Spielberg's world

  Spielberg invades Bayonne In his recent Internet appearances to answer fans' questions about War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg said he had always wanted to make a move of the H.G. Wells book, but had felt that some previous movies had glommed (my word not his) many of the better parts. In rereading the book, however, Spielberg said he discovered elements that other films have passed over. As the Howell Township shoot shows, Spielberg brought out the Red Weed element that the book highlighted - an alien growth that thematically echoed the alien invasion, playing off Wells environmental concerns. Yet inherent in most of Wells' writing is also the concept of advanced technology especially in regard to weapons. Wells and his American contemporary, Mark Twain (in his book Connecticut Yankee) laid out the frame work for modern warfare that would unveiled in the public arena during World War I. While Wells in War of the Worlds pointed out the advantages of aerial observation, Twai...

  Spielberg invades Bayonne Nearly everybody who heard that Steven Spielberg was filming in Bayonne has asked the same three questions: What is Spielberg like? Have you met Tom Cruise? And what will the Aliens look like? And remarkably I never met Spielberg or Tom Cruise, and I saw no aliens roving the streets of Bayonne, before, during or after shooting the film. For the most part, Spielberg's aliens have always bugged me - partly because they had this uncomfortable air of sweetness that made them seem more like the Christian concept of angels than the space invaders I always imagined there were hiding under my bed when I was a kid. I'm one of the few people that hated ET. I tolerated the aliens in Close Encounters simply because I found the film's main character so intriguing and could easily understand how he could get so wrapped up in the invasion and his need to find out more. When Spielberg began filming in Bayonne, I felt and acted like the character from Close Encou...

  Spielberg invades Bayonne While home can mean a lot of things in Spielberg, the concept usually involves a physical structure that becomes the symbolic image throughout the film - the home of the woman and child in Close Encounters, the fortress in Jurassic Park, the unusual shaped home with peaked roof above the door in ET. In each case, this home or sanctuary is invaded by hostile forces. In Close Encounters the home is attacked by UFOs apparently seeking to abduct the woman's child. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs attack. In ET, the home is violated by a hostile human population seeking to abduct the alien the children are protecting. In each cast, the people - the woman, the scientists and the kids - believe the building can protect them from the intrusion, when in each case the homes are simply cages - a fact that even the film work in Jurassic Park reflects. This is an important pattern that seems destined to be replayed in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. How this will be pl...

  Spielberg invades Bayonne While the story of the War of the Wo rlds is significantly impacted by the book from which it is being adapted - about the desperate attempt by invaders from Mars to take over our planet as theirs is dying, dropping into our world seeds of destruction that soon blossom into monstrously effective killing machines. Spielberg plants seeds of his own in his tale, seeds that we have seen planted in many of his other films and which bear buds of some other reality, sprouting out of Spielberg's imagination or cultivated from his distant past. Closely related to his concept of home is Spielberg's apparent environmental agenda. The concept of a natural environment in Spielberg has extremely romantic connotations. But nature, especially wooded areas in his films, would require a complete study of their own that I have neither time nor patience to conduct except to skim over some of the details. By romantic, I'm talking about a pre-Napoleon era when poets, ...

  Spielberg invades Bayonne As pointed out by better minds than mine, Science Fiction is large a modernization of Gothic, part romance, part realism - with most critics agreeing beginning with Mary Shell's Frankenstein. In more modern times, instead of the cruel father of traditional Gothic, we get the mad scientist, and instead of haunting spirits, we get aliens. Many of Spielberg's better movies are a kind of re-telling of the same tale, of science out of control, and this break from nature to which the main character is desperately seeking to return. But in order to get there, the main character must do as Dante did, take a quest through hell in order to find salvation on the other side. In Close Encounters, the Dryfus character comes into contact with something bigger than life, something he cannot explain - and finds he can no longer be satisfied with life as it is until he resolves this dilemma. In many ways, the archeologist in Jurassic Park is on the same quest, but the...

  Spielberg invades Bayonne While fan appear to see Steven Spielberg as something close to infallible, critics have not always been kid to him, despite or perhaps because of his massive popularity. Film critics (whoever they are) seemed to agree that Spielberg's films oozed with style, but for some reason also believed them devoid of content. Such critics presumed a Spielberg film did little than to titillate the masses, but never to enlighten. This is not true of SF writers like Brian Adlis whose admiration for the original Close Encounters - not the special edition - painted Spielberg as a complex director with unique vision for his characters. I won't pretend to be any kind of Spielberg scholar - nearly everything I have written on him over the last few months comes from casual observation of a handful of films, and not the intense scene by scene study his body of work deserves. And as reluctant to admit this, I have not even seen all of his films once, not even his well-rec...