The Weekly Screed (#637)

With apologies to H.G. Wells
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — H.G. Wells, wherever he is, must be wondering where he went wrong. Although one of history’s great futurists, I doubt that he foresaw, when he wrote The War of the Worlds, that he had limned the most popular — and eventually the most tiresome and hackneyed — movie theme of the 21st century.

For more than 60 years, moviegoers have been watching their favorite cities being reduced to rubble by giant robotic invaders, usually manipulated by invisible alien misanthropes whose heart’s desire is to slaughter every living thing on earth, devour its every resource and leave behind a dead planet as nude as a cueball.

It all started in 1898, when Wells’ book came out. Repercussions remained minor for 40 years, until Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast a radio version of The War of the Worlds so vivid that people ran panic-stricken into the streets convinced that America was being overwhelmed by Martians.

Since then, invaders, monsters, machines and giant cyborgs have trampled, trashed, and cinematically incinerated every major city in the world dozens of times. Byron Haskin directed the first version of The War of the Worlds in 1953 and won a technical Oscar. That launched a special-effects war among filmmakers that has yet to end. The latest incursion is an ocean-born alien-invader flick called Pacific Rim. Predictably, it drowned on its first weekend in release.

In 1898, monsters from outer space was a cool premise, and Wells was gifted enough to lend it the sort of depth that has kept the theme alive ever since. Among my favorite variations were Godzilla’s repeated attacks on Tokyo, a series of zombie-infested urban wastelands that began with Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth and the sheer final-scene genius of Planet of the Apes.

By the late 60’s, however, Toho’s Godzilla suit was fraying at the cuffs and the shtick was wearing thin. Until… computer graphics. Roland Emmerich, in the “spectacular — and spectacularly stupid” (Leonard Maltin) film, Independence Day in 1996, gave the flying-saucer city-squishing genre a fresh franchise by simultaneously barbecuing New York, L.A., Washington and Paris in the most picturesque wave of wanton demolition (and human carnage) ever put on film.

Since then, New York and L.A. have been flattened again and again, by monsters, by alien robots (Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds was both escalation and enervation), even by volcano, tsunami and the onset of a flash-freeze Ice Age. But it all traces back to the little book that earned H.G. Wells a 200-pound payday.

Wells would be perplexed, I think, by what he hath wrought. He certainly would have foreseen that you can only flatten Manhattan so many times before the thrill is gone, especially since you can walk out of the theater and look around and there it is — New York City — unscathed, unwashed and brazenly unashamed.

Wells would be puzzled by our fascination with the endlessly repeated leveling of our greatest architecture. He might see something jaded about people who can take pleasure in such vandalism. We might tell him it’s not so bad, ‘cause everybody knows it’s fake. But that, in itself, is a pretty jaded response.

And herein lies, possibly, Hollywood’s dilemma. The more jaded we become, the more horrific Hollywood’s movies have to be.  By scaling up our robots, aliens, monsters, mother ships and death stars, Hollywood has scaled up cynicism to levels previously unknown to the human experience. To a substantial extent, the human experience has been squeezed out of our most fantastic and fanciful entertainments.

High-tech eye-candy like Pacific Rim or Transformers is not what H.G. Wells intended. His fellow futurists, whose work came to be known as “science fiction,” also had deeper themes in mind. In 2001, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000 computer failed because HAL absorbed too many — not too few — human feelings, including the fear of death. Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — filmed as Blade Runner — is populated by robots who must be killed because they’ve developed egos and discovered romance.

Perhaps the most terrifying sci-fi flick of all was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It features no robots, no death rays, no torched cities. The alien invaders are an invisible cloud of pollen that drifts through the air we breathe and turns human beings into a goggle-eyed species of ambulatory vegetables.

Even Wells, after the pyrotechnics of his Martian invasion, provides a simple human solution to his war between worlds. Earthlings are vastly outgunned. Earth weapons are useless against the alien tripods, and mankind appears doomed — until the Martians catch a cold. They’re done in by microbes and viruses to which earthlings are congenitally resistant. The variety and resilience of humanity’s very humanity trumps the immense firepower and superior technology of an invader who didn’t have the sense to get a tetanus shot before he set foot on the Earth.

A weekend before Pacific Rim (price tag, $180 million) was released, I watched Random Harvest, one of those small-budget, human-scale movies Hollywood seems reluctant to risk nowadays. At a glance, Random Harvest offers no more surprises than your average alien-blitzkrieg flick. But look closely.

In Random Harvest, a contrived plot meanders gently toward an ending that’s obvious an hour in advance — as soon as Smithy bumps his head and remembers that he’s Charles Rainier. In Random Harvest, like any movie, the set is fake, the characters are fictional, the story is a little far-fetched. But I still I get emotional every time Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman fall into that final embrace, because there are bits and flashes of my own life in that moment. Something of what Paula and Smithy feel is something all of us have felt — or should have felt.

By contrast, it’s hard to muster any sort of analog feeling while watching the fake destruction of a computer-simulated L.A. by animatronic alien juggernauts for the umpteenth time — except perhaps the urge to apologize to H.G. Wells.