Spectacle

Every generation gets the movie monster it deserves. The Depression spawned Frankenstein and Dracula--a victim of modernity and a figment of predatory, shape-shifting capitalism. The nuclear age begat mammoth mutants; the chaotic 1970s produced super psycho-killers; the feminist era inspired hyper-macho crazies and the ultimate patriarchal cannibal, Hannibal Lecter. For reasons that have much to do with the rise of Fortress America, our current creature of choice is the invader from space.

In September this life form will land in prime time with two new series, Invasion and Threshold. It's already produced the summer's biggest blockbuster, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which a cosmic Qaeda does its terror thing. But aliens haven't always been mean. Some are sweet--think E.T.--others progressive, like the visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), whose only demand was world peace. Back in the cold war the evil invaders were mainly after mental enslavement, but in these even less generous times their agenda is human extinction. And forget about liquid eyes and campy costumes; today's aliens are bony and buck naked, signifying their primal, transgressive power. That's been the model ever since Independence Day (1996), and Spielberg has applied the look and spirit of that film to the post-9/11 landscape.

This is the fourth dramatization of H.G. Wells's 1898 novel (if you count Orson Welles's infamous radio charade). None of them have preserved the author's intention to create a metaphor of subjugation that would resonate with the conduct of his own imperialist civilization. H.G. was a socialist; his adapters have no such impulse, least of all Spielberg. His War of the Worlds is stripped of liberal guilt. We are under attack almost from the opening credits, and by the time the New Jersey suburbs have been ravaged (Manhattan being off-limits for such fantasies these days), there's nothing to do but thrill to the awesome computer-generated imagery and root for your species. In a more relaxed time Spielberg gave us utopian pageants like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). But this hawkish moment demands spectacles of righteous revenge, and he has complied by making a very Republican horror film.

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