Word: spielbergisms
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...Spielberg’s sparkling new version of H. G. Wells’ anti-colonialist sci-fi bonanza, “The War of the Worlds,” avoids the cliché pratfalls that have been the peril of many an ambitious epic. As he destroys Planet Earth, Spielberg spares us images of the White House splintering to pieces or blustery generals ordering tanks and fighter jets into battle; instead, we see the horrors through the eyes of Spielberg’s everyman hero, Ray Ferreira (Tom Cruise...
...give a more intimate sense of the global destruction, Spielberg and his screenwriters David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) and Josh Friedman (“Chain Reaction”) set the action in a small New Jersey town. We can identify with an inhabitant of this anonymous location, finding redemption in the midst of an alien invasion, much more than we could with a suave New Yorker. That explains why Spielberg introduces us to Ferreira, a barely involved father...
...other director does foreboding with the finesse of Steven Spielberg. He gets a puzzle ticking in your head with a thick carpet of clouds, then allows you an anticipatory shudder at an eerie lightning storm. When city streets crumble like a concrete cookie and a fissure speedily climbs the faade of a church and cracks it, you wonder, What next? Since this is a Spielberg thriller, you know that the answer has to be, Something worse. Something wonderfully worse...
...Spielberg has said he wanted to make a film about "American refugees." He thinks of northern New Jersey as postwar Europe. There, survival was a form of heroism, and filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini etched stories of a continent of the homeless. So this is Spielberg's Open City or Germany Year Zero, disguised as When E.T.s...
...actors--especially Tim Robbins, as a daft homeowner--could you please stop hyperacting? This is a monster movie, not a Bergman film. The monsters are pretty cool: hood-headed, dog-faced critters that suggest the Alien beast mixed with one of the nastier Gremlins. They, and the tricks Spielberg uses to display the devastation they wreak, are the show. A splendid horror show it is, except when three little people...