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Rating: How poorly some blockbusters age. Tonight Mentana is not doing any marathon, strangely work gives me a break, and from some despondent channel surfing emerges the opportunity to distractedly rewatch a film of which it's difficult to have great memories.
One even tries to appreciate a work fairly faithful to the groundbreaking novel by H. G. Wells. But you just can't. And not due to a matter of literary rigor (the novel itself is not a masterpiece, but it's probably the ancestor of science fiction). No, Spielberg's The War of the Worlds is crap as a movie. And I say that a quarter into the running time.
It's crap because in the most action-packed sequences you can clearly perceive the camera movements, the dolly forward and backward, the trajectories of the extras. It's quite clear how the set is made, the cardboard walls and the points where something will have to break automatically to serve the narrative. You can almost see the lines on the ground that the actors must follow, given how clumsy and mechanical they are in their movements.
But even when the pace slows down, the shots continue to be cloying. It seems like a cheat sheet (on a budget) of cinematic mechanics developed over thirty years of career. An exemplary recap for novice students, without soul or ambition. The movements, the zooms, the panoramics, everything speaks of a functioning cinema but worn out from use, time, and success. Just as words wear out, so do the shots. And as beautiful and functional as they are, they resemble calls made with long, excessive advance. Tracking shot backward, tracking shot forward, close-up, shot and reverse shot: the craft becomes mannerism, inevitably.
It is a minor, minimal Spielberg. Tamed in his gaze, he manages to render schematic even the scene of a tripod overturning a ship full of passengers. Furthermore, the dynamics of this novel are anything but formidable (the beauty lies elsewhere, see further) and thus old Steven fills the flight from the Martians with his most worn-out clichés. The kids, those damn kids, the old grump (to be discredited). The claustrophobic-labyrinthine sequence (the kitchens of Jurassic Park redone verbatim), the overturned and crushed vehicle (like by the T-rex), the human solidarity chain, the family reconciliation. Even the mockery of the bacteria that annihilate the Martians is reread in an epic-providential key.
But as I was saying, the heart of H. G. Wells' imaginative effort was in the squeezing of men, with the Martians getting high on sugary human blood. Well, Spielberg censors it, showing it yet hiding it simply behind a random obstacle. Certainly, compared to some other degenerate offspring like Independence Day, it's a proof of good fidelity, but completely sterile. A disaster movie that discovers itself philological when the genre is already in twilight. Ugly, among other things, the cinematography, ugly the special effects, besides a not very significant Tom Cruise and a willing child Dakota Fanning. Not even the finale with the tripods crashing to the ground is moving.
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