Steven Spielberg's retelling of H.G. Wells's s-f classic. The alien-invasion subgenre, as everyone now knows, blossomed during the Cold War, fertilized by fears of Communist takeover; and it's quite reasonable, quite knowledgeable, to deduce that 9/11 and its aftermath could dump some fresh manure in the field. Spielberg makes damn good and sure that no one will miss the relevance: the "sleeper cells" hidden beneath American streets; the hero's coat of ashes fabricated from his incinerated fellow citizens; the shower of clothes from the sky; the bulletin board of the "missing"; and of course the natural question in the first confusion, "Is it the terrorists?" All of that seems legitimate enough. This is a serious film in a way that Independence Day, merrily blowing up the White House so few years earlier, didn't need to be, want to be, or pretend to be. There's something of an air of penitence in Spielberg's choice at this time to do an anti-Close Encounters, an anti-E.T. Or if not quite penitence, then a reappraisal, a caveat. He would appear to have seen a new light. And if his conversion falls short of total renunciation, it at least infuses him with a new zeal. Still, the decision to re-do the seminal alien-invasion story, rather than to do a new one, tends to raise the familiar specter of Spielbergian arrogance. In spite of the gracious gran-and-gramps cameos for Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the two stars of the commendable 1953 treatment of the novel, there is the inescapable implication that that version didn't have the wherewithal to do the job right. No matter how eye-popping Spielberg's special effects may be, no matter how much "improved" over those of a half-century ago, we are at every turn confronted by his belief in the almighty dollar, his infatuation with size, his complacent certainty that bigger is always better, and his dependence on mere loudness and suddenness to elicit a response from his audience. And his trusty old device of the temporary death, the takesy-backsy death, the just-fooling death, would indicate that his penitence for E.T. lacks a little something in sincerity. Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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