The Existential Terror of War of the Worlds

Finally managed to watch this one. I saw Independence Day as a teenager with precious little critical thinking capabilities, and loved it. The bombast, the explosions, the heartwarming resolution. Never saw War of the Worlds, but I found the comparison very enlightening and interesting. Most food for thought this time, though, came from two general statements you made. 1, if an alien is never just an alien and a monster never just a monster, what about more abstract concepts, like magic, or the Matrix? And 2, is there an expiration date on the chilling effect 9/11 has on pop culture? I imagine and seem to remember being taught about a similar effect of WW2, and apparently, pop culture got over that one...

Martin Karsten

You're exactly correct about both movies -- and exactly correct about the second War of the Worlds goes off of a cliff.

So glad to he contributing to ur fantastic work lindsay!

Josh Marjonen

Is this a companion piece to Jenny's "the Grim Dystopia of a Christmas Prince”?

EmperorEthan

I kind of wish Spielberg had leaned into the sorta pessimism(?) regarding the three main characters. Robbie is really just a ranting dipstick, Tom Cruise is still a terrible father who learned nothing, Rachel really can't handle pressure, etc. The aliens died because of some random fluke, nothing of our characters' revelations means anything, our cultural anxiety is gibberish. Neil LaBute's War Of The Worlds [copied from youtube]

Great video, as usual! Reminded me of an article I read back in the 90s about how Spielberg's (then) two alien movies reflect the family values of the time in which they were made: The late 70s were seen as a time of moral decline and collapsing traditional families. So in Carter-era Close Encounters Roy Neary is portrayed as righteous for leaving his shrill, nagging wife and annoying, whiny kids, to go chase aliens with another woman, before abandoning them, and the planet, completely. Whereas E.T., made just a few years later during the moral majority, family values Reagan era, portrays a barely-coping single mother whose messed-up family pulls itself together only thanks to an implicitly male messianic father-figure-ish from space. In just 5 years, the "traditional family" concept went from being a burden to a necessity. So now I'm trying to think about how this applies to War of the Worlds. There does seem to be something Bush-era reactionary about the father who's bad at "normal" "feminine" parenting but gets his act together only through "masculine" challenges involving driving fast and running and punching. Curious if you have any thoughts.

Humans are monsters and are not monsters. We always have / haven't been. And the buried tripods were beyond stupid. IDK, maybe Xenu put them there.

Ryan Courdy

I missed this post until now after the livestream. Great video. I'd just comment that what you were talking about towards the end about the tone of ID4 not being replicable in the modern day, I did feel like Pacific Rim achieved a similar sort of dumb silly joie de vivre in the face of the apocalypse in its way, albeit in a futuristic setting. They didn't really focus that joy on the destruction and it was a different sort of movie (one with a similar large cast and a payoff and complete arc for many of those characters similar to ID4) set in the future, so yeah, point. I just love both films unapologetically and didn't clue into that similarity really before, so thanks for that as well.

Was great to see this video again, was missing your old two part series and enjoyed some of the updates you added. I was really hoping you were gonna bring up the Independence Day sequel that came out a few years ago. Just like you said, they tried to do pretty much the same movie again, and it feels like it failed pretty spectacularly.

Jesse

The existential terror of missing a Lindsay video!

JM

Thank you! I really liked this one it made me wonder though where does a film like Children of Men or Arrival fall? I would love to see an analysis of either of them. I was comparing War of the Worlds to Children of Men in my head while watching the clips & just how different (at least in how I remember) woman being escorted/protected by male protagonist is in that film

Arrogant cum trucks

Thank you! You finally vocalized something that I had been thinking about for years: Just because one piece of art (Independence Day for example) is less sophisticated than another (War of the Worlds, 2005) doesn't mean that it's worse. As you point out, from a narrative structural sense, ID4 is actually a better movie in the sense of each character having an arc (silly and implausible as those arcs might be) than WotW05 (whose characters are set up with arcs but then fall flat on them).

Erebus92

You really should check out Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (original 1978 edition). It is simply distilled awesomeness, I think you'd like it.

Kristian Høy Horsberg

I was thinking about your Nostalgia Chick "Disaster Movies of Roland Emmerich" series literally yesterday because I'm TA-ing a class about climate change and the environment and one of the films we're gonna watch is "The Day After Tomorrow." I know you're unhappy with your work under the NChick moniker, but those videos were some of my favorites and I would rewatch them often. I can see some of the bones of those videos in this one (e.g. they have a mouth so they can go "bleh") but this one is definitely better. It's so cool to have seen the videos that were precursors to this one, and to see a clear example of the way you have grown as a critic and creator. As an additional aside, I really loved your Roland Emmerich impression where you talked about the aliens having no mouth. ("So eensted of no eyes, zey have no mouth. And it is scah-ree.")

Three Memes in a Trenchcoat

I want her to hear the musical so very badly.

Curt Clark

I think I get it. I feel like "Thanos Was Right" is a tired, wrongheaded take on a bad guy just because Josh Brolin emoted really well as his character sent Gamora plummeting to her death.

Curt Clark

Lindsay, you MUST hear the War of rhe Worlds musical. My stepfather had a CD of it back in the 90s. It is so very late-70s-early-80s and I would LOVE to hear your take on it, even in a simple vlog or comment. Of particular note is the <i>ridiculously</i> cheesy "Thunder Child" nmber that takes place when the titular ship buys time for the evacuation of civilians from London.

Curt Clark

I kind of wrestled over that one , and to be honest - I went with "Door King" because the correct pronunciation tilts too close to the english "dork", and I didn't want to deal with a million "tee DORK" comments.

Lindsay Ellis

Yay! I was so sad when you didn't repost your original two parter from you NW days. So happy to see this well polished history based version. Spot on!

Reo Scrolls

one other thing I left out was that the production itself (including the final screenplay) happened REALLY fast

Lindsay Ellis

Commented on the video, but perhaps consider renaming the final product to "The Existential Terror of War of the Worlds and the Immaculate Silliness of Independence Day", so you can get both in.

Hank Kleinberg

This movie once caused me to speculate the nature of time, attention, and of human brain evolution. It's like this weird ultra-compressed disaster movie where any scene from it would have passably served as a plot for some other movie or TV show in the past.

Aimee Thorne

Very excellent all around—completely unsurprising considering the source. If you'd like criticism, I would consider removing or short-handing some of the repeated clips used as examples ... as a viewer, I did remember the beats of each movie that you were trying to get at but could have skipped the repetition of the actual clip. Unrelatedly—despite thinking this while watching—do you have an opinion of Ishtar? The behind-the-scenes is a strange story, and I think the movie could have been at least pretty good if it were allowed to be finished.

Jason Olshefsky

Great, as always. The intro into Invasion Literature was perfect, could've been an It's Lit episode (still could be!). I kinda wish at the end there'd been a little more about the incomprehensible vs understandable enemy, specially post Infinity War. Thanos seems like the, no pun intended, endgame of the "relatable" or humanized invader, and IW didn't work for me. It gets messy when "understanding" the Enemy turns into providing their genocidal drive an ethos that may or may make sense, and ambiguity can be great for a lot of narratives, but maybe not that? I also wondered if there's a similarity between seeing the goofy aliens in WotW and superhero movies that "humanize" the Enemy, both functioning as a release of tension and dread? Maybe I'm an idiot but I hadn't made the connection that maybe the real power fantasy of the MCU is not the heroes, it's making the baddies so charming that Invasions kinda become safe-spaces? No idea if this comment helps or makes sense, hope it does!

Alien6981

Very different circumstances in Regency era England than the Late Victorian era. Helena Kelly in JANE AUSTEN: THE SECRET RADICAL argues that Britain during the Napoleonic Wars was a totalitarian state that didn't look kindly upon "treasonous" or "seditious" ideas. This might be why Austen contemporaries like Sir Walter Scott instead hide in historical metaphor, e.g in IVANHOE the Anglo-Saxons (i.e. native Britons) suffer under but resist Norman (i.e. French) rule. Had Scott written about a contemporary Britain occupied by Napoleon's forces he might have come under suspicion for undermining the war effort. This is without getting into other factors: poetry was held in much higher regard in the early 1800s than prose fiction, which was often dismissed as a womanly pursuit (even Scott was more famous for his poetry in his own lifetime), while this was not the case in the 1870s. In the Regency era it was mostly the aristocracy and the increasingly growing upper middle classes who were literate, while by the Late Victorian era you have a literate working class with some disposable income who are better informed about international affairs from newspapers and editorial cartoons but have limited options for entertainment--not coincidentally, you can trace the origins of most of our modern fictional genres from around this time.

Joe G

Kinda cool as a remake, shows how much you improve as an editor, though to be pedantic, I rather you just rerelease the original and done something different

Adrian DeZendegui

Perth was mentioned in kill bill and I’ve been thinking about it ever since

Amy

I feel like Spielberg's War of the Worlds represents the inevitable Hollywood compromise. I can see the film that he wants to make,but I can also see the hand of a studio spending millions that wants to put the movie on a more marketable track. It's just too expensive to be a character piece,but that's what the director made.

What a joy your videos are. I’m fascinated by the invasion stories (I had no idea Wells was drawing on that tradition), and why they didn’t show up earlier. The UK had obviously been threatened much more directly by invasion from the mainland before, and at least as recently as 1800 by Napoleon. That scare DID lead to on of my favorite Coleridge poems – “Fears in Solitude”, which capture my feelings around 9/11 better than anything contemporary. I guess they just expressed themselves in poetry more readily than scary “what if?” stories back then? Thankless too for peace, (Peace long preserved by fleets and perilous seas) Secure from actual warfare, we have loved To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war! Alas! for ages ignorant of all Its ghastlier workings, (famine or blue plague, Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows,) We, this whole people, have been clamorous For war and bloodshed; animating sports, The which we pay for as a thing to talk of, Spectators and not combatants! No guess Anticipative of a wrong unfelt, No speculation on contingency, However dim and vague, too vague and dim To yield a justifying cause; … And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony Of our fierce doings?

Ken Hall

A perfectly good analysis of these two movies and of the shift in perspective towards invasion and/or destruction movies in the US post 9/11. It made me think of how I, as a European, would be interested in a comparison between how 9/11 impacted Western culture as a whole and how it impacted US culture vs. Western European culture. Both depend heavily on one another - or Western European imagery is perhaps more influenced by US culture than the other way around - but the impact of 9/11 cannot have been so heavily felt by Europeans as it has been by US citizens. And yet, that same shift in perspective did impact European imagery in huge ways. Just thinking out loud.

Rianne Werring

The timing of this is uncanny, because I started the Jeff Wayne Audiable version of War of the Worlds a few days ago, and now here you are talking about it. I always adore your video essays, including this one. The changing climate of what audiences want from their media is always very interesting to me, like the to and fro of zombies vs. vampires every few years as well.

canadiankazz

Absolutely brilliant.

The wife was excited about a landmark to her people getting destroyed. I am still waiting for a movie where the Big Chicken is destroyed.

Mister CPU

Excellent as ever. Small niggle from a Brit: Dorking is pronounced with a softer k, like walking, not Door King. But it doesn't really matter because I hadn't heard of victorian invasion literature as a genre. Fab stuff.

Pete Ashton

For me the best version will always be <a href="https://soundcloud.com/erwtenpeller/war-of-the-worlds" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://soundcloud.com/erwtenpeller/war-of-the-worlds</a>

Paul John Showalter

I know it’s absolutely not the point of the video, but as a Tasmanian myself, hearing the word “Tasmanian” when you’re not expecting it is like someone screaming it into a megaphone

David Loring