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War of the Worlds is so impressive in so many ways that it makes the frustration over its miserable final moments that much harder to bear. It’s as if the post-Schindler’s List Spielberg suddenly transformed in the Worlds’ final minutes into the cheesy 1989-era Spielberg of Always. What a shame considering the genius side of this director lays the groundwork for this movie. There are snippets from various Spielberg movies evoked all through War of the Worlds: It’s got the child-parent dynamic of E.T. set against the mass hysteria scenes of Close Encounters and Schindler’s List, suspense setpieces lifted straight out of Jurassic Park (The snake-like probes invading the cellar have an eerie resemblance to the raptors stalking the kitchen in Park, am I right?). But the most devastating and heart-wrenchingly brilliant aspect of Spielberg (especially since Schindler’s) has been the manner in which he humanizes violence. He’s got a masterful way of undercutting the spectacle of violence by foregrounding the real human suffering involved in the crossfire of violence. Saving Private Ryan was, in this regard, a miraculous work. Spielberg can stage a brilliantly crafted action sequence but, all the while, he will force us to ponder the human toll of the acts being committed. I am in awe of his ability to do this. It is exactly the way violence must be depicted, especially in a medium that treats violent acts so casually and amorally.

To be fair, Spielberg has never traded in mindless spectacle (with the exception of the hideous Temple of Doom installment of Indiana Jones and, to a lesser degree, 1941). For him, spectacle can only be justified when it’s from the point-of-view of a relatable and sympathetic character. In War of the Worlds, we watch as a whole community of average human beings are faced with and mercilessly destroyed by an alien legion wielding death rays. Unlike subhuman garbage like Independence Day or any in the barrage of “spectacle”-heavy alien invasion/disaster films of the last 20 years, this movie knows that spectacle in and of itself is pointless, nothing but a bludgeoning device meant to elicit some sort of submissive awe from the lemmings in the audience. Not this movie, though. Spielberg’s movie is truly character-driven, not effects-driven. Indeed, it’s actually very restrained in the latter regard. There is one scene in which a battle between the alien tripods and the missile-wielding copters and tanks is kept off-screen, just over a ridge. We only hear and see hints of it followed by the after-effects of the fight (a soldier screams into his radio–”No effect!”–and we see army vehicles come barreling back over the ridge…in flames!) This is the stuff of pure cinema! Ditto the train engulfed in flames as it hurtles across the screen in full view of a group of horrified survivors, the wreckage of the crashed airliner and the deracinated, crimson-hued landscape that Ray (played by Tom Cruise) eventually happens upon. In each scene, we are left to extrapolate what just happened–without availing of the action just perpetrated. For one thing, Ray wasn’t there to witness it, only there to witness the aftermath. And we’re left to look on with him and ponder the movie’s themes of the moral costs of violence, the preciousness of life and nature, and the need for a community to rally against forces that do not nurture such values.

One of the greatest images in movies released in my lifetime is in War of the Worlds. It takes place during the scene in which panic-stricken survivors are clambering aboard a ferry, trying to get past the barricade of soldiers keeping them at bay. Then, they hear that heart-stopping siren (that two-note baritone battle call that the alien tripods emit each time they’re about to attack). They turn around–and Spielberg cuts to the reverse shot. And there it is, in an extreme wide shot–the image of an alien tripod looming over a hill not far from the landing in the foreground where passengers are struggling to save themselves. It’s a horrific image–straight out of a nightmare, primal and unsparing, and you know that there is no turning back or hedging. Spielberg doesn’t flinch from these scenes, he shows death and destruction in all their fury and tragedy. Also, I have to commend Cruise’s performance (yes, he’s an insane Scientologist, but he’s also a very shrewd and hard-working actor). His dockworker, Ray, feels completely believable, the working-class milieu that Spielberg portrays feels spot-on, and Ray’s relationship with his alienated children, Rachel (Fanning) and Robbie (Chatwin), are convincing as well. Spielberg shrewdly references memories of 9/11 as well: The bulletin boards cluttered with pictures of the missing, for instance, and the hysteria and desperation palpable in the faces of everyone on screen, not to mention the scale of the violence itself.

This then leads to the great and shattering disappointment that awaits us as we near the end of War of the Worlds. I have several problems: Ray is spared the cost that so many others in this movie suffer, namely to lose a loved one in a time of crisis, and Spielberg’s exempting Ray from the take-no-prisoners storytelling that came before it feels false, a cheat. It was as if another, lesser director took over in the Worlds’ final act, as if Spielberg suddenly felt impatient and uncertain about how to end this movie, ever eager to please his lowest common denominator audience. He should’ve known that staying truthful to the tone and themes (the costs of defending your community), rather than capitulating with sentiment, is how you win over your audience. As the credits rolled, I had to hide my head in my hands.

Also, why is it that an alien intelligence that’s supposedly kept its eyes trained on Earth for a million years couldn’t anticipate the bacteria factor? I realize this is how H.G. Wells’ story wraps up. But for it to have worked here, Spielberg and his scribes (big-budget machine David Koepp and this other guy) had to then infuse the theme of “germs” all throughout their story, rather than have it suggested arbitrarily in their movie’s climax. More crucially, why is it that the aliens waited so long to launch their attack? What was the point when they were a superior intelligence and killing force all along? Why not attack humanity when they were not so equipped with such lethal weapons? Also, why bother with death rays when a nuclear bomb can wipe out hundreds of thousands in a single blast? (Again, this last was a nod to Wells’ story, I understand, but it just doesn’t make sense anymore in the context of a total takeover and annihilation.) Easy answers are, sadly, all it would’ve taken to fix what are debilitating problems in an otherwise masterful exercise in humanist sci-fi moviemaking.

Grade: B

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Josh Friedman, David Koepp
Cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins

Based on the novel by P.D. James, director and co-writer Alfonso Cuarón’s futuristic adventure derives its power from a premise as potent and primal as they come. Early in the 21st century, women are, suddenly and inexplicably, rendered infertile. No one knows why; reasons ranging from environmental pollution and genetic testing are cited as possible culprits. That’s neither nor there, however, because both mankind and civilization are rapidly unraveling. The world that Children of Men’s hero, Theodore Faron (Clive Owen), an erstwhile social activist, inhabits is riddled with political instability, terrorism, riots, economic crises and nuclear conflagrations. Britain has become a police state, violently quashing all discontent. Because of large-scale illegal immigration into Britain from less stable parts of the world, the country has adopted a violent policy against it. Everywhere we see police rounding up migrants into buses, hauling them off into Guantanamo-like detention camps. They’re ruthless in how they treat citizens who, in turn, have become disaffected, or else taken up arms in their struggle against the system. Terrorism and persecution widespread. The use of legalized over-the-counter euthanasia drugs is encouraged for all.

So it’s no surprise that when Baby Diego dies, everyone everywhere is sent into a grief-stricken tailspin. Reputedly the youngest man on Earth, Baby Diego is killed in a violent incident that characterizes the tenor of the times. The event underscores the fragility of the fate of our species, a twist of the proverbial knife already embedded in our backs. But Faron’s already inside his own grief vortex; twenty years ago, right around the time when pregnancy rates worldwide were dropping, he and his former wife Julian (Julianne Moore) laid to rest their own child. It was, in a way, the end of both their lives.

Those pieces in place, Cuarón shunts into action mode, “chase picture” mode to be exact, after Julian pays the disaffected Faron a surprise visit. She tells him about Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a teenage girl who miraculously happens to be pregnant, and charges him with the task of transporting Kee and her nurse, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to the coast where they can be delivered into the hands of a benevolent organization called the Human Project. The existence of the Human Project is itself open to question, a rumor more than a fact, but it’s a chance Faron decides is worth taking; the world’s too dangerous to entrust with anything this precious. Faron’s not kidding either, for no sooner have they set out on the road than the group is set upon by sectarians determined to make Kee’s soon-to-be-born baby the poster child for their revolution.

Children of Men exudes an aura of effortlessness in how it lays out the particulars of its complex social and political realities. The pandemonium that wracks this future-world feels both logical and palpable; without that crucial sense of plausibility, Cuarón and company’s script would’ve been lost at sea. The same can be said of Cuarón’s assuredly brilliant direction, at much at ease with developing a range of absorbing characters as with staging one riveting action set piece after another. Owen creates the kind of hero you can’t help but immediately sympathize with and root for: Faron is a bedraggled Everyman, he has no power, no authority, and he wouldn’t know how to use a firearm if he found one in his hands. But, wounded by the loss of his own child, he’s the heart and soul of the picture, driven solely by his desire to save. And not just Owen; Children of Men is marked by high caliber performances throughout, particularly from Ferris, whose Miriam is Kee’s only protection and professional support; from Chiwetel Ejiofor whose militant leader Luke’s yearning for revolution becomes wrongly enmeshed with his desire to co-opt Kee’s child; from Ashitey whose Kee’s vulnerability is shielded only by her maternal pluckiness; and from the ever-watchable Michael Caine as a pot-smoking, lank-haired eccentric who’s the closest thing Faron has to a guide and benefactor.

Through a series of escapes and captures, Faron, Kee and Miriam manage to flee Luke and his organization only to wind up in a Homeland Security detention camp. In depicting their arrival at the camp, Cuarón’s acutely evokes, without exploiting, our collective incredulity for places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Cuarón’s sequence is frightening and bears the stamp of truth for anyone who’s seen images in the news of hooded prisoners, Gestapo-like guards, and unwholesome, barbed-wire ringed compounds. It’s at the camp that Cuarón’s direction (and his picture) gathers steam. He begins with an excruciatingly suspenseful sequence in which Faron tries to find Kee — in the final pangs of labor — a safe corner in these pellmell surroundings where she can give birth, and builds to a bravura climax as Faron must infiltrate a war zone to fetch Kee and her newborn. Cuarón’s courage and craftsmanship — together with the skills of his superb cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — prove themselves in a shattering single-take sequence in which a very simple but enormously effective juxtaposition is established between the roar of gunfire against the crying of an infant as Faron tries to sneak mother and child out of a besieged building. A more mind-blowing display of technical virtuosity in tandem with emotional power hasn’t been burned into celluloid since the opening of Saving Private Ryan. At one point in Children of Men, Miriam comments how the voices of children are what keep the world from tipping into self-destruction. That sentiment is borne out precisely and perfectly in Cuarón’s final scenes.

All that keeps Children of Men from achieving masterpiece status is a greater sense of Faron himself. The script never delves deeply enough into Faron’s character; we know that he’s a burned-out shell of a man, haunted by feelings of fatelessness, but, of Faron’s inner life, we glean very little. Rather, he is a flat character who goes from one challenge to the next, as demanded by the story and with an attitude that remains the same whether he’s fetching a cup of coffee or a baby from a burning building. Faron should have been Cuarón’s bid to assert his personality over this material, an opportunity to provide his “spin” on the terrible state of the world (real and allegorical) and perhaps his own world-view as an artist. Children of Men gives us Cuarón the prodigal filmmaker, notching another success in a long string of them, though it comes frustratingly close to giving us Cuarón, the newly minted auteur.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam, Danny Huston, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Peter Mullan, Pam Ferris, Michael Caine

The premise for District 9 — even as alien invasion scenarios go — is pretty damn ludicrous. But if you can get past it, and you’re a fan of the Peter Jackson school of over-the-top, shoot-em-up violence, then you stand a good chance of enjoying what’s otherwise a clever and provocative sci-fi thrill machine. Here’s the stretch: A superior alien civilization arrives on Earth in a spaceship large enough to house thousands, or even millions. It conks to a stop above Johannesburg, South Africa.

When humans find that its occupants are ailing or debilitated, they promptly remove and house them in makeshift refugee zones in the city. Soon thereafter, these zones become sprawling, militarized slums, where the aliens (whom we derogatorily call “Prawns”) live in shanties, amidst poverty, corruption and political oppression, segregated from the human population. Off the bat, District 9′s apartheid-informed, sociopolitical allegory comes raging at us full-force with scenes of alien riots and police brutality. Except, these aliens aren’t simple life forms, like bees or ants, as the filmmakers would have us believe; by the magnitude of their advancement — their superior weaponry, physical strength and space-travel technology — we can’t buy that even the Prawns’ version of “worker bees” does not possess the survival instincts to resist and overpower their bullying, would-be human oppressors. What’s weirder, the Prawns trade their hyper-advanced guns (seriously, one shot is all it would take to turn you into a splatter of pasta sauce on the wall) to local Nigerian racketeers for cans of cat food — apparently, the Prawns develop a taste for it (as they do for human prostitutes). At this point, it’s as if Jackson and company dumb-down and degrade their aliens just so their humans will appear more disgusting and oppressive in opposition. By conceding to such absurd, simple-minded ideas, they risk dumbing down their entire, already shaky premise.

All great science-fiction, especially of the “Close Encounters” variety, asks us to question our natures and our place in the universe. Most often, mankind comes up short when faced with the prospect of encountering “the other.” From The Day the Earth Stood Still to Close Encounters, Contact and even The Terminator series, humans usually get suspicious, agitated, devious, or even downright hostile. Though a few individuals in these stories have the sagacity to overcome such base instincts, mankind by and large is depicted as being dominated by them. District 9 lands squarely in that territory as Blomkamp, his co-writer Terri Tatchell and producer Jackson revel in the gross venality and xenophobia of the human species. We’re not far into District 9 before our simmering contempt for our own kind reaches a roiling boil as scenes unravel of armed security forces running havoc in the aliens’ shantytown, badgering and brutalizing them into submitting to government plans to re-locate the Prawns to a new site.

It’s during these eviction operations that District 9 kicks into full gear. When Wikus (Sharlton Copley), a by-the-book bureaucrat in charge of the Prawn re-location scheme, gets exposed to an alien chemical, he finds himself, to much terror and bafflement, turning into a Prawn himself. As a human-Prawn mutant, capable of operating the aliens’ bio-mechanical weaponry, Wikus is suddenly the most highly prized guinea pig in the world. On the run from the military, Wikus holes up in the Prawns’ shantytown and finds his only ally and confidante in the alien’s leader — resourceful, intelligent, and the only one who knows how to restore Wikus to his human state. The leader promises to help Wikus if he, in turn, helps him secure the last bit of technology he needs to render their spaceship operational and, hence, return to the Prawns’ home planet.

What District 9 does exceptionally well — and this is crucial for an action-thriller — is draw the line distinctly between good and evil. In this world, the humans are the villains, and, if you were to judge from District 9, humans have got to be the nastiest, sleaziest life form around, quick to hate, greed, and violence. It makes one wonder how we, as a species, survived as long as we did given the vileness of our nature. As a viewer, I haven’t hated humans this much since Children of Men and, before that, T2: Judgment Day. That clear polarity makes us identify with the aliens that much more, and root for Wikus and his Prawn allies.

The violence here is excessive to the point of being cartoonish — people are blowing up like paintballs left and right — but it’s predicated on such an emotional investment that we want the aliens’ fight against the humans to be as bold and decisive as Blomkamp’s visuals and the digital soundtrack will allow. Indeed, the movie’s final 40 minutes is an extended, Saving Private Ryan-esque action sequence that’s as riveting as they get as Wikus fends off an army of zealous, machine gun-happy troops while his alien comrades set their own plan into motion.

Precision editing and a clever sense of narrative and point-of-view — we’re told the story through a variety of means, from news blurbs (a la Starship Troopers), surveillance cameras, docu-style coverage blended together with more traditional styles — all amp up tension, suspense, and keep us hooked no matter the silliness of the story’s set-up. District 9 doesn’t carry much weight as sociopolitical commentary or satire but, taken on the merits of its shrewd story sense and craftsmanship, it’s a popcorn entertainment destined to stay in our minds. Till the sequel at least.

Grade: B

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvanie Strike, William Allen Young, Vanessa Haywood, Robert Ho