| | If my first post on this thread was an "anti-reaction," does that make this an anti-anti-anti-reaction? Oh well. Let me start first with the esthetic arguments posed in defense of WOTW:
1.) The claim that this and other horror movies is a sign of cultural decay is questionable, given the presence of similar myths in other cultures like ancient Greece and 19th-Century America.
Michael Marotta posted the first comment, which was a broad defense of horror and monster movies. I am not that familiar with the myths of Heracles (I found Euripides incredibly boring), but Michael's examples at least suggest some battle taking place, where the protagonist rails against his (possibly inevitable) doom -- Heracles versus the hydra, Heracles versus the Stymphalian birds. Jaws, Spielberg's first summer blockbuster, is a similar sort of tale, a movie with a terrible monster, but one who can be fought and defeated by the movie's heroes.
To me, the thing that makes horror movies horror is that whatever does the killing and maiming, whether it's a dream or a child's doll or a psycho killer or whatever, is unstoppable. The survival attempts of the characters being pursued are thus futile, and the movie itself wallows in that futility. (These movies may, as WOTW does, tack on a brief and hurried ending where, by a simplistically miraculous plot twist, everything works out all right, so that someone is left alive when the credits roll.) Esthetically, then, the horror genre, broadly speaking (emphasis added so I am not nitpicked to death with counterexamples like The Stand), has as its theme the metaphysical impotence of human beings. Given our need for a worldview that includes human efficacy, and given my basic agreement with Ayn Rand's position that "art is a selective recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value-judgments," I see no artistic value in such a work. On the more visceral level, these myths and movies may be quite effective in provoking fear and dread, but again, there is no value in such an exercise. Fear is occasionally a useful emotion in the pursuit and maintenance of life; it is not, in and of itself, an intrinsically valuable experience for one to seek out and pursue.
Back to Michael's point, let's also remember that, while the Greeks certainly achieved a culture almost unparalleled for its rationality and humanism, they were not impervious to philosophically flawed myths like that of Pandora, nor to cultural decay itself. (These are, after all, the same people who executed Socrates and exiled Aristotle.)
2.) The movie, and its ending, have value because they are true to H.G. Wells's original story.
This is a point made in Michael's second post, and echoed by several others on this thread. It's simply begging the question, according to a line of logic that goes:
P1. The movie and its ending are true to Wells's original version of the story.
P2. Wells's original version is good.
C. The movie and its ending are good.
Of course, premise 2 is simply assumed without argument or basis. Fine, so the movie follows the original Wells. Then all my arguments are applicable to his novel as well. So let's hear the arguments that the original Wells is good. (This should include some actual responses to Marcus's point about the silly absent-mindedness of the supposedly super-intelligent invaders, The Don's point about its Ludditism, and Ayn Rand's point about its nasty satirical dig at man.)
A more honest ending to this movie would have been for the aliens to win. If they were really intelligent enough to hurl themselves across space in invincible death-machines, they would have exercised enough foresight and planning to send a few scouts ahead to make sure there wasn't, I don't know, *something in the air* that would kill them all! Sheesh!
As it was, the first 90 minutes of this movie were so thoroughly hopeless, I entirely expected that that was how it would end. In fact, in terms of realism and consistency, it would have made it a better film. The actual "germs win" ending is, in a way, worse: it offers simple bacteria as the arbiters of a war between intelligent races. Intellect, which is portrayed as malevolent and unsympathetic in the form of the aliens, is also shown to be less effective than sheer numbers and the deterministic mechanisms of evolution and nature. The ending almost petulantly shouts: "Hah, the arrogant presumptions of man's greatness unmasked as baseless hubris once again! Ponder your helplessness, you conceited fools!"
3.) The movie has value as a way to re-experience the "tiny apocalypses" in our lives, or to understand what it is like to live through wars and Holocausts.
Robert Malcolm has essentially addressed this point with his post. This is the post-modernist idea that everything is art, as long as it provokes some experience or gets a rise out of you. And it is clap. But a few more things need to be said.
First of all, when it comes to the tiny apocalypses in my life, I'd say being hospitalized for a mental illness four years ago takes the cake. At no point did this movie remind me of how that felt, nor was it an experience whose despair and anguish I have any desire to revisit (and I certainly wouldn't pay $8 to do it!). And I can't understand wanting to flash back to finding one's father dead on the floor or seeing one's daughter run over by a truck, either.
Then there's the point about war. If we lived in a world where violence, bloodshed, and brutality were not so commonplace, there would be no need to "remind" us of these things, nor to be thankful that we do not suffer from them. In fact, it would probably never occur to someone to make a movie like WOTW. But what, then, is the point of it? Well, it's sort of like the parent who exorts his child to eat his vegetables because there are starving children in Africa. The child's pain is allegedly justified, not by the health gains from eating well, but because others are suffering. They pick through feces to find pieces of corn to eat, so you just sit there and be happy with your carrots and string beans and think about that, mister!
A film like WOTW doesn't challenge us to change the conditions that cause war, or to take up arms in the right side of a war. It just rubs our noses in the gory evil of it. But, I'm sure the Iraqi policemen being shredded by suicide bombs would be delighted to hear that American audiences are sharing in some small part of their anguish thanks to Spielberg's latest summer blockbuster.
Holocaust museums are of value because the Holocaust happened and needs to be remembered. One could even make a movie where heroic characters struggle to survive against the backdrop of a Holocaust (see Life is Beautiful for an excellent example). But to make a movie where Jews are thrown into ovens for two hours, just to make the audience feel what they felt, would be horrifying and absolutely beyond the pale of anything approaching a humanistic esthetic. What Holocaust victim, in his right mind, would want anyone to have to experience what he experienced? Remember it, yes. Revel in it, absolutely not.
I will stop here to address some parts of Daniel's first post.
('...horror movies are a sign of cultural decay' indeed! Fortunately others have saved me the trouble of debunking this notion). After all, one would not want to come across like the fresh faced young Adventist who stumbles out of Hooters believing he has discovered the first sign of the The End Times....;-)
Here Daniel draws a very dubious and strained comparison between
-an expression of concern about the culture that would produce a movie where almost all of humanity is murdered, and
-a religious nut driven to despair by the gorgeous tits in a Hooters
Notice also the words "fresh faced" used as an implicit and very lame attack on my age. No, I would not want to come across like some fresh-faced Adventist or like Stolyarov... guess I have to just say everything's peachy-keen then, huh!
For if he does not know of the famous radio broadcast, or the original book (Wells being, incidentally, one of history's most famous optimists), it is only reasonable to assume he does not know many of literature's or the cinema's famous nihilists either.
The very first thing in this thread is my disclaimer about not having heard the radio play or read the original book. Why would I mention not having read that book or heard that radio play if I didn't know of them? And your claim that ignorance of H.G. Wells implies ignorance of nihilism is just silly. So how's this: I've seen Fight Club. *Now* can I talk about nihilism? 'Kay, thanks.
4.) The movie is not nihilistic because (after sifting through Daniel's meanderings about "your active, empathic imagination will be as central to the film experience," "the rather narrow aesthetic base he is attempting to build his offhand yet simultaneously large-scale critique on," etc.) it has a happy ending, while other nihilistic films do not.
As I have argued ad nauseam (and received no reply), the film's ending is an after-after-afterthought. It's like beating someone savagely about the head and neck and then saying, "Just kidding!" It is seriously as if the film reels from two completely different movies were sutured together. In one, all of humanity dies. In the other, humanity is saved by germs. How life-affirming.
I found the tearful reunion of the families to be an emotionally shallow moment, and one that thoroughly undermines any supposed lessons about war that the movie has to teach. After all, all the characters are still alive. You can't have a movie about the despair and horror of war where everyone you care about lives. Daniel quipped-and-winked, "An apocalypse where everyone survives? I don't really think so....;-)" Perhaps it was he who missed the ending.
Given the subjects to which the film devotes the vast majority of its attention, it is clear the characters are kept alive not to heroically reunite in the end, but to give the audience a frame through which it can be made to view an interminable string of atrocities.
In his second post Daniel writes,
Stolyarov, for example, misunderstood the meaning of the song "I Am The Walrus" - which was satirical - as being nihilistic, and like Andrew, extended his mistake into a hysterical condemnation of the band themselves and then into the entire culture...;-) ... Seems to me Andrew's attack was heading in this exact direction, so I though someone better throw on the brake. It even drops context to a massive degree - after all, there is *nothing* in Spielbergs oeuvre to suggest he is now, or has ever been a nihilistic filmmaker!! In fact all evidence points to the *exact reverse*. Why would he start now? It is absurd. Andrew is just not looking any deeper than his initial emotional reaction. There *are certainly* criticisms of nihilism in popular culture to be made, but this is neither the film nor the filmmaker to do it with.
Once again, an unfair comparison is being drawn. Here are the lyrics from I Am The Walrus:
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I’m crying.
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.
... and here is a description of a scene from WOTW (spoiler alert, although words cannot really capture the immense horror of the scene I describe):
Having been pursued across the countryside, Ray and his daughter are holed up in the dank basement of a farmhouse. Ray sees some strange red tendrils snaking through one of the basement windows, and pulls on them a bit, splattering a red liquid across his face. He looks outside to see an alien tripod throw a screaming man down on the ground and tear his chest open with a snaking point-tipped arm. A series of panning shots then show us the purpose of this grisly sequence: the aliens are using human blood as fertilizer, and the snaking tendrils Ray encountered are some sort of delivery system. The arteries stretch in all directions like vines across the countryside, which glows red as far as Ray's eye can see, broken only by the sight of more tripods.
If the movie has any messages to speak of, they are:
-The way to survive evil is not to fight it, but to meekly run until it dies out on its own.
-Intellect is malevolent and ultimately impotent, while nature is benevolent and powerful.
-Man has earned the right to exist by "dying a billion deaths."
On a more technical level, the movie suffers from:
recycled, one-dimensional characters: dickhead dad, rebellious teenager, precocious pre-teen
simplistic plot: Mom drops the kids off for the weekend. Aliens land and start killing everybody. Dad tries to get the kids back to Mom for no apparent reason. They meet various crazy people along the way. Aliens kill everyone some more. Dad and the kids go through all the standard domestic quarrels. Aliens kill everyone by turning them into fertilizer. Dad and the kids make it back to Mom and the aliens all get a bad case of influenza and die. Cue fadeout narration by Morgan Freeman.
hamhanded commentary on current events: crazy character babbles about how "occupations always fail," children scream "is it the terrorists?" etc.
The movie is not an absolute failure. The CGI is great, and a lot of the cinematography is unique and interesting. But it is used in the service of a script with a terrible plot and an anti-human theme. Daniel accuses me of failing to achieve a deeper analysis of this film than that of my emotional reaction. In fact, I am the one who has offered a reasoned analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of this movie. It is WOTW's advocates who are clinging to emotional responses: how "surreal," how "deeply moving," how "weird," how "startling."
Phew! Now that that's out of my way, my thoughts on the continuing SOLO drama that has erupted on this thread.
Joe, in his post, says, "They can dish it out but they can't take it." Hogwash. Just take a look at Daniel's Post 21. He basically says that he took my strong criticism of a movie he liked personally, i.e., as an attack on his character, and evidently felt free to respond in kind with the catcalls of Stolyarov, fresh-facedness, and such. He seems to imply that his posting of very enthusiastic comments about WOTW preempted a strong negative comment from another SOLO poster.
But nowhere in my posts here, or in the series of posts that started this discussion on the "Sharp Test" thread, http://solohq.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/1247_2.shtml#47, did I attack anyone's character simply on the basis of their liking this movie. A few people had said they thought it was fantastic. I said I thought it was horrible, promised to set forth my reasons why, and did so. For that, I was called a fresh-faced Adventist, compared to an insufferable fascist, and accused of suffering from a "rush of blood to the head." So who's guilty of bad faith in this thread?
My last memory of a discussion with Daniel Barnes was this thread, where he pursued a similar tactic of adopting a superior tone and belittling the character and intelligence of other posters. While I don't think that what Daniel has posted so far in this thread would merit moderation or banning, I can certainly sympathize with the way Linz has lost his patience for Daniel's arguments by invalid comparison, and his snide and dismissive comments followed by wink emoticons. He may not be banned or moderated, but I'm done with him.
I am
Andrew Bissell I
(Edited by Andrew Bissell on 7/03, 3:10am)
(Edited by Andrew Bissell on 7/03, 3:51am)
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