Like the previous interpretations, the new movie is true to the book, focusing on the question of how we would react to the experience of being squashed like bugs. Unlike the others, however, Spielberg’s movie is much more personal and visceral. Rather than experiencing mass destruction through the eyes of the main character Dr. Clayton Forrester (as portrayed by Gene Barry, who is as composed as Ward Cleaver, or by Richard Burton, who always establishes a strong presence), we experience it through Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), who is a self-centered, divorced father, estranged from his son (Justin Chatwin), and nearly so from his daughter (Dakota Fanning). When Ferrier starts to panic, so do his children and so do we. As they dodge death time and time again, the new movie evolves as much more of a survival tale than the earlier versions, and the message appears to be that survival is 1% keeping your head and 99% luck.

What is perhaps most bleak about this movie, though, is the nearly total absence of God. Tipping its hat to the original novel, the movie opens with a passage from the book, which is as powerful with Morgan Freeman’s narration as it was with Richard Burton’s. (Thanks also to Spielberg for tipping his hat by casting Gene Barry as the Grandfather, what a nice surprise!) God doesn’t show up until the closing narration, in which we are told that the aliens were brought down by microbes, “those simplest and most plentiful of things that God, in his wisdom, placed upon this earth”. Perhaps this is to be expected, given the “watchmaker” image of God that most people seem to have today (i.e. that he created the Earth like a watch, wound it up, and let it run on it’s own with no intervention). But I believe that God is more active than that, and He usually shows up in people’s hearts and minds. Throughout the movie, the pervading attitude among humanity is “every man for himself”, and the only acts of kindness and sacrifice come between family members. In those rare moments that it appears as if someone is about to commit an act of kindness (such as when Dakota Fanning is nearly carried off by a concerned couple or Tim Robbins invites the Ferriers into his shelter), it is always with a looming sense of menace. These acts are not so much performed out of a desire to do good as a desire not to be alone in suffering. And for this reason, I can’t say there was much that was uplifting about the movie. There is an ugly side to survival, but without our humanity, we really are no better than bacteria, and we’re more likely to die in our own poisons than we are to be killed off by alien invaders. To avoid extermination, we have to hang on to our humanity with both hands, and that means acts of kindness for total strangers, not just family members.

written July 3, 2005