Innocence and The War of the Worlds
Jul. 10th, 2005 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakI doubt many other people will get the same message out of it that I did, but the character of Ray Ferrier in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds was at a certain stage a perfect metaphor for the United States Government. Out of fear he decides to do a horrible thing and to protect his daughter from the knowledge of this horrible thing he has her cover up her eyes and ears as he does it. All through the movie he his trying to protect her from knowledge of what is happening, when the lack of that knowledge is what is most likely to get her killed by innocently freezing up in the face of danger.
That is precisely what our government is doing. Evil bad things to protect us while trying to let us, the common citizens, live some imaginarily blissfully ignorant life oblivious to danger. Of course that's all me reading into the movie rather than something that was explicitly there.
It was a solid terrifying horror movie with some new twists on the old H.G. Wells story. All the same bits are there, just updated and slightly turned about. Not a great movie, but certainly with better acting and so on than appeared in the 1950 version. Negatives, of course, would be the usual stupid character. On the other hand it was nice to see a person who isn't superhuman surviving just by chance, but at times I wonder about the people in it. Maybe I'm just a little more skiddish, but I would have been running about five minutes before anyone else in a certain opening scene because I would have just assumed that something bad was going down when a large section of earth started moving. And not just because of SF knowledge, also because I know how extraordinarily fast and dangerous just ordinary real world phenomena like sink holes can be. If you're standing too close.
Also that's something to wonder about. It did follow the H.G. Wells ending, but what sort of interstellar invasion would be taken on without some sort of bacteriological defense? They were updated to look more modern, but at heart they were very Victorian aliens without thinking about something most modern people have at least a basic understanding of. Of course the ending of a real alien invasion would likely be somewhat unsatisfactory to most human viewers.
Thumbs Lukewarm Up
That is precisely what our government is doing. Evil bad things to protect us while trying to let us, the common citizens, live some imaginarily blissfully ignorant life oblivious to danger. Of course that's all me reading into the movie rather than something that was explicitly there.
It was a solid terrifying horror movie with some new twists on the old H.G. Wells story. All the same bits are there, just updated and slightly turned about. Not a great movie, but certainly with better acting and so on than appeared in the 1950 version. Negatives, of course, would be the usual stupid character. On the other hand it was nice to see a person who isn't superhuman surviving just by chance, but at times I wonder about the people in it. Maybe I'm just a little more skiddish, but I would have been running about five minutes before anyone else in a certain opening scene because I would have just assumed that something bad was going down when a large section of earth started moving. And not just because of SF knowledge, also because I know how extraordinarily fast and dangerous just ordinary real world phenomena like sink holes can be. If you're standing too close.
Also that's something to wonder about. It did follow the H.G. Wells ending, but what sort of interstellar invasion would be taken on without some sort of bacteriological defense? They were updated to look more modern, but at heart they were very Victorian aliens without thinking about something most modern people have at least a basic understanding of. Of course the ending of a real alien invasion would likely be somewhat unsatisfactory to most human viewers.
Thumbs Lukewarm Up