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Mystery of inspiration, it comes like a burning beam of light. "It's better than Goofy Golf!" A vigorous surrealism (Second World War helicopters found in Mexico, a vessel stranded on Mongolian sands) prepares the snapshot of suburban ordinariness, a darkened back road is where the Indiana repairman (Richard Dreyfuss) feels the pull of the cosmic sublime. Extraterrestrial visitors, "sky speeders" to the local newspaper, an overpowering vision to the doofy Everyman soon obsessed like Van Gogh. The door to the glowing unknown is opened by a kid (Cary Guffey), cf. Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, he squeals with excitement as his mother (Melinda Dillon) experiences the full galvanic horror of a raid by unseen forces. Scientist (François Truffaut) and cartographer (Bob Balaban) round out the seekers, a Wyoming rendezvous brings them together. "It's like Halloween for grown-ups." A luminous sheen for an excoriating center, the quintessence of Steven Spielberg's art. The ascension is also a regression, the protagonist must talk to aliens because he can't talk to his wife (Teri Garr), new forms are pursued in shaving cream and mashed potatoes until there's a tower of mud in the living room. "I guess you've noticed something is a little strange with Dad..." Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it owes a debt to DeMille's The Ten Commandments. (Arnold's It Came from Outer Space is another marked influence.) Rejection of domesticity and embrace of myth, the bedeviled mind's progression toward the fireworks display in the desert. The most guileless film of the most paranoid decade, or so it seems until trucks of governmental suppression wear Piggly Wiggly logos. The euphoric epiphany is a universal language of signs and sounds, naturally stage-managed by the gentle nouvelle vague firebrand. "I don't think we could ask for a more beautiful evening, do you?" E.T. continues that old time religion, War of the Worlds takes stock of the infernal new millennium. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, William A. Fraker, László Kovács, John A. Alonzo, and Douglas Slocombe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |