Spielberg Flaws.

Over the past two nights I’ve been watching Steven Spielberg’s version of The War of the Worlds. I have three things to say about it:

1. Early in the film there’s one of the funniest lines I ever heard in a supposedly serious movie. The Tom Cruise central character comes home shocked and dishevelled and tells his teenage son what he’s just witnessed.

‘They came out of the ground. They torched everything, killed everybody.’

‘Were they terrorists?’ asks the son.

‘No. They came from somewhere else.’

‘What… like… Europe?’

Whether it was meant to be a joke, or whether it was meant to be a comment on American teenagers, I have no idea. Maybe it was written by an American teenager. How can I know?

2. The whole film was littered with as many glaring plot holes as I’ve ever seen anywhere.

3. The dénouement was laughably implausible, and the spoken epilogue was, I’m fairly certain, written by somebody from a southern Baptist church who was imbibing the kind of substance not usually associated with southern Baptist churches. Unless, of course, it was lifted directly from a novel written in the 19th century and applied to a 21st century contemporary adaptation. Either way, it was quite absurd.

I’ve long thought that after Duel and Jaws, Spielberg began to lose his sense of creative and emotional balance. I still think so.