War of the Worlds
After a nice dinner at Roadhouse Grill, radiantbaby and I went out to see War of the Worlds.
The most important thing to me going into the movie was that Spielberg maintain the themes and the feel of the book. With one exception, I think he did an exceptional job of that. The mass populace were the same sheep that Wells wrote about a hundred years ago. The movie effectively portrayed them as incorrigibly curious, drawn to the aliens like moths to a flame. That wasn't tough to do believably. The thing you *don't* see a lot of in movies nowadays, though -- and the place I was most concerned the new movie would weaken -- is the mass panic and hysteria of having the entire world essentially ripped apart. I felt Spielberg actually got that dead-on. People were walking madly -- dumbly, even -- to get away, without even knowing what "away" really was. People were rioting -- not pissed-off Rodney King-style riots, but "Oh my God, I'm so panicked I'm willing to do literally *anything* to get out of here" riots. And it was all believable.
The one theme I really *didn't* get out of the movie was the book's sense of isolation. There was a lot of time spent in the book on the narrator's gradual separation from sane people, and it made a nice parallel to humanity's general social disintegration and separation from community sanity. The movie had *some* of that, but significantly less than the book, I thought. Honestly, though, I'm not sure how interesting such a level of personal isolation would be on a screen, so I can forgive him that one.
A lot of the detail that he used to approach those themes, though, was distinctly different from the book. Tom Cruise's character -- the narrator in the book -- was in the movie a basically useless divorced New Jersey car mechanic meathead who didn't really have any relationship at all with his kids, who themselves lived with his ex and her upper-middle-class guy (new husband?). This is a *significant* change from the book, and it grated on me a bit, but I suspect it was done to make the character more sympathetic to a modern American audience than a random upper-class gentleman would be. Also instead of the Martians landing in their pods and building their tripods on the spot as they had in the book, the movie had the tripods buried deep underground, waiting for the creatures -- they were never actually called Martians in the movie -- to arrive and start them up. I didn't find this particularly believable, but it worked in context. Besides that, they kinda merged the book's soldier, curate, and Man on Putney Hill into the Ogilvy character, and made that character rather more clearly and dangerously insane than I thought he came across in the book, which kinda bugged me. Again, I chalk that one up to the increased pacing of the medium. I was sad that they skipped some of the more interesting of the Martian weapons (no inky black smoke *pout*), but again there's only so much you can do in the space of a couple of hours.
Theme and plot aside, I thought the movie was good from a technical standpoint. The effects were high-quality. I thought the actors overall did a very good job with the difficult emotions and situations they were portraying. The shots were effective, and the writing felt to me like it had good pacing, appropriate surprises, and believable tension-breakers.
Overall I really liked it. Despite some detail differences from the book, the movie stays basically true in spirit to the original and had strong technical qualities. It literally had much of the audience on the edges of their seats, and I know there were a few points that I had to make a conscious effort to keep myself from squeezing too hard on radiantbaby's hand. All in all definitely worth seeing.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: meathead -> mated)
The most important thing to me going into the movie was that Spielberg maintain the themes and the feel of the book. With one exception, I think he did an exceptional job of that. The mass populace were the same sheep that Wells wrote about a hundred years ago. The movie effectively portrayed them as incorrigibly curious, drawn to the aliens like moths to a flame. That wasn't tough to do believably. The thing you *don't* see a lot of in movies nowadays, though -- and the place I was most concerned the new movie would weaken -- is the mass panic and hysteria of having the entire world essentially ripped apart. I felt Spielberg actually got that dead-on. People were walking madly -- dumbly, even -- to get away, without even knowing what "away" really was. People were rioting -- not pissed-off Rodney King-style riots, but "Oh my God, I'm so panicked I'm willing to do literally *anything* to get out of here" riots. And it was all believable.
The one theme I really *didn't* get out of the movie was the book's sense of isolation. There was a lot of time spent in the book on the narrator's gradual separation from sane people, and it made a nice parallel to humanity's general social disintegration and separation from community sanity. The movie had *some* of that, but significantly less than the book, I thought. Honestly, though, I'm not sure how interesting such a level of personal isolation would be on a screen, so I can forgive him that one.
A lot of the detail that he used to approach those themes, though, was distinctly different from the book. Tom Cruise's character -- the narrator in the book -- was in the movie a basically useless divorced New Jersey car mechanic meathead who didn't really have any relationship at all with his kids, who themselves lived with his ex and her upper-middle-class guy (new husband?). This is a *significant* change from the book, and it grated on me a bit, but I suspect it was done to make the character more sympathetic to a modern American audience than a random upper-class gentleman would be. Also instead of the Martians landing in their pods and building their tripods on the spot as they had in the book, the movie had the tripods buried deep underground, waiting for the creatures -- they were never actually called Martians in the movie -- to arrive and start them up. I didn't find this particularly believable, but it worked in context. Besides that, they kinda merged the book's soldier, curate, and Man on Putney Hill into the Ogilvy character, and made that character rather more clearly and dangerously insane than I thought he came across in the book, which kinda bugged me. Again, I chalk that one up to the increased pacing of the medium. I was sad that they skipped some of the more interesting of the Martian weapons (no inky black smoke *pout*), but again there's only so much you can do in the space of a couple of hours.
Theme and plot aside, I thought the movie was good from a technical standpoint. The effects were high-quality. I thought the actors overall did a very good job with the difficult emotions and situations they were portraying. The shots were effective, and the writing felt to me like it had good pacing, appropriate surprises, and believable tension-breakers.
Overall I really liked it. Despite some detail differences from the book, the movie stays basically true in spirit to the original and had strong technical qualities. It literally had much of the audience on the edges of their seats, and I know there were a few points that I had to make a conscious effort to keep myself from squeezing too hard on radiantbaby's hand. All in all definitely worth seeing.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: meathead -> mated)