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 and sticking to their clothes.
Payoff: The film's color scheme comes from the dust, so 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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen 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.