While the 1950s produced some fascinating and thought-provoking science fiction, it was largely bleak and fatalistic. Facing down Soviet missiles and nuclear holocaust at every turn, Cold War America’s favorite escapist genre became a way to deal with the angst and terror many Americans felt when they looked at the world around them. With alien forces as barely disguised metaphors for Communism, these allegorical science fiction films reflected Americans’ collective unconscious.

The 1960s and early 70s were little different. Even as man first stepped foot on the moon, the momentous events barely made a dent in Hollywood Sci. Fi. philosophy. The films, if anything, got bleaker.

Then came 1977.

In May of that year, a behemoth of a film hit movie screens and caused a cataclysmic reaction in the film industry. An epic story of good vs. evil set with mythological archetypes and boasting special effects the world could not even fathom, Star Wars represented a massive break-through in the world of science fiction. Sure, there were evil monsters here too, but there were also courageous men and women of inestimable good willing to do battle with the evil for the salvation of the galaxy. A jaded and world-weary public devoured it.

Later that year, an only slightly less iconographic and popular movie hit theater screens. It was Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a magical, beguiling and transcendent look at a first contact event between humans and aliens. The thing that made Close Encounters so very revolutionary was its optimistic, even loving portrayal of our alien visitors. These were not monsters come to destroy us, but benevolent beings who wanted nothing more than for us to communicate and learn from one another.

A few years later, in 1981, Spielberg made aliens the focus of yet another film, this one the beloved E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial. Immensely popular, the magical film about the relationship between a stranded alien and an awkward boy conveyed the idea that alien life forms wished us nothing but peace, harmony and relationship.

Spielberg (and Lucas) had done something no one else could have, or perhaps desired, to do. They had made science fiction cool again. And they had done so by telling us that the “other” was not to be feared. That life is out there and it desires friendship with the people of Earth. That, though we may look different and be from different worlds, we are all, in our hearts and souls, very much the same. The future, it was suggested, is very bright indeed.

So how do we account for Spielberg’s lethal misstep, War of the Worlds?

In 1953, in the middle of the Cold War, George Pal made Orson Well’s radio broadcast of H. G. Wells classic novel, “War of the Worlds” into a film, presenting the besieged Americans as stout, heroic, God-fearing victims of an unprovoked and presumably Soviet-style attack. Now, 53 years later, in 2005, Steven Spielberg has remade the now-familiar story into a film to reflect our post-9/11 sensibilities.

The only problem is, unlike the first version, this War of the Worlds is not a good film.

It’s not the film isn’t well crafted or that it doesn’t have astonishing special effects. It is and it does. And it’s not even that it doesn’t have genuine moments of terror. But for all that it has going for it, the latest rendition of the popular story is flat, uninspired, disturbing and unfulfilling.

This is Spielberg at his unabashedly commercial worst—bland, unimaginative, and more interested in his bang than his brain. The film is not without its deeper themes, but it explores them so clumsily and so schizophrenically that one cannot tell what the film is for and what it is against. Beyond the schizophrenic political sub-text, War of the Worlds just doesn’t make sense and has plot holes large enough to fly a spaceship through.

Some friends have delighted in the fact that the aliens’ intensions were never spelled out and while I didn’t expect a “press release announcing their plans for world domination” as Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film, I was looking for a few more answers to their behavior. While I normally appreciate ambiguity and mystery, the fact that the aliens’ motives were not spelled out did not make them scarier, it made the script poorer.

The implausibilities hamstring the film and lead to a resolution of the war that, while true to the original novel, is handled in such a way that smacks of a contrived Deus ex Machina conclusion. The end of the film is abrupt, predictable, Hollywood sentimental, convenient and thoroughly unsatisfying.

And on top of all this, while Spielberg begins with familiar territory we’ve seen before—a broken home, a dysfunctional and absent father, bright but awkward kids—he doesn’t develop them beyond their cardboard dimensions. The human characters are disappointingly one-dimensional. Furthermore, Spielberg seems to have lost his ability to draw magical performances from children.

I miss Steven Spielberg.

I’m not saying the director is not allowed to change, or mature, or grow more cynical with age. But what I am saying is that I miss the youthful vibrancy, childlike zeal, and optimistic idealism that not only defined all of his early films, but several decades of entertainment as well. I miss the Spielberg before he thought he was Stanley Kubrick. I miss the Spielberg that rejoiced in the unknown and took great pleasure in the world’s many mysteries.

Yes, War of the Worlds contains some sensational sights. But it lacks the zest and joyous energy we expect from a Steven Spielberg picture. It lacks idealistic integrity. And it lacks courage. Was the march of years all it took to do this? Was a terrorist attack all it took to alter your world-view, Steven? What happened to the sense of wonder celebrated in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? What happened to the imagination of E.T.? War of the Worlds just may represent the bleakest view of humanity that has ever come out in one of Spielberg’s films.

Is this the future to which we have to look forward? As our country sinks toward another age of war, recession, fear and pessimism, has Spielberg become the very thing he once supplanted? Will Hollywood once again glory in bleak stories told to despairing viewers in a dingy world?

We must wait and see.

For now, it seems Spielberg has traded wonder for terror, awe for gore, innocence for cynicism, optimism for fatalism, day-dreams for nightmares, Peter Pan for the Brothers Grimm.

The cinema is poorer for it. And so are you and I.

© Copyright 2005 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.