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Creepy Cruise Scares Even Aliens

By Rex Reed

Tom Cruise is an alien. Think about it. That would explain just about everything. Like the tripod invaders from outer space hell-bent on destroying planet Earth in War of the Worlds, this actor, scientific philosopher, deep-thinking morning-show pundit, public debater, Brooke Shields fan and self-appointed pharmacologist is off the radar. He wobbles, shrieks, jumps, rants, leaps up and down, waves his arms like a spastic penguin, and seems always on the verge of imploding. Just like the space invaders who want to take him away with them, back to Mars. He must be one of them already.

While you peruse the possibilities--and if you can stand to read one more word about War of the Worlds--you might also ponder the answers to the film's only important question: How much can $135 million buy? By today's Hollywood standards: enough special effects, digital animatronics, high-definition computer graphics, drawing boards and soundstages to keep an army of technology nerds and union extras employed, not to mention a lot of donations to Scientology.

All of the things an escapist summer action-movie blockbuster with Tom Cruise could hope for, except one: It isn't much fun. There's stuff to make you go "Wow!" but nothing you'll remember the next day. Steven Spielberg has devoted his career to a teenage schoolboy obsession with science fiction. Now he shows us his nightmares. He's Spielberg. He knows how to pull our strings. So the gimmicks are often skillful, inspired and worth talking about. But the human elements were written with invisible ink. And there's nothing new here that H. G. Wells' original novel didn't think of first, back in 1898. Orson Welles was a visionary who elaborated on the book in a famous radio broadcast that scared the living crap out of everybody in 1938, and the first 1953 movie version did its share of damage, too. But we've watched so many aliens come and go since then that it's hard to suppress a yawn. So what is there to tell you about War of the Worlds? There is no plot, but here goes.

Tom Cruise is a divorced blue-collar construction worker and neglectful father stuck with his two kids (Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning) for the weekend. We know he's a surly, indifferent slob because when the kids ask what's for dinner he tells them to order in, throws himself on the bed with his clothes on, and starts snoring. Finally, the movie begins. Apparently an army of Martians buried machines under the Earth eons ago which they now activate with bolts of lightning. Out of the ground pop the aliens in many forms. Some look like tripods, wobbling unsteadily on three steel rods. Others slither like snakes and squishy crawlies from Animal Planet. They are vile, nasty, and they have only one goal--to destroy our universe and every form of human life that inhabits it. It's a new kind of terrorism, but after 9/11 alien spooks no longer have the power to terrify. I find it hard to get worked up over blood-soaked killing machines that resemble boiled calamari covered with marinara sauce.

In four minutes of violence and slaughter that is entirely too nauseating for children, the Cruise family goes through hell trying to survive while walking from New York to Boston. Things crash through holes in the concrete, turning city streets into earthquake faults. Highways are jammed with armed tanks. The most harrowing shots focus on mob panic, with hundreds of members of the Screen Extras Guild smashing windshields, trampling each other to death to confiscate a car, and searching for lost relatives while Tony Bennett sings "If I Ruled the World" over a loudspeaker as a train roars by with all of its cars on fire. My favorite shot involves multitudes of refugees trying to storm a ferry to cross the Hudson River while the aliens capsize the boat, drowning everyone but the Cruise family. They miraculously survive everything, including a harrowing encounter in a deserted cellar with a demented ambulance driver named Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). This is no war. This is an extermination. And so Mr. Spielberg's poetic license goes wild, with the aliens and their captives turning into metaphors for everything from the Holocaust to the American invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. I tell you, it's a lot for Mr. Spielberg to explain, but on every talk show I've seen with him and Tom Cruise, he never gets a chance to open his mouth. Instead of probing the matrix for science-fiction symbolism in American politics, the interviewers spend all of their time asking Tom Cruise questions about Katie Holmes. (Maybe it's the same thing.)

The actors in this movie have little to do beyond rolling their eyes and acting hysterical, but the real problem with War of the Worlds is not the one-dimensional people but the head-scratching, people-zapping space freaks. It is never clear what their motivation is, or what they hope to accomplish by total annihilation. The visiting aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wanted to exchange ideas and learn something. The fang-dripping slime bags in the Alien pictures were much more horrifying. And the scariest aliens of all were in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, because we never saw them at all! Mr. Spielberg's ghoulish machines just want to draw us all up in their suck holes and spit out oceans of guts and blood from indigestion. What do they want? Why are they here? And how stupid are their advisors to forget they can't last on Earth because they've got the wrong immune systems? Steven Spielberg probably can't make a dull movie, but he sure can make one that is utterly pointless.

Under the circumstances, the acting in War of the Worlds is confined to the level of screaming and running berserk, accompanied by another glass-shattering John Williams score. Most of the screeching is done by poor little Dakota Fanning. In one movie after another, this child has been stalked and abused by parents, kidnapped by terrorists, pursued by psychos, and otherwise generally mauled, tortured and traumatized in ways only a highly paid Hollywood child psychologist can fix. Things have changed since the days of Margaret O' Brien, and not for the better.

As for Tom Cruise, he squints. He swaggers. He mumbles incoherently so the aliens can't hear him. He flashes that phony plastic grin from ear to ear. By the time his dysfunctional family learns to bond, you worry about his kids. He acts crazier than the aliens. He also gets creepier in each successive movie, and the more money he makes, the weirder he gets. He leaves you worrying about things you shouldn't even be thinking. Like, how did Nicole Kidman survive? What's his attraction to the Eiffel Tower? How do we keep him from Oprah? He obviously needs a prescription for Ritalin. I don't know. Maybe he's bipolar.

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