head and informs her that the marauding monsters “come from somewhere else” and his sullen son immediately enquires if “somewhere else” means Europe. Oh, for that kind of firepower.
Meanwhile, striking a completely different note, Tim Robbins’ psycho-paramedic declares that occupations of far-flung places are doomed to failure because “local insurrections always bring you down”.
Hmm, call me stupid, but I think there’s a moral in there, even if it sits rather oddly in a film that’s trading on fear of the enemy without. It’s a typically mixed message from an uneven and disappointing blockbuster.

Running Time 117 mins. Cert 12a. Opens June 29.