Dirty Liberal Invasion Films

I saw X-Men 2 in March/April 2003, and it was right after the invasion of Iraq officially began. There were a lot of news stories about why we were invading Iraq, and the debate was actually pretty fierce. Halliburton was all over the place, and in Houston, there were protests outside KBR (Halliburton subsidiary) headquarters downtown. Basically, the liberal view was that this war was being orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfiwitz, et al. as a means to control oil and to simply make money from government contracts. I didn’t buy it, at least not wholly. Nothing’s ever quite so simple, I maintain.

And then X-2 enters in the middle of this. If you have seen the movie, you know who the bad guys are—a private corporation that runs a paramilitary group and wants to eradicate all dissidents, I mean all difference, I mean, anyone who isn’t just like everyone else.

Not far into the film, this paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the government and acting as the U.S. army, invades the Xavier school. To save one the students, Wolverine brutally kills many of these soldiers. When he first killed one, I jumped. First of all, killing is generally minimal in these action movies—it’s generally limited to the main bad guy. The rest are either robots or simply knocked unconscious. Here, though, we get to see the good guys (the X-Men) kill the bad guys (soldiers in army uniforms who are simply doing their jobs). It was shocking to see the U.S. military in the role of the enemy, the bad guy, as it were.

Am I hinting that Bryan Singer is commenting on Iraq in this film? Not really. I do think films take on special prescience according to the cultural climate of the time, however. X-2 certainly seemed shocking at that point in time, where it would not have if it had been released five years earlier. Is the paramilitary organization actually Halliburton? No, I wouldn’t go that far. But the film does comment on the role and power of such organizations to manipulate government—see Patriot Act, etc.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith contains similar elements. In this film, we get lines like Skywalkers—“If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” And Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” Or Padme’s “This is the way democracy dies—with thunderous applause,” when the Senate agrees to give the Chancellor supreme power. I may have gotten the exact quotes wrong, but you get the jist. Being released in 2005, we can’t help but read these lines as comments on the Bush administration.

And then there’s Spielburg’s War of the Worlds. Consider the basic plot—aliens have been planning this invasion for a long time. They have superior intelligence and technology, and they can easily wipe out the humans. The invasion begins, and they begin chewing up everything, terraforming to create their own world on top of ours. And what happens? They didn’t plan for every contingency, that’s what happens. Smartest beings in the universe, and they forget to bring their gas masks. Or more metaphorically, they didn’t plan on the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not the people that fights them off, but the climate itself.

I will ask myself the same question: is War of the Worlds an allegory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s way too complicated, I think. What is undeniable, though, is that an invasion movie is released in 2005, while the U.S. is still in the middle of its own invasion. The movie must therefore take on special prescience, or undertones, that it would otherwise not really have. It easy to substitute the U.S. for the aliens—they plan the invasion, go and wipe everything out in order to create their own land and government, and yet that little bit of resistance continually gnaws at them until they die, or in this case, leave. But I would never seriously suggest such an allegory (although I just did!). Instead, I would say that the film is commenting on invasions and how they never work. Resistance can come in many different forms, but it always comes.

Sometimes movies can be dirty little conservative films, too, and I will talk about one of those next time.

A Pointless War

Steven Spielburg's War of the Worlds opened last night, and I was disappointed. After seeing that it received 72% fresh on http://www.rottentomatoes.com/, I expected much more from it, and, thus, I was let down. Spielburg's action is generally amazing, and this film definitely delivers on this account, but the story itself just seemed pointless.

Warning: if you have never seen the original War of the Worlds, or you have no idea what happens in this movie, you may not want to continue. I try not to give anything major away, but if you didn’t know this was an alien invasion movie, I suggest you go read another review.

There have been numerous stories of alien invasions, but the difference with this one is that we stick with Tom Cruise’s character (Ray Ferrier) the entire time. Besides brief expositions before the movie actually begins and again at the very end, we have no idea why this alien invasion has occurred, or even why it has suddenly stopped. All we see is Cruise and his kids trying to survive it.

Which isn’t all bad. The acting here is really great, and the family dynamics are interesting, too. My problem with this film is that there is no point to the invasion. I think back to Shayamalan’s Signs, which is a highly flawed movie, and I realize that what made that movie so compelling and different from other invasion movies is the reason for the invasion. The entire invasion occurred as a means for Mel Gibson’s to renew his faith in God. Crazy, perhaps, but it works to draw us into a logic behind the invasion. In Spielburg’s invasion movie, we know nothing. The narrator (Morgan Freeman) hints that the aliens were jealous of our planet, but this is never developed. Instead, the invasion simply happens, Cruse and company wade through it, and then the movie ends. As Bill Paxton says in Aliens, “Game over, man!”

The movie is also pretty tortuous for the audience, partly because of Spielburg’s mastery of suspense, and partly because of his relish of what develops into simple gore. This movie is “taut,” as one friend put it, because it keeps the audience on the edge of its seat the entire time. Even though we all know what is going to happen (this is a remake, after all), we still don’t know exactly how it’s all going to go down (Spielburg makes quite a few changes from the originals). Think Titanic on a global scale: yes, we know the ship is going to sink, but it can be a fun ride, too.

The goriness of War of the Worlds still disturbs me, because it’s unlike Spielburg. Saving Private Ryan was difficult to stomach, for sure, but there was a real point to it. We had seen similar things in Braveheart, but Spielburg was able to translate it to modern warfare, to show the human lives beyond the statistics. And it was compelling. And rated R. This movie is PG-13, and that’s a mistake, I think. One thing in the movie just seemed weird, and then it turned out to be really disgusting and, well, plain unnecessary. Spielburg knows that the hint is more terrifying than the specific, yet he eventually gets bogged down in this flick. He should remember Jaws, or Close Encounters and forget AI and Jurassic Park. In a lot of ways, this movie is akin to that dino blockbuster—it’s a big thrill ride gone awry.

What made his earlier films so good was the suspense but also the creativity behind the dramatization. Here, once we see the aliens, Spielburg is forced to just make us wait for it again and again. And the movie seems like one escape after another, until it simply, well, ends. And I was actually glad it did.
This movie is not all bad, by any means. The suspense and the visuals were worth watching. The digital effects were mind-numbing, making me say “how’d they do that?” That’s a phrase that I never say anymore, not since digitalization became so advanced. In fact, I don’t think I had said it since Jurassic Park. Like that movie, the digital effects may be the best thing War of the Worlds has going for it.