Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch War of the Worlds
2005 · Steven Spielberg · War of the Worlds on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for the foghorn bellow before you see a tripod. (sound)
Spielberg gives the machines a voice before he gives them a body. The low horn arrives, then the thing arrives. Soon the sound alone is enough to empty a street.
Payoff: The warning comes with nothing attached to it. You learn to hear doom coming and wait, which is what Ray does all film.
Notice how low and close Kaminski keeps the camera to Ray. (camera)
The camera is handheld, crowded, often at shoulder height inside the car or the crowd. There is no general at a map, no view from orbit, no shot Ray could not have stood in.
Payoff: Without the wide view you cannot measure the disaster, so you panic on the characters' schedule instead of the genre's.
Notice the gray dust settling on faces, jackets, and sky. (light)
Kaminski drains the picture to bleached skies and sick greens. Ash keeps landing on people. Watch Ray in the bathroom mirror and you see what the dust is made of.
Payoff: The film's color scheme is made of the dead. You read the scale of the disaster off a man's sleeve.
Watch the machines come up out of the street. (staging)
The tripods are not flown in from the sky. They rise from under a Bayonne intersection, where they have been buried the whole time, cracking the asphalt of an ordinary American block.
Payoff: The threat is placed beneath the most familiar ground in the film, so no distance or border can be put between you and it. In the reading: originary world. Machines rising through familiar pavement is what the reading calls an originary world, a primal force breaking up through the ordinary social surface.
Count the problems Ray actually solves. (performance)
Cruise plays a dockworker who runs, hides, and watches. His competence never catches up to the crisis, and his fathering arrives late and half-formed. The tally stays near zero.
Payoff: This is a star vehicle built to deny its star any deed that changes anything, which is why the dread never releases.
Once you have seen it
Watch what Ray does in Ogilvy's cellar and what he hides. (staging)
Spielberg narrows the widest disaster movie he ever made to one room with Tim Robbins. The spectacle stops. What is left is a man deciding how far he will go with a child listening.
Payoff: The scariest passage in a film about alien machines has no machine in it, only two men and the drive to survive. In the reading: impulse-image. The cellar is the reading's impulse-image: raw drive breaking through the moral surface once the ordinary world stops holding.
Follow the unbroken camera circling the minivan as it drives. (camera)
The rig travels around the car and through it, holding every face without a cut while society burns past the windows. It is the most mobile shot in the film and the least useful to the people inside.
Payoff: All that fluid movement expresses no change at all. The form flees and never fights, which is the whole picture in one shot.
Track the route: Bayonne, the ferry, the cellar, Boston. (structure)
Every leg is flight or concealment. Nobody plans a destination or chooses a next move. The chain of places is the plot, and the family arrives where the crowd carries them.
Payoff: Ray travels the length of a catastrophe and alters none of it. What he brings back is a son and a daughter, not a victory. In the reading: voyage / balade form. The reading calls this a voyage form: movement that carries people across a world without any of it turning into action.
Count the human acts that bring the tripods down. (structure)
Wells killed his invaders with earthly microbes in 1898 and Spielberg keeps it almost verbatim. Morgan Freeman's narration says so plainly. No soldier, no scientist, and no father contributes.
Payoff: Survival here is an accident of biology rather than a reward for courage, and the film refuses to let anyone earn it.
Carry this in: Listen before you look. The film tells you doom is coming by sound, and gives Ray nothing he can do with the warning.