Baby, you can drive my car
One of the great curiosities about Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds is how little an essential role the automobile plays towards resolving the central conflicts.
There is an old adage in detective story writing that if you have show a gun in a scene, you have to use it at some point.
In presenting a character, whose significant talent is the repair and use of cars, you have to provide this skill more play than the throw away scene at the beginning where he gives advice to the gas station attendant about what could be wrong with the vehicle after the arrival of the aliens. Even the main character’s skill at driving is used very little, providing the family with a get away down the New Jersey Turnpike (AKA Staten Island 440 or Freeway), but not in the central resolution.
I kept expecting Ray to break out somewhere in the film and thwart the aliens in a dramatic chase scene later in the film to echo the scene early in the film.
The flight from the gas station, while well-crafted and full of wonderful special effects, comes way too early in the film to solve the dramatic issue.
Without this critical scene late in the film, where Ray’s skills are pitted against the aliens in a meaningful way, the car talents become mere decoration to the character that fail to pull the beginning of the film and the end of the film together in a thematic way.
Part of the problem is that the most dramatic auto action scene comes so early in the film and not at the expected dramatic high point nearer the film’s resolution. In ET, for instance, we got the bicycle early to show what was possible, but later, this was used in a dramatic chase scene concluding the film.
You can’t have an automobile engine in a man’s kitchen and not expect this to play a bigger role in resolving the conflict. I anticipated him somehow finding an old wreck in a garage later on in the film (AKA Woody Allen) and putting it back together for a chase scene with the lumbering aliens – a lost cause, perhaps, but one in which Ray rides the modern steed into battle.
Spielberg, of course, seems to have a curious relationship with the automobile in nearly all his films. In War of the Worlds, Spielberg used the car as a way of developing the main character in War of the Worlds. In ET vehicles became a means of developing the enemies – with the mother and son somewhat less than competent. Most of the heroes in previous Spielberg films tended to lack talent for driving, hitting trash cans and doing other dubious damage to the vehicle and landscape.
Whether intended or not, ET’s depicted the car as something not to be trusted, a tool of society that seeks to oppress people, and that kids with bicycles manage to overcome the car because of their skills and their will to succeed. Even during the critical chase, the heroes of ET do not handle the automobile well and soon abandon it for a better mode of escape.
In Close Encounters, chase scenes between police cars and aliens come early in the scene, but the critical scene using the auto comes later in the film, when the Dreyfus character takes off across desert to avoid military road blocks. This, of course, highlights one of the small apparent mistakes in the film since Dreyfus appears to be fleeing with a vehicle he wife and kids fled with in earlier scenes. War of the Worlds is not free of such a possible small blunder having the stolen van survive one of the more horrific air plane crashes when very little else in the neighborhood did.
One element brought out more in War of the Worlds from its use in Close Encounters is the concept of the Pulse and its effect on automobiles – only the stalling effect in WOW was permanent but not in CE.
Spielberg, of course, used the Van for remarkable visual effects, playing with windows and doors to frame characters on the screen in ways that are more than memorable: mirror shots, shots dividing characters and such. But the most amazing sequence came when the van was traveling through the highway of stalled vehicles, where the camera moved in and out from the passenger compartment in a way I still haven’t managed to figure out. It was brilliant cinematography in a film thick with amazing visual effects.
While War of the Worlds – as it is currently released – seems unable to pull together as well as other Spielberg films, the visuals are among the best of all his films.