A Random Movie: War of the Worlds (2005)

A reminder that the 2000s really sucked.

Tom Cruise is fascinated by his own hand in War of the Worlds

I have access to a preposterously large number of movies. I’ve decided to take a random number generator, pick a movie, watch it, and write about it. Today’s film: War of the Worlds (2005).

I’ve said that there are two movies to watch if you want to understand almost everything about the 2000s: 28 Days Later and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

28 Days Later - in spite of production starting before 9/11 - was about this prevailing sense that everything was going to self-destruct. We didn’t know how, we didn’t know when, but there was a distinct pessimism that the world was on the verge of collapse. The idea that suddenly we would be Cillian Murphy, waking up through a destroyed world. It was also filmed in incredibly muddy handheld digital video, because that’s just how everything looked - digital video was cheap, but it wasn’t actually high quality yet. It was gritty, it was handheld, it had the impression that it was recorded by someone who happened to be there instead of a more deliberate production. That’s how we saw ourselves - the last remaining people to record the last gasps of the world.

Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, meanwhile, had an outsized emphasis on celebrity culture. Mystery Inc. was famous and tired of it, everyone was being manipulated into a figure of entertainment. It was about a group of characters who start the film high on their own supply and their own celebrity is both a goal and a curse. There were celebrity cameos, there was the surprising influence of American Idol, there were pop-punk songs.

Truly, we were focused on the worst of ourselves, grasping to the idea that maybe we could get famous because nothing else was working out. What was the point of optimism? The world could end, let’s just wear all of our shirts and once and see if we can get some attention.

It might seem as though I didn’t have a particularly great time in the 2000s, but did anyone? The aesthetic was rooted in pessimism. The ‘90s had issues - oh boy did it have issues - but it also had a degree of optimism shaped in transparent purple plastic. We were at least headed towards the future, one which was bright and colorful, even if there was something lurking beneath it. In the 2000s? Whatever was lurking beneath it was all we had.

War of the Worlds suggests that lurking under the surface were big alien tripod robots.

It felt strange that the lack of optimism spread to Steven Spielberg, the guy who made E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Those were movies about trying to reach an understanding with an outsider. This is about the world’s greatest shipping container mover and divorced dad Ray (Tom Cruise) having to protect his kids Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning, who screams a lot) from scary aliens. This is about outsiders trying to kill you. 

But then, who is the outsider?

The Iraq war was omnipresent during the era, as the shadow of 9/11 touched everything the governments at the time thought could, potentially, be shown as a threat. Having Robbie foolishly rush off to any army vehicle he sees is clearly about all the people who decided to “do something” by enlisting, without really thinking about what “something” might actually mean.

The War of the Worlds has always been an anti-colonial text, and a character - Harlan (Tim Robbins), who represents both a savior and a threat to Ray and Rachel, outright says that occupations always fail. Adaptations always shift with the era, and a movie that exists deep in the context of 2005 is going to feel as though it’s commenting on Iraq. There’s a distinct impression that the U.S. isn’t represented by good ol’ American boy Tom Cruise, but by the aliens. Their actions - planting the seeds before an invasion in order to gather resources - is basically pointing directly at the Iraq war. 

Is this a more pure expression of the 2000s than 28 Days Later? I’m not sure. It definitely looks better, though it has the intense bloom that Spielberg got kind of obsessed with during the era. It’s certainly muddy and gray, but it doesn’t have the same embrace of consumer-grade digital video that became common in the era. In some ways, it is better connected to what was going on. A crowd that’s lost and confused amid ash and disaster is something that we all remembered from 9/11. If we are asking what it was like to live in the decade, it could easily be held up as an example. 

We are probably five to ten years out from a rush of 2000s nostalgia - People tend to feel the most fondness for decades about 30 years ago - and I’m not looking forward to it. The decade was vapid and ugly, and in spite of coming of age around that time I don’t want to relive it. War of the Worlds - much like 28 Days Later and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - is an example of what we were going through. In spite of Spielberg’s most Spielberg-y flexing - there’s a shot that weaves in and around a van in an uninterrupted take that is brilliant - this movie is as ugly and nihilistic as anything else was going on in the era. In spite of making the ending slightly happier than it should have been, it’s not optimistic. 

The ending does work on a different level today compared to its release in 2005. Wouldn’t the aliens have done a tiny bit of research and maybe given themselves vaccines? Of course they wouldn’t, the aliens are Republicans.