June 26, 2005
War of the Worlds
No doubt if you follow any sort of popular culture, you’ve heard about the upcoming movie “War of the Worlds“. After all, the publicity surrounding former Oompa Loompa Tom Cruise and his half-starved fiancee, Katie Holmes, it’s hard to miss it.
I’ve already decided that this movie is not worth my time. And no, it’s not a boycott of “TomKat“, nor related to the fact that I don’t like paying attention to people whacked out on Scientology. You don’t use Scientology to improve your acting; that’s what drugs are for. All those are certainly valid reasons for not watching the movie, but I’ve got a better one.
This just looks like it will either be a “remake” of a bad story, or have nothing to do with the original story to begin with.
The original War of the Worlds novel was a political statement about European colonialism. In the end of the book, the all-powerful destructive Martians were destroyed not by the humans fighting against them, but by the diseases they caught from humans. Tremendously anti-climactic, don’t you think? Of course, from the perspective of a story, you would think that a civilization capable of transporting themselves from Mars to Earth, and developing a “heat ray” capable of incinerating humans, would also have the medical technology to withstand our germs. Or, you would think that they would have brought equally dangerous germs along with them that would have further decimated the humans.
From a story standpoint, it’s not a lot to work with. So how did it become such a cultural landmark ripe for exploitation by Spielberg and Cruise? Because of the radio show version. This is not to say that the radio show in any way improved the story, but the presentation was such that a lot of listeners missed the portions where it was explained that this wasn’t real. The “news” format and realistic reporting style caused mass hysteria, because many radio listeners started to believe we were being invaded by Martians (with voters like these, kinda explains the “New Deal”, huh?). The only reason that people today even know that the “War of the Worlds” is a remake of an earlier story is that there was an enormous cultural event surrounding the radio version, not because the story itself is worthwhile.
If the movie, then, follows the storyline, there’s not much point to seeing it. At least with “Independence Day“, a movie full of bad speeches and tremendous cliches (Area 51, anyone?) you have a story line that ends in human triumph, rather than alien failure. So that leaves the other option. The movie will likely be so far removed from the original story line of War of the Worlds to be completely unrecognizable. Which will turn it into a garden-variety “When Aliens Attack!” movie. Sorry, but that genre’s been done a few million times.
Of course, when you listen to Spielberg, you see that it’s not really about story or acting at all. It’s all about the effects, man!
Spielberg told the web site Dark Horizons: “I’m more interested in concept shots and money shots than I am in tons of MTV coverage, which certainly takes a lot of time. But if I can put something on the screen that is sustained where you get to study it and you get to say, ‘How did they do that?’ That’s happening before my eyes and the shot’s not over yet, it’s still going and it’s still going and my God, it’s an effects shot and it’s lasting seemingly forever. I enjoy that more than creating illusion with sixteen different camera angles, where no shot lasts longer than six seconds on the screen. To pull a rabbit out of a hat, because you are really a smart audience and you’re in the fastest media, the fastest growing new media today and you know the difference between sleight of hand visually and the real thing. I think what makes War of the Worlds, at least the version that we’re making, really exciting, is you get to really see what’s happening. There’s not a lot of visual tricks. We tell it like it is, we shot it to you, and we put you inside the experience. “
Yeah, because I’ve never seen CGI before. No matter how much he tries to compliment his audience’s intelligence, it means a lot when he thinks the effects are the key to a good movie, not the story or acting.
I think I’ll pass on this one.
The Unrepentant Individual linked with Egg on face
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Okay, so I didn’t want to see War of the Worlds. In fact, I blogged about how I didn’t want to see it. I mentioned that I planned on sk [...]