June 30-July 6, 2005

movies

End Times Two

They're here … Tom Cruise watches the skies.

This is the way the world ends -- or is this?

War of the Worlds

by Sam Adams

It's no longer a matter of whether the world will end, but when. In Land of the Dead, the fourth installment of the series George A. Romero began with Night of the Living Dead, the zombies have more or less taken over. Men are confined to fenced-in enclaves. The fortunate live in a towering glass-and-steel paradise called Fiddler's Green; the less so in teeming slums at its base. Outside a fortified triangle of land, the world belongs to the dead.

War of the Worlds, the latest and most elaborate (or at least most expensive) film version of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel, waits several minutes before unleashing an alien invasion on an unsuspecting world, but for the few who don't know what's about to transpire, Morgan Freeman's thrumming narration (paraphrased from Wells' text) helpfully sets the scene: As the human race lived "with infinite complacency … confident of our empire," the invaders watched "with envious eyes, and slowly and surely made their plans against us." While Freeman warns of impending doom, the movie shows us men and women in teeming crowds, swarming like paramecia under a microscope (a comparison made explicit by the opening shot, a digitally concocted pull-back from inside a drop of water). If the people in those shots don't expect an invasion, they ought to know they're ripe for one.

Of course, being vulnerable to conquest isn't the same as inviting it, and War makes clear that humans have done nothing to provoke the attack. The aliens (who, in this version, are of unknown origin) have been planning their attack for millions of years, salting subterranean warships under the earth in anticipation of their future offensive. Considering that humans — more specifically, their precious bodily fluids — are integral to the aliens' plans, it doesn't make much sense that their strategy predates humanity's existence. But no matter. A sneak attack is a sneak attack, no matter how implausibly conceived.

Even where his family is concerned, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) minds his own business. A divorced dockworker whose children live with his pregnant ex-wife and her moneyed new husband, Ray is little more than a child himself: He keeps a car engine in his living room and spoiled milk in his fridge, and works the crane at his day job with casual cockiness, like he's fishing for trinkets in a video arcade. When cataclysmic bolts of lightning start striking the ground near his modest, cluttered house, he grins like a kid and assures his frightened daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) that everything's going to be all right. But as the bolts keep coming, whomping louder and louder, he quickly loses his cool, and before long, he and Rachel are huddled cheek to cheek under his kitchen table, eyes wide.

Ray has a son as well, sullen, angry Robbie (Justin Chatwin), whose hoodie-and-jeans dress code mimics his dad's (with the crucial substitution of a Red Sox for a Yankees cap). But although they're obviously intended as mirror images, the movie banishes Robbie for most of its middle section so that Ray and Rachel can work out their father-daughter issues alone. Like most, if not all, of Spielberg's movies, War of the Worlds is about the creation, or in this case re-creation, of family: Ray, who has never much cottoned to grownuphood, has to shoulder fatherly responsibilities in the course of saving his kids — and, oh hell, the planet — from the massive three-legged machines that fry human beings to ash and cover the planet with crimson weeds. The trouble is that Spielberg's pet theme has little to do with his chosen subject matter. Like any good popular artist, Spielberg has tapped the cultural currents, in this case the fear of sudden, unforeseen attack from a present but hidden enemy (the underground war machines being the equivalent of a terrorist sleeper). But where Minority Report and The Terminal raised questions about racial profiling and bureaucratic xenophobia, War of the Worlds merely exploits the national mood. Unlike the aliens in Close Encounters or E.T. , these L.G.M.s are bad down to the last slimy appendage.

Wells' story lends itself to nervous times; it's hardly a coincidence that the last major adaptation was produced in 1953, at the height of the red scare. But War of the Worlds is ambivalent to the point of incoherence. Spielberg delights in staging end-of-the-world spectacle: an unseen force slices the front off a small-town church like an invisible knife; a highway overpass tumbles toward the camera in twisting segments; a ferry spills cars and bodies into the Hudson as mechanical arms upright it and snatch struggling figures off to unknown fates. But although Josh Friedman and David Koepp's script tosses off loaded allusions — a panicked Rachel asks her dad, "Is it the terrorists?"; a TV reporter says that when the aliens attack, "everything lights up like Hiroshima" — Spielberg runs away from the dark heart of his material.

Declining to speculate on the aliens' motives, War focuses on the human response, but it never approaches the terrifying social breakdown of Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf. A mob pulls Ray and his kids from their precious car (one of few still working after the aliens' electrical assault), panicked soldiers barricade a half-empty ferry, and Ray dispatches a babbling paramedic (Tim Robbins) rather than let his ravings give away their position. But there's no question that order will be restored, the family reunited. It's a movie about weathering destruction, not facing it.

In Land of the Dead, destruction is an imminent, and eventually realized, threat. Romero has never been one for happy endings, and when the zombies first fixate on the distant spire of Fiddler's Green, you know there will be no last-minute rescue. In fact, Romero comes close to siding with the zombies this time around. The Green's residents, protected and effectively ruled by the cold-blooded billionaire Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, explicitly channeling Donald Rumsfeld), aren't individualized until they become zombie meat, and the residents of the decadent slums aren't much better. The only humans worth caring about are a band of mercenaries led by Cholo (John Leguizamo), a gung-ho operator, and Riley (Simon Baker), a reluctant soldier who quashes a post-kill whoop with the reminder, "There's no such thing as nice shooting, only good shooting."

Romero has made a point of casting African-Americans as heroes, beginning with Night's Duane Jones, who is accidentally shot dead by white lawmen after saving a house full of people from zombie attack. But in Land, the only significant black character is Eugene Clark's Big Daddy, the leader of the zombie hordes. Although his gas station uniform marks him as working class, Big Daddy's rudimentary consciousness represents an evolutionary step forward; unlike the other zombies, he can think, and he can teach them to think. They're still pretty mindless, their inevitable shuffle a welcome return after the undead sprinters of 28 days later… and the Dawn of the Dead remake. But under Big Daddy's leadership, they learn how to act in concert, make plans, even fire guns. The zombie revolution has begun. (Big Daddy's consciousness-raising even works on humans; Kaufman's valet, a white-coated black man whose bug-eyed mannerisms deliberately evoke the painful darkie stereotypes of Hollywood yore, is persuaded by Big Daddy's presence to leave his master in the dust.)

In Land of the Dead, the humans' stronghold becomes a deathtrap. Bordered on two sides by water and barricaded on a third, the city's fortifications make a perfect cul-de-sac. As Cholo puts it, "What was built to keep people safe is gonna trap them alive." This isn't just a savvy critique of American isolationism, but of seeing the world in exclusively military terms — and, not incidentally, of underestimating the enemy's capabilities. (Zombies may not swim, but that doesn't mean they can't cross a river.) The spectacle of zombies hung by their legs for target practice audaciously references the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, while the carnage of the one-sided Iraq war is recalled by one soldier's horrified comment: "I thought this was going to be a battle. It's a fucking massacre."

In 1985's Day of the Dead, the series' previous installment, the humans and zombies threatened to switch places. Now, the exchange is nearly complete, and the only thing to do is start over — in Canada, no less. Land of the Dead doesn't have anything like War of the Worlds' budget (reported to be as much as $182 million), and Romero's action sequences pale beside Spielberg's expertly directed tours de force. But like the lumbering zombies who always catch their prey, Land sneaks up on the zeitgeist and takes a chunk out of its neck.

War of the Worlds Directed by Steven Spielberg A Paramount release Now playing at area theaters. Land of the Dead Written and directed by George A. Romero A Universal release Now playing at area theaters recommended

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