Maybe it was self-control that compelled Spielberg to build his whole movie around aliens but give the aliens themselves as little screentime as possible. (Or, for all I know, he did it on a dare.) But this is only one of the risks taken by his latest film.
This first encounter picture is distanced from something like Independence Day and more toward something like 2001: A Space Odyssey--and it's even closer to something like Arrival. The film sees a cyber-security worker, Daniel Kilner (Josh O'Connor) who defects with the intent to reveal what he knows to the world: the government has had repeated, secret encounters with extraterrestrial life. He has a team of underground sympathizers, lead by Hugo Wakefield (Colmon Domingo), but he also has agent Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) out to stop the truth at any cost. Kilner's only chance getting the truth out there is in joining up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a newscast personality who is suddenly beset by inexplicable phenomena.
My favorite thing about War of the Worlds, Spielberg's last alien film (unless I guess you want to count "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ...) was the vantage point from which he explored an alien invasion. That territory lends itself to a specific kind of popcorn flick led by a specific kind of cast acting out a specific kind of conflict. But the human characters in War of the Worlds wouldn't have thought of themselves as the stars of an "action movie," they were just an ordinary family trying to survive circumstances that were beyond them to understand.
That effect is applied and compounded here. The picture traces the outline of an action-thriller, yet its concern is far more humanistic. The turmoil and panic posed by the introduction of alien existence is the lifeblood of the film, yet the film's momentum is sustained by the human interactions, like the constant exchange of charisma supplied by the film's impressive cast.
I have at least a baseline level of familiarity with all the main players, yet this latest interview still yielded new faces from each of them. I don't know how many times I'll have to be reminded that Emily Blunt really can do anything. Even so, my deepest impression probably went to the performer I was least familiar with, Eve Hewson as Jane, Daniel's girlfriend who asked for none of the nonsense he gets wrapped up in.
I struggled to apply the proper descriptor to this movie. It's "foreboding," yet there is an undeniable sense of wonder, even playfulness underpinning it. It's "mysterious," yet when the curtain falls--or in this case I'd say dissolves--you find the movie wasn't hiding anything at all.
The film spins a lot of curiosity dressed around a very simple idea: for an otherworldly species that can traverse the galaxy, the ability that they admire above all others is simply that of empathizing with another living being. And this very basic idea guides most of the film's essential touchstones.
There's a moment, for example, late in the film where a main character is introduced to a group of strangers for the first time but is able to name each of them individually as if reuniting with an old friend. The intimacy of the moment reached me--as did the awareness that such an interaction would, in many circumstances, be an item of discomfort, something to snigger at.
I couldn't help but notice this kind of thing was on the mind of a lot of my fellow theater patrons in moments like these. Many lines of dialogue were designed to lead audiences to a place of vulnerability, and judging by the reactions of my fellow patrons--at least the younger ones--that wasn't a space all of them were willing to go.
Perhaps that means Spielberg's experiment failed, at least in this auditorium, but I'm more inclined to believe that it proves its necessity in this landscape--a landscape in which the causticity and coarseness of the day is surely evident in far more than just some chuckling at what is a decidedly sentimental picture. A film like this will be relevant for at least as long as it's challenging.
The word I normally default to for the attitude of a film like this "idealistic" or even just "optimistic." But I'm pretty sure that a word like "serene" belongs somewhere in there too.
--The Professor
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