War of the Worlds

Mrs Vache Folle and I saw War of the Worlds last weekend. We wanted to see Star Wars, but it wasn't playing in the mall where we were loitering while my eyeglasses were being made.

In the main, the story was true to the book. Aliens invade, they attack people and property from killer tripods, they are unstoppable and ruthlessly homicidal, the situation is hopeless for mankind, then the aliens catch a terrestrial disease and die through no effort of ours. We get to live through these horrors through Ray Farrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced father of two who works as a crane operator in New York City. He is a self absorbed jackass who has a poor relationship with his teenaged son and young (8ish?) daughter (Dakota Fanning). He has weekend visitation with these kids when the alien invasion begins, and one of the alien tripods emerges right in his own grubby neighborhood.

The whole movie involves Ray trying to get to Boston where the children's mother and stepfather are so he can drop them off and deal with the alien invasion headache without the inconvenience of his surly son and neurotic, kvetching daughter. Along the way, they witness one horrific scene after another and narrowly escape being killed by aliens themselves on numerous occasions. The aliens are simply unstoppable and ubiquitous, and nothing avails against them. Luckily, they sicken and die. Luckily, the experience is not completely pointless, because Ray grows as a father and a human being and repairs his relationships with his children. His son becomes a man, and his daughter overcomes her neuroses and finds the courage to survive (that, or she develops severe PTSD or multiple personality disorder). At first, you don't really care if Ray and his kids get annihilated, in the middle of the film you are rooting for the aliens to get them, and by the end you are back to not caring.

The effects were seamless, and we were spared no horror. That the preferred mode of killing humans was a disintegrating death ray that left clothes unaffected meant that we saw little bloodshed or gore. Clothes raining from the sky stood as proxy for mass murder in some scenes.

I have a few quibbles with the plausibility of the story unrelated to the science fiction aspect. Firstly, the aliens have more or less simultaneously stopped all motor vehicles and other appliances and machines with an electromagnetic pulse. Ray, a motorhead (he has an engine on his kitchen table), immediately perceives that solenoids want replacing and tells his mechanic friend. After he becomes aware of the danger, he steals the mini-van that his friend has repaired, the only working car in the vicinity and decides to drive the kids to New England. Miraculously, all the stalled vehicles in New York City have pulled aside to give the Farriers a clear road out of the city and up the thruway to the Hudson Valley. Aliens might well come and attack, but such a clear roadway COULD NEVER HAPPEN!

On the way, the Farriers stop at the kids' colonial in what seems to be Westchester County in order to rest and gather themselves. Although there is power, they never even try to turn on the TV or radio to find out what is happening. They don't check in with any neighbors, either. Also, Ray insists on making peanut butter sandwiches with peanut butter from his house and does not even look in the refrigerator or cabinets of his ex-wife's house to see if there is anything better.

That night, a jet crashes in the neighborhood. Conveniently, there is a TV crew there to explain that the tripods are everywhere (Ray thought there was just one). Ray decides to go up the west side of the Hudson and cross at a ferry to Stanfordville to get to Boston. Who does that? Why would he think the ferries would be running during the alien emergency? I suppose he wanted to avoid contact with other people by staying on back roads, but it turned out that the ferry was a bottleneck that led to the theft of his van. All this made for an exciting mob scene and the chance to have the ferry attacked by aliens.

Finally, Ray and his daughter (the son ran off to help the National Guard fight the aliens) hole up in a basement with another refugee (Tim Robbins) who wants to start a resistance movement. Ray just wants to hide and ends up murdering the other refugee to keep him quiet after he learns that the aliens are harvesting humans to use their blood for fertilizer. The tripods have cages full of live humans whom they take one at a time and turn into fertilizer. It is plain that these aliens would simply process the humans en masse into a slurry rather than bleeding them singly.

Despite these shortcomings, I was mildly entertained.

UPDATE: I have been informed that Ray lived in Newark, NJ. It makes sense that he would be West of the Hudson.