In 2005, Spielberg did what he had done in 1989, 1993, 1997 and 2002, that is make two films in the same year. This feat is pretty incredible in and of itself, especially in modern Hollywood, and though it seemed to follow in the standard formula of blockbuster in the summer and serious film in the winter, the two films are really more alike than they are different. War of the Worlds and Munich are both, essentially, reactions to September 11th - the former is a channeling of the imagery from the attack through science fiction aesthetics, the latter is a philosophical consideration of the aftermath via a combination of an early shared memory of Israel/Palestine relations and, fittingly, 70's spy movie tropes. Together they form a rich, fascinating tandem, and still stand as amongst the most thoughtful reactions to the September 11th attacks by an American artist.
When I saw War of the Worlds when it was released in the summer of 2005, my opinion was pretty much in line with that of many other people - that it was a failure with some effective moments, that Spielberg's sappiness ruined the ending, and so on. When I saw Munich later that year I was forced to reconsider a film I had dismissed, because Munich made me stop viewing War of the Worlds as a piece of summer entertainment and made me think of it as a serious consideration of 9/11, as Munich most certainly is. Now I think of War of the Worlds as the dream and Munich as the reality, like when you wake up after a nightmare and begin to comprehend the imagery and dream logic; that which seemed irrational or nonsensical while you slept suddenly makes perfect sense.
Spielberg subverts standard blockbuster formula with War of the Worlds, which is all too fitting as he allegedly invented the genre (which is another topic for another day). War of the Worlds is, essentially, the world's first avant-garde blockbuster. Upon its release in the summer of 2005, though the film did well at the box office, everyone I spoke to about War of the Worlds treated it with a kind of hostility, and I think that's because it does not aim to excite, it aims to capture an emotional frame of mind, and a painful one at that. There are moments in the film that are downright frightening. It is a masterful, if imperfect, symbiosis of 1950s martian mythology - itself symbolic of communism hysteria - and imagery directly inspired by the September 11th attacks and our subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Spielberg forces us to see ourselves on the wrong end of an invasion - which is truly radical in a time when the media barely documents the atrocities of the wars we wage - by reminding us what our home looked like as a warzone, and then expanding that nightmare to a full scale invasion. But rather than using the imagery as a gateway to cheap thrills by justifying our knee jerk desires for revenge and further brutality, Spielberg vividly dramatizes what an invasion looks and feels like, turning the American landscape into a desolate warzone. 9/11 was a nightmare, but it was only a glimpse into the true nature of living in a place where war is being waged, and Spielberg's film serves as a powerful visualization of invasion and occupation - something the United States has never been on the receiving end of. As Wells' novel, written at the height of the English empire, was a blatant allegory for the spread of imperialism and colonialism it's only fitting that Spielberg, King of Hollywood, shift the setting of the film to the modern day United States.
By recontextualizing Wells' text to modern America, Spielberg is able to express themes that have been vital to his work throughout his career while still remaining faithful to the source material. By making the film's central character the typical Spielberg absent father, Spielberg is able to examine the issues of family that have been so vital to his work. As in his first feature, The Sugarland Express, Spielberg paints a portrait of a parent who is really still a child, who has been unable (or unwilling) to grow up, and the casting of Tom Cruise as the perpetual adolescent is a stunning example of casting against type. I've always thought Cruise was a better actor than he was given credit for, and the way he portrays his characters transformation from an immature, incompetent man to a capable, mature father is truly remarkable. It probably didn't hurt that he was given a fully capable co-star, whom he shares many of the film's most deeply affecting moments with, Dakota Fanning, in one of the best performances Spielberg has ever received from his child performers (which is saying something).
Spielberg's affinity for familial drama is put brilliantly on display early on, when the tensions begin between Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier and his teenage son, Robbie. What other film maker could use a simple game of catch between a father and son to express the emotional distance between them? Only Spielberg could elevate such iconographic American imagery as a father and son tossing a baseball in the backyard into something so intimately personal. Ray, who has been seen adorning a Yankee cap for the entire film, is miffed when his son comes for a weekend visit wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. This detail could have been merely juvenile bickering, but in Spielberg's hands this visual detail becomes truly heartbreaking, a metaphor for how Ray Ferrier has lost his children in the time since he divorced his wife. Spielberg, by shifting the focus from the children onto the neglectful father, challenges himself to sympathize with a character he has demonized in the past.
The examination of the dissolution of the nuclear family in the modern era gives Spielberg an emotional vessel to illustrate the manner in which extreme trauma is capable of at once uniting and dividing humans; Spielberg's martian invasion brings out the best and worst in humanity simultaneously. There is a harrowing sequence where the Ferrier family, who have one of the few working automobiles left, suddenly find themselves in a town surrounded by hungry, exhausted, desperate people who steal their car from them - one particularly unsettling image shows a man breaking the windshield glass with his bare hands. The person I saw the film with in 2005 criticized this moment as being unrealistic, whereas I felt the exact opposite, that the sequence is an all too accurate dramatization of exactly what would happen - it wouldn't even require a disaster on the magnitude of an alien invasion to unleash our barely restrained animal instincts. In Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report, a character has a line that essentially serves as the precursor for this scene in War of the Worlds. "It's funny how all living organisms are alike. When the chips are down, when the pressure is on, every creature on the face of the Earth is interested in one thing, and one thing only: its own survival". Though this sounds like a cynical sentiment, it's really not, as we are animals and our latent desire to survive above all else is something that Spielberg has elevated to profound heights in films like Schindler's List, A.I., and here in War of the Worlds. All of Spielberg's films are, essentially, survivor's stories, which makes the ending of the film where Robbie inexplicably turns up alive - which is a very accurate approximation of the book's ending, for what it's worth - not as out of place or absurd as it has been accused of being. Yes, it's a bit contrived, but people have been shown to be capable of surviving against all odds - let's not forget that there were people on 9/11 who survived having 110 story buildings collapse onto them. To quote Dr. Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way".
Spielberg has said that they key image he took away from September 11th was people walking in large groups away from Ground Zero, and he channels that imagery of mass exodus beautifully in War of the Worlds, filtering an almost absurd science fiction concept through our collective memory of our home being attacked. Spielberg invokes the attack to give way to catharsis, challenging us to stop seeing 9/11 as something that happened to the United States and to instead view it as something that happened to the human race. I may not have responded to Spielberg's profoundly empathetic sentiments the first time I saw War of the Worlds, but little did I know at the time that Spielberg was in the process of making a film that would turn the very concept of national identity on its head.
War of the Worlds forces you to relive September 11th. Munich, on the other hand, forces you to think about it. Though War of the Worlds deals with the attack more directly, the fact that Munich fictionalizes a real life event - the massacre at the 1972 Olympics - allows Spielberg to draw a direct parallel between an event that introduced many in the United States to the realities of radical Islam and September 11th . Munich begins with the members of Black September hopping a chain link fence and breaking into the Israeli athlete's hotel room and ends with a shot of the World Trade Center, and Spielberg here is illustrating that the events at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the atrocity in September of 2001 are directly linked, and Munich can be viewed as serving as a straight line between the two events.
Spielberg always claimed that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the result of his desire to make a James Bond movie, but we could argue that Munich is actually his 007 movie - but it's a Bond movie as only he could do it, one that thoughtfully considers identity on both a personal and national level, that evaluates the morality of killing another human being, that analyzes the sacrifice a person must make to become an assassin. It's James Bond with a moral center, in other words (though obviously morality is not the reason we watch 007 movies). In Munich Spielberg transcends nationalism before the film properly begins, as the title sequence shows a collage of major world cities before ultimately highlighting the word "Munich" - rather than portraying this act of terrorism as something that happened to Jews or to Germany or to any one group of people, Spielberg is suggesting throughout Munich that this was a tragedy that happened to the human race, that the murder of human beings is something that should be treated as tragedy regardless of your religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.
Munich is, at its heart, the tragedy of a man - that man being Avner, in an unforgettable performance from Erica Bana. We are introduced to Avner at the end of a long montage showing people of various backgrounds - Israeli, Palestinian, families of both the athletes and the members of Black September - watching the events unfold on television; as with September 11th, this is a tragedy that television was an inseparable part of, where the news reports are a vital element of the popular conception of the event. Spielberg captures the feeling of being glued to your television by this real life drama beautifully in these opening sequences. The next day, Avner is contacted by no less than Golda Meir herself, who requests that he lead a mission of retaliation against the architects of the Munich massacre, essentially Government sponsored terrorism in the name of revenge. Out of a sense of duty to his people and his country, he accepts, not realizing that by agreeing to take part in this mission that he will lose his soul as well as his cultural and spiritual identity in the process.
In the hands of lesser artists, Avner could have been an empty symbol, but Tony Kushner (whose screenplay surely ranks amongst the very best of the last 10 years), Spielberg and Bana manage to make Avner work on both a symbolic level and as a flesh and blood human being. The same is true of the supporting players - Daniel Craig's Steve, a nationalist who has no moral qualms about the mission and makes this fact repeatedly known, Ciaran Hinds' Carl, who has nothing but moral qualms about the mission, Geoffrey Rush's Ephraim, the pencil pushing bureaucrat - who, between the quality of the writing and the excellence of the performers, manage to play Kushner's admittedly philosophy-heavy script as very real human drama. But it is Avner who is the heart of the film, and Bana plays his pathological dissent into guilt, paranoia, and borderline insanity masterfully.
The tragedy of Avner is that, at the outset of his mission, he truthfully believes that what he's doing is right, and as the mission presses on he gradually comes to the realization that killing is not only wrong but that it doesn't accomplish anything; that anyone you kill will only be replaced by someone who is even worse, that murdering your enemy will only escalate their desire to bring harm to you - essentially, Avner comes to understand the reciprocal nature of violence over the course of the film. More than violence being morally reprehensible, it doesn't solve a damn thing except our desire for bloodshed, which is only a temporary fix anyway. Yes, Avner loses the notion of Israel as a home over the course of his mission, but he gains a philosophical enlightenment by becoming a man without an ethnic identity; he stops seeing humans as a collection of countries and religions and sees us all as one. That Munich was accused of being anti-Israel by some and anti-Palestine by others (depending on your bias) illustrates the depth of the film's powerfully anti-nationalistic, humanistic sentiments.
Avner is clearly meant to represent a certain discontent that Spielberg and Kushner feel as pacifists with the militant actions of Israel. Late in the film, Avner's mother has a beautiful speech about how whatever he did - and she doesn't actually want to know - was worthwhile because it means the Jews "now have a place on Earth". Kushner and Spielberg certainly aren't arguing that the Jews don't deserve to have a home, they're just theorizing on what extents are acceptable to ensure that they don't lose that place on Earth. Avner - and by extension Kushner and Spielberg - draw the line at bloodshed, radically suggesting that the murder of another person is wrong regardless of if it's in the name of revenge, country, or religion. In a time when the United States launches invasions predicated on the concept of vengeance, this is a truly bold sentiment.
The film's brilliant final scene - which features some of the best screen acting you are ever likely to see - sends this message home in a powerful way. It details the final meeting between Ephraim and Avner, and in it Avner makes his stance clear that he firmly believes that the mission he undertook was wrong, while Ephraim argues that what he did was brutal but necessary; he reminds him that he did what he did he did for "the future, for Israel... for peace", to which Avner responds "There's no peace at the end of this". While Ephraim still believes in his responsibility to his country above all else, Avner has comes to the realization that his responsibility to humanity overrides his responsibility to his country. Avner invites Ephraim to break bread with him, and Ephraim refuses - it's a truly devastating moment, but their worldviews are ultimately irreconcilable. As Avner walks back to his Brooklyn apartment, alone, the camera pans to reveal the World Trade Center off in the distance simply waiting to be destroyed, another casualty in the war between Israel and Palestine. Here, Spielberg cuts through the nonsense we were fed by our Government after the attacks - that we were attacked because those stinking Arabs hate freedom, democracy, and capitalism - and acknowledges that 9/11 happened for political as well as religious reasons. September 11th was another act of retribution, and it has only yielded further murder and destruction in the name of revenge.
When I saw War of the Worlds when it was released in the summer of 2005, my opinion was pretty much in line with that of many other people - that it was a failure with some effective moments, that Spielberg's sappiness ruined the ending, and so on. When I saw Munich later that year I was forced to reconsider a film I had dismissed, because Munich made me stop viewing War of the Worlds as a piece of summer entertainment and made me think of it as a serious consideration of 9/11, as Munich most certainly is. Now I think of War of the Worlds as the dream and Munich as the reality, like when you wake up after a nightmare and begin to comprehend the imagery and dream logic; that which seemed irrational or nonsensical while you slept suddenly makes perfect sense.
Spielberg subverts standard blockbuster formula with War of the Worlds, which is all too fitting as he allegedly invented the genre (which is another topic for another day). War of the Worlds is, essentially, the world's first avant-garde blockbuster. Upon its release in the summer of 2005, though the film did well at the box office, everyone I spoke to about War of the Worlds treated it with a kind of hostility, and I think that's because it does not aim to excite, it aims to capture an emotional frame of mind, and a painful one at that. There are moments in the film that are downright frightening. It is a masterful, if imperfect, symbiosis of 1950s martian mythology - itself symbolic of communism hysteria - and imagery directly inspired by the September 11th attacks and our subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Spielberg forces us to see ourselves on the wrong end of an invasion - which is truly radical in a time when the media barely documents the atrocities of the wars we wage - by reminding us what our home looked like as a warzone, and then expanding that nightmare to a full scale invasion. But rather than using the imagery as a gateway to cheap thrills by justifying our knee jerk desires for revenge and further brutality, Spielberg vividly dramatizes what an invasion looks and feels like, turning the American landscape into a desolate warzone. 9/11 was a nightmare, but it was only a glimpse into the true nature of living in a place where war is being waged, and Spielberg's film serves as a powerful visualization of invasion and occupation - something the United States has never been on the receiving end of. As Wells' novel, written at the height of the English empire, was a blatant allegory for the spread of imperialism and colonialism it's only fitting that Spielberg, King of Hollywood, shift the setting of the film to the modern day United States.
By recontextualizing Wells' text to modern America, Spielberg is able to express themes that have been vital to his work throughout his career while still remaining faithful to the source material. By making the film's central character the typical Spielberg absent father, Spielberg is able to examine the issues of family that have been so vital to his work. As in his first feature, The Sugarland Express, Spielberg paints a portrait of a parent who is really still a child, who has been unable (or unwilling) to grow up, and the casting of Tom Cruise as the perpetual adolescent is a stunning example of casting against type. I've always thought Cruise was a better actor than he was given credit for, and the way he portrays his characters transformation from an immature, incompetent man to a capable, mature father is truly remarkable. It probably didn't hurt that he was given a fully capable co-star, whom he shares many of the film's most deeply affecting moments with, Dakota Fanning, in one of the best performances Spielberg has ever received from his child performers (which is saying something).
Spielberg's affinity for familial drama is put brilliantly on display early on, when the tensions begin between Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier and his teenage son, Robbie. What other film maker could use a simple game of catch between a father and son to express the emotional distance between them? Only Spielberg could elevate such iconographic American imagery as a father and son tossing a baseball in the backyard into something so intimately personal. Ray, who has been seen adorning a Yankee cap for the entire film, is miffed when his son comes for a weekend visit wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. This detail could have been merely juvenile bickering, but in Spielberg's hands this visual detail becomes truly heartbreaking, a metaphor for how Ray Ferrier has lost his children in the time since he divorced his wife. Spielberg, by shifting the focus from the children onto the neglectful father, challenges himself to sympathize with a character he has demonized in the past.
The examination of the dissolution of the nuclear family in the modern era gives Spielberg an emotional vessel to illustrate the manner in which extreme trauma is capable of at once uniting and dividing humans; Spielberg's martian invasion brings out the best and worst in humanity simultaneously. There is a harrowing sequence where the Ferrier family, who have one of the few working automobiles left, suddenly find themselves in a town surrounded by hungry, exhausted, desperate people who steal their car from them - one particularly unsettling image shows a man breaking the windshield glass with his bare hands. The person I saw the film with in 2005 criticized this moment as being unrealistic, whereas I felt the exact opposite, that the sequence is an all too accurate dramatization of exactly what would happen - it wouldn't even require a disaster on the magnitude of an alien invasion to unleash our barely restrained animal instincts. In Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report, a character has a line that essentially serves as the precursor for this scene in War of the Worlds. "It's funny how all living organisms are alike. When the chips are down, when the pressure is on, every creature on the face of the Earth is interested in one thing, and one thing only: its own survival". Though this sounds like a cynical sentiment, it's really not, as we are animals and our latent desire to survive above all else is something that Spielberg has elevated to profound heights in films like Schindler's List, A.I., and here in War of the Worlds. All of Spielberg's films are, essentially, survivor's stories, which makes the ending of the film where Robbie inexplicably turns up alive - which is a very accurate approximation of the book's ending, for what it's worth - not as out of place or absurd as it has been accused of being. Yes, it's a bit contrived, but people have been shown to be capable of surviving against all odds - let's not forget that there were people on 9/11 who survived having 110 story buildings collapse onto them. To quote Dr. Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way".
Spielberg has said that they key image he took away from September 11th was people walking in large groups away from Ground Zero, and he channels that imagery of mass exodus beautifully in War of the Worlds, filtering an almost absurd science fiction concept through our collective memory of our home being attacked. Spielberg invokes the attack to give way to catharsis, challenging us to stop seeing 9/11 as something that happened to the United States and to instead view it as something that happened to the human race. I may not have responded to Spielberg's profoundly empathetic sentiments the first time I saw War of the Worlds, but little did I know at the time that Spielberg was in the process of making a film that would turn the very concept of national identity on its head.
War of the Worlds forces you to relive September 11th. Munich, on the other hand, forces you to think about it. Though War of the Worlds deals with the attack more directly, the fact that Munich fictionalizes a real life event - the massacre at the 1972 Olympics - allows Spielberg to draw a direct parallel between an event that introduced many in the United States to the realities of radical Islam and September 11th . Munich begins with the members of Black September hopping a chain link fence and breaking into the Israeli athlete's hotel room and ends with a shot of the World Trade Center, and Spielberg here is illustrating that the events at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the atrocity in September of 2001 are directly linked, and Munich can be viewed as serving as a straight line between the two events.
Spielberg always claimed that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the result of his desire to make a James Bond movie, but we could argue that Munich is actually his 007 movie - but it's a Bond movie as only he could do it, one that thoughtfully considers identity on both a personal and national level, that evaluates the morality of killing another human being, that analyzes the sacrifice a person must make to become an assassin. It's James Bond with a moral center, in other words (though obviously morality is not the reason we watch 007 movies). In Munich Spielberg transcends nationalism before the film properly begins, as the title sequence shows a collage of major world cities before ultimately highlighting the word "Munich" - rather than portraying this act of terrorism as something that happened to Jews or to Germany or to any one group of people, Spielberg is suggesting throughout Munich that this was a tragedy that happened to the human race, that the murder of human beings is something that should be treated as tragedy regardless of your religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.
Munich is, at its heart, the tragedy of a man - that man being Avner, in an unforgettable performance from Erica Bana. We are introduced to Avner at the end of a long montage showing people of various backgrounds - Israeli, Palestinian, families of both the athletes and the members of Black September - watching the events unfold on television; as with September 11th, this is a tragedy that television was an inseparable part of, where the news reports are a vital element of the popular conception of the event. Spielberg captures the feeling of being glued to your television by this real life drama beautifully in these opening sequences. The next day, Avner is contacted by no less than Golda Meir herself, who requests that he lead a mission of retaliation against the architects of the Munich massacre, essentially Government sponsored terrorism in the name of revenge. Out of a sense of duty to his people and his country, he accepts, not realizing that by agreeing to take part in this mission that he will lose his soul as well as his cultural and spiritual identity in the process.
In the hands of lesser artists, Avner could have been an empty symbol, but Tony Kushner (whose screenplay surely ranks amongst the very best of the last 10 years), Spielberg and Bana manage to make Avner work on both a symbolic level and as a flesh and blood human being. The same is true of the supporting players - Daniel Craig's Steve, a nationalist who has no moral qualms about the mission and makes this fact repeatedly known, Ciaran Hinds' Carl, who has nothing but moral qualms about the mission, Geoffrey Rush's Ephraim, the pencil pushing bureaucrat - who, between the quality of the writing and the excellence of the performers, manage to play Kushner's admittedly philosophy-heavy script as very real human drama. But it is Avner who is the heart of the film, and Bana plays his pathological dissent into guilt, paranoia, and borderline insanity masterfully.
The tragedy of Avner is that, at the outset of his mission, he truthfully believes that what he's doing is right, and as the mission presses on he gradually comes to the realization that killing is not only wrong but that it doesn't accomplish anything; that anyone you kill will only be replaced by someone who is even worse, that murdering your enemy will only escalate their desire to bring harm to you - essentially, Avner comes to understand the reciprocal nature of violence over the course of the film. More than violence being morally reprehensible, it doesn't solve a damn thing except our desire for bloodshed, which is only a temporary fix anyway. Yes, Avner loses the notion of Israel as a home over the course of his mission, but he gains a philosophical enlightenment by becoming a man without an ethnic identity; he stops seeing humans as a collection of countries and religions and sees us all as one. That Munich was accused of being anti-Israel by some and anti-Palestine by others (depending on your bias) illustrates the depth of the film's powerfully anti-nationalistic, humanistic sentiments.
Avner is clearly meant to represent a certain discontent that Spielberg and Kushner feel as pacifists with the militant actions of Israel. Late in the film, Avner's mother has a beautiful speech about how whatever he did - and she doesn't actually want to know - was worthwhile because it means the Jews "now have a place on Earth". Kushner and Spielberg certainly aren't arguing that the Jews don't deserve to have a home, they're just theorizing on what extents are acceptable to ensure that they don't lose that place on Earth. Avner - and by extension Kushner and Spielberg - draw the line at bloodshed, radically suggesting that the murder of another person is wrong regardless of if it's in the name of revenge, country, or religion. In a time when the United States launches invasions predicated on the concept of vengeance, this is a truly bold sentiment.
The film's brilliant final scene - which features some of the best screen acting you are ever likely to see - sends this message home in a powerful way. It details the final meeting between Ephraim and Avner, and in it Avner makes his stance clear that he firmly believes that the mission he undertook was wrong, while Ephraim argues that what he did was brutal but necessary; he reminds him that he did what he did he did for "the future, for Israel... for peace", to which Avner responds "There's no peace at the end of this". While Ephraim still believes in his responsibility to his country above all else, Avner has comes to the realization that his responsibility to humanity overrides his responsibility to his country. Avner invites Ephraim to break bread with him, and Ephraim refuses - it's a truly devastating moment, but their worldviews are ultimately irreconcilable. As Avner walks back to his Brooklyn apartment, alone, the camera pans to reveal the World Trade Center off in the distance simply waiting to be destroyed, another casualty in the war between Israel and Palestine. Here, Spielberg cuts through the nonsense we were fed by our Government after the attacks - that we were attacked because those stinking Arabs hate freedom, democracy, and capitalism - and acknowledges that 9/11 happened for political as well as religious reasons. September 11th was another act of retribution, and it has only yielded further murder and destruction in the name of revenge.
