To think like the masters

Bayonne, N.J., has so far been spared an invasion from outer space. But the attack it suffers in Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” is beyond familiar. Terrified residents rush through the streets covered in ash and dust; handmade missing-person posters line the sidewalks; commercial airliners fall from the sky, to be instantly scavenged by predatory news media; pieces of clothing rain down from above.

The first major studio release to reference the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York, “War of the Worlds” does so strictly in the context of a midsummer popcorn doomsday scenario. No iconic national monuments were harmed in the making of the picture, and neither are any real-life players named. Even H.G. Wells’ Martians have been replaced by a menace from someplace not worth mentioning, so as to avoid offending possible members of the extraterrestrial community. Still, the citations are relentless. In the movie, as in reality, the attackers don’t come out of the clear blue; they were right under our feet, dormant and awaiting instruction. “Is it the terrorists?” shrieks Dakota Fanning, who plays Tom Cruise’s daughter, Rachel, as the first wave of attacks hits their neighborhood. Well, Rachel, it’s complicated.

What is pretty clear is that with “War of the Worlds” Spielberg does more than cap his four-decade-spanning aliens-in-America trilogy, which began in 1977 with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and left off in 1982 with “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” Unless, of course, you count “The Terminal,” in which the stranded extraterrestrial was played by Tom Hanks and a mall/food court at JFK stood in, without a trace of irony, for the American way of life. Spielberg seems to have been in a revisionist mood of late, and “War of the Worlds” in many ways feels like a rebuke to his younger self. In interviews, he has called his new movie “a polar opposite” to “Close Encounters.” “I’ve grown up a lot,” he’s said. “I’m a father now. I would never have made that film after having children.” (That would have been our loss.) Not surprisingly, the promotional campaign for “War of the Worlds” has been flogging this aspect of the creation myth of Spielberg-the-artist accordingly: A boy’s father directs his attention to the stars and then abandons him; a sequence of events then fixes him (as if he’d crossed his eyes in a breeze) on the idea of a faraway world populated by superior beings who wouldn’t dream of doing such things.

But “War of the Worlds” runs counter to “Close Encounters” in more ways than that. Spielberg’s longevity as an artist, his matchless success over the years, and his preoccupation with a closed set of themes have yielded a series of snapshots of not just his own but also his generation’s evolving attitudes toward parenthood, government and what those things have in common. Spielberg’s early films (“Jaws,” “Close Encounters”) were marked by a sly baby-boomer antiestablishmentarianism that is hard to imagine him embracing now. In “Close Encounters,” Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a restless working stiff mired in domestic chaos, gets a glimpse of something transcendent and begins devoting his time to bizarre art projects involving shaving cream and mashed potatoes. Eventually, Roy loses his job and the respect of his community; he abandons his family and defies his government to put on a satin track suit and hop a mother ship to parts unknown.

What is Roy if not a perfect encapsulation of the attitudes of the Me Generation and of its yearning for exotic experiences to transcend the familiar, the local, the domestic? The movie’s hero leaves everything behind to explore an alternate lifestyle -- religious cult, ashram, spaceship, whatever -- far from home; to have his mind blown and his consciousness expanded by a tribe of mute albinos from another planet. And he gets there thanks to a French scientist, played by none other than French film auteur Francois Truffaut. No wonder “Close Encounters” is still an art school favorite. It not only comprises a young person’s idea of what it means to be an artist (“This is important,” Roy repeats several times throughout the movie. “This means something.” And later, after meeting others who have experienced similar apparitions but been frustrated by the limitations of their art in expressing them, “You should try sculpture”), but it elevates his nonconformist personal vision above everything else.

If “Close Encounters” offered a beautifully place- and time-specific portrait of the 1970s -- the Nearys’ suburban tract house, with its shabby, post-utopian air; the family captured in the throes of dissolution; the multiculti spiritualist promise of alien life -- “E.T.” was the pitch-perfect 1980s follow-up. “E.T.,” which turned its attention to the abandoned child, was a retraction and an apology. Elliott (Henry Thomas) is the middle son of a broken home. His father has recently decamped for Mexico with his new girlfriend, leaving Elliott’s working mom and lonely siblings unmoored in a development that smacks of another empty promise. But Spielberg’s longing for a life beyond the development is considerably less acute than it was in “Close Encounters.” In E.T., Elliott finds a fellow stranded kid longing for home. Elliott helps E.T. contact his family but asks him to stay. E.T. fills the void left by Elliott’s father for a while, but more importantly, he helps find him a replacement in the form of fellow alien-sympathizer Peter Coyote, who protectively puts his arm around Elliott’s mother as E.T.’s spaceship takes off. The cult has been replaced with the foreign exchange program.

DEMONIZED ALIENS

So what are we supposed to make of “War of the Worlds”? The tenets of Hollywood controversy avoidance, in extra-high gear during the summer months, would dictate that the movie hedge its ideological bets. The movie’s marketing asks that we take it as a simple parable about parental responsibility. The movie itself, by relentlessly referencing the terrorist attacks and cribbing from the war rhetoric to create its iconography (the aliens look like demons straight out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, in contrast to the glowing, celestial beings in “Close Encounters” and the earthy, familiar E.T.), demands to be seen as a political allegory. Cruise’s Ray Ferrier never stops being the hero, but it’s possible to detect the slightest shift in Spielberg’s point of view between the surprise attack, the invasion and the occupation. Or maybe not. For all its citing of 9/11, “War of the Worlds,” coming as it does a full four years later, offers no catharsis at all. It doesn’t even dare advance a theory, or a feeling. The distinct, surefooted point of view that once set Spielberg apart -- rebellious but sentimental, idealistic but humanistic -- now seems mired in conflict, confusion and compromise.

It goes without saying that “War of the Worlds” features no tolerant French scientist to facilitate communication between American government officials, half-cracked UFO enthusiasts and foreign visitors. The closest thing to a foreign culture that Ray encounters en route from New Jersey to Boston (and even Boston, home of the Red Sox, is stretching it for this die-hard Yankees fan) is Tim Robbins. Robbins’ Harlan is a sweaty survivalist, pushed over the edge by the loss of his family, who invites Ray and his daughter to share his bunker and his food supply as the two exhausted refugees outrun yet another Tripod attack. (The gesture stands in stark contrast to Ray’s attitude toward his car, which he was less than willing to share with anyone.) At first, Ray is grateful to him -- until it becomes clear that Harlan wants the two of them to resist the alien occupation, which immediately brands him as a dangerous crackpot.

“Occupations never work,” Harlan says, and Ray looks at him as if he’s crazy. Fair enough. But if Harlan is a nut job for wanting to fight the alien invasion, he’s a creep for offering to usurp Ray’s role as father and protector of Rachel, should anything happen to Ray. (So for that matter is the woman in the field who mistakes Rachel for a lost child and tries to take her with her.) At this point, Ray has no choice but to blindfold Rachel and instruct her to clap her hands over her ears and sing a song while he dispatches Robbins’ character with a shovel to the head.

In “Close Encounters,” the notion that government would try to hide the truth from people who had glimpsed it -- going so far as to fake an environmental disaster as a diversion -- wasn’t exactly presented as a handy parenting tip. But this same impulse in “War of the Worlds” is offered as the last word in parental responsibility and love. Ray is forever covering Rachel’s eyes and instructing her not to look, to block out the world around her and trust him entirely-- even though he was never to be trusted before.

In Harlan, Spielberg has created a queasy, ever-shifting reflection of our current emotional morass: Is he meant to represent the insurgency? Is he a stand-in for antiwar activists? When the Goliath-like invaders succumb to tenacious local microbes, which Morgan Freeman’s narration tells us were put there by God, does it mean he was right all along? In the end, his most salient objectionable quality seems to be that he rubs Ray the wrong way. “You and I aren’t on the same page,” he says -- at which point we understand that Ray and Harlan are past looking, past listening, past asking questions, past turning on their heart lights.

In the end, although it flirts with other possibilities, the one course “War of the Worlds” never seems to veer from is the opinion that Ray’s tenacity, autocratic paternalism and willingness to “stay the course” are what eventually bring his kids to safety. Ultimately, Father knows best, even if he has no clue -- as Ray doesn’t -- what the capital of Australia is. What matters is that he knows where they keep the grenades, and where to stick them. It’s light-years away from Roy Neary and his all-important need for cosmic answers. Why ask why? Why even ask who? Humanity has survived countless horrors and will survive countless more. In the meantime, the film seems to say, just batten down the hatches, close your eyes, create your safe space and let Dad do the thinking for you.

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Carina Chocano is a Times film critic. She can be contacted at calendar.letters@latimes.com.