Hey folks, Harry here... I see this on Sunday. Can we speed up the sun's rotation around the earth? Heh. Beware of spoilers - I read the first two paragraphs and stopped reading for fear of spoilers. I'm so jazzed for this.
Dear Harry & Moriarty,
Rabid reader since the beginning of the site (and Moriarty was once kind enough to post my thoughts about Master & Commander). I have a confession to make. For some unexplicable reason this film was not as high on my 2005 must-see list as brilliant Sin City, near-perfect Batman Begins and the I-hope-DVD-version-will-be-all-it-should’ve-been Kingdom of Heaven. Silly me. The following may be a little blabbery at times but I just needed to get it off my chest
One of the toughest jobs any film has this summer (or year) is not to be upstaged by gigantic mastermind Jackson’s King Kong trailer if it plays in front of it (those 2 minutes were, in two words, pure bliss!). WAR pulls this off and then some! It is absolutely exhilarating to watch such brilliant work from people who are completely free, at the top of their game, having no need to prove antyhing to anybody. There is no wrong turns taken here by the bunch of masters big and small behind this film. From the fuck-me seamless blending of Kaminski’s work with the efforts of Muren & Co. (there’s a sequence when Ray and the kids manage to get away in a car where camera does two rounds around the car, popping into the car, fron seat-back seat, back outside, then pull back to reveal all the chaos with hundreds of cars dead from the alien EMP and it all looks like one continuous take!) to the few touches of humor (which were nothing like the disturbingly wrong joke-notes in Minority Report) this film is a joy to behold, to use an over-used expression here.
Cruise’s Ray Ferrier is a big-time loser who himself just doesn’t seem to get it, sort of a 42 year old fratboy working at the docks, driving his vintage Mustang and living in a shithole of a house. He gets to babysit his kids (Justin Chatwin, looking like a cousin of Jake Gyllenhaal and the scaringly talented Dakota Fanning who after this and Man on Fire will hopefully avoid in the future stuff like Uptown Girls Go Down or Hide and Reek) and he even manages to fuck that up (“It was 8.30, right? You’re saying it was 8? Hmm”). Unlike most of his movies, Cruise’s character doesn’t have all the answers here (hell, the guy usually doesn't even hear the questions). The only bright idea he gets when the intergalactic shit hits the fan is to get the kids to his ex-wife (oh-so-lovely Eowyn Miranda Otto who doesn’t have much to do here) because she has, obviously, always been the one doing all the hard work in family matters. Cruise is doing superb work here, from the scenes where he shows that Ray is less mature than his 10-year old daughter, to the scenes where it starts to dawn for him that there may not be a happy ending to this.
Score by Williams (I’ve been wondering for some time who’s gonna score Spielberg’s films after Maestro leaves us one day?) is used almost as economically as Silvestri score in Cast Away. No syrupy violins to drive the emotion home, no heroic-tragic fanfare&military drums combo when the doomed troops head in the opposite direction as Ray and his kids. There are moments so bleak and destruction so massive that the desperation is on the same level as the ghetto clean-up in Schindler. Numb animal instincts of the panicking mob are on display in another scene that is just perfectly frightening. Or a moment where closing door has bigger effect than that when John Wayne’s uncle Ethan remained outside. Ray simply does what he has to do in order to make sure the survival of his offspring and it’s devastating. I won’t clarify (I hate the fuckheads who think that the only way to talk about the film is riddle their review with spoilers – even though there are times when it’s simply impossible to discuss certain points without giving away some key moments)
This has been told already, but the film is scary. The kind of we’re-fucked-big-time kind of scary, when there might be glimmer of hope that you know will be crushed soon because there just is no escaping these indestructible killer-tripods, sent by a civilization God knows how many millions of times more advanced than ours, making all the efforts to counter-attack them or even defend us totally pointless.
The only problem I have with the film is that we get to see couple of the aliens, because I would’ve preferred if the face of the alien force would have been those merciless tripods. But that’s a minor flaw compared to all that is right here. There is no jeffgoldblum uploading some computer virus up the alien ass nor randyquaid giving them an enema with crop-dusting plane nor brucewillis drilling a hole into their mothership and blowing himself up with it. There are, thank God, no slo-mo “Bay-shots” of children running past JFK murals or the French standing around the Eiffel tower/Egyptians around the pyramids/Londoners on Piccadilly Circus etc, looking up at the threatening skies. And luckily, nobody mentions E.T. (even though there is one small gag with a prop in a basement – or just my imagination running wild). And there’s no talk about “whupping ET’s ass”…
By the way, when was the last time a Cruise film didn’t have big face of TC on the poster? (I’m not counting the Japanese version with Tom and Dakota). When was the last time a Spielberg film ran less than 2 hours? When was the last time that big alien threat in a film was not taken down by the US Army/scientist/deep core drilling team or former fighter-pilot/president? There’s lot to enjoy here. Me and my buddy Bill Kill talked about the film after seeing it for a long long time. Later at home I gave him a call and we talked some more. It’s that kind of film, it gets you all giddy and stoned on the miracle of cinema, it makes you want to sit down and watch 3-4 good films in a row, putting aside such minor luxuries as eating and sleeping. I hope to God both of these guys keep the quality in both Munich project and M:i-3
Sorry if this has been sort of a rambling but it’s been too few hours since I saw it and there’s still ton of it to digest. All I’m saying is I’ll be damned if I’m not seeing it again next week!
Pleasure, as always, when the subject is movies,
Dashing Don Lockwood
