War of the Worlds, 2005

Some of the most fascinating science fiction comes out of collective cultural trauma. Godzilla, for instance, clearly emerged as a kind of fictional symbol of Japan’s experiences in World War II. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, meanwhile, is an explicitly post 9-11 film, and while the sight of imagery in movies that deliberately recalls the September 11 attacks may feel cliche all these years later, to see this movie in 2005 was to see the first mainstream work from a major filmmaker that was clearly trying to process the event and its lingering trauma. Spielberg frames the action masterfully (no surprise, of course), keeping us among the masses of terrified, struggling people, both so that we know that this struggle is a collective one, and so the alien threat remains larger than life.

I’m not sure if, as more time passes, the film’s power will grow, with people appreciating it more and more as a remarkable cultural artifact that offers insight, through the lens of art and fiction, into the psyche of a reeling nation, or if it will fade as the moment that shaped it gets ever further away and the film starts to seem obvious and clunky in its attempts to process something of such magnitude. I just know that it was remarkable to see this movie in a theater in 2005, to hear Dakota Fanning shriek, “Is it the terrorists?” when the aliens start attacking, to see people vaporized in an instant and know they were never coming back, to see Spielberg engage with how the real terror was the way that people, in their fear and desperation, could turn on each other. War of the Worlds is a rough, imperfect movie but I think perhaps a work like this should be rough and imperfect. There is no “perfect” way to process a tragedy through art, just as there’s no perfect way to move on from tragedy or carry it with us. Somehow, though, turning them into the stuff of movie monsters or extraterrestrial attacks always seems to help in some way. – Carolyn Petit