War of the Worlds is unquestionably a big sci-fi movie about aliens invading the Earth. It begins with Morgan Freeman narration about observers jealously watching our planet from afar and it is filled with the big thrilling sequences that made director Steven Spielberg‘s reputation. Yet for the film’s first viewers in 2005, War of the Worlds didn’t provide the escapist entertainment that they got from the big 1953 Hollywood adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, nor from Spielberg’s legendary adventures of yore like Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, the image of Jersey dad Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) running from a Martian tripod and evading laser blasts didn’t provide viewers with edge-of-your-seat excitement. Rather they were overcome with deep sadness and existential dread.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});That’s because at the end of the escape sequence, Ray is covered with dust, having ran through collapsing buildings and the ashes of other people who were graphically vaporized before our very eyes. In that moment, we don’t see Tom Cruise, international superstar. We see one of the survivors of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 covered in the remains of the dead and incinerated.As absurd and perhaps disrespectful as it sounds to compare an alien invasion to a tremendous loss of life, War of the Worlds was hardly the only Hollywood blockbuster to wrestle with that event either in the 2000s, and as the U.S. lurched toward a decade and more of MidEast misadventure in the “War on Terror.” In fact, many of the movies of this era tried to make sense of America’s newfound sense of vulnerability and the way the country’s response affected the rest of the world.Pictures From the RubbleCinemagoers of 2002 had high expectations for Spider-Man, expectations that director Sam Raimi more than exceeded. Yet film fans didn’t get to see one sequence they already saw in the marketing—in the movie’s very first teaser trailer, in point of fact. Because in that two-minute clip, Spidey thwarts some bank robbers by catching the thieves in a web he spins between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.Obviously including them was an impossibility after the events of 9/11, albeit producers at the time claimed that the pricy sequence was never intended for the final film. Nonetheless, while Spider-Man was obviously filmed before the events of Sept. 11, 2001 changed the world, the film’s euphoric reception not quite nine months later signaled a newfound mass need for cultural escape (one might even argue it informed the decades of superhero fixation that followed). In Spider-Man, a fairytale version of the reigned where New York City remained proud, whole, and the heroes always won.Very soon, however, movie makers would change this approach and work imagery from 9/11, and from the War on Terror that followed, directly into their films. Soon Hollywood blockbusters were filled with burning buildings, citizens covered in rubble, and military or intelligence outfits battling unconventional terrorists.The best of the bunch is arguably 2008’s The Dark Knight, which announced itself with a poster featuring Batman dwarfed by a burning skyscraper. Within the film, the hospital that the Joker (Heath Ledger) destroys doesn’t evoke the falling towers, but the panic he causes recalls the anxieties Americans experienced in the fall of 2001. And a video that same supervillain, here explicitly called a terrorist by the media and authorities, uses to record his murder of a Batman copycat (Andy Luther) mirrors the videos insurgents in Iraq would film of their execution of captives. Meanwhile Christian Bale’s Batman’s use of mass surveillance to catch his enemy mirrors the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 legislation that increased government invasions of privacy. The three central heroes of the film—Batman, police lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart)—are establishment figures, even with the vigilante amongst them, attempting to do what is right in a paranoid, “indecent time,” as Dent later laments.Fittingly, one of the worst examples of 9/11 imagery in a Hollywood blockbuster, however, also involved Batman. 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins by replaying the climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Zod (Michael Shannon), this time through the perspective of a different Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). This Bruce races to the center of the city, ordering employees to evacuate a Wayne Enterprises building before it collapses. At the end of the sequence, Bruce is covered in dust in debris, cradling a child who lost her parents. He then looks up and swears vengeance against those who caused the violence!Of course the metaphor soon got lost among the gloomy superhero fights, clumsy worldbuilding, and ramblings about theodicy from Jesse Eisenberg‘s Lex Luthor. But the impulse to process the trauma of the attacks through blockbuster fantasy makes sense, with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and BvS being attempting to escalate what Nolan among others had already started. Chief amongst those others being Spielberg.A Losing WarLate in War of the Worlds, Cruise’s Ray emerges from a basement to see the full level of destruction wrought by the invading Martians. They have decimated the landscape and sprayed the ground with human blood and vein-like weeds. Between the bloody haze, the fires in the distance, and the morning dawn, the shot of Ray standing on a hillside looks like something from 1953’s The War of the Worlds with its Technicolor hues and obviously artificial sets.In fact, much of Spielberg’s version, written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, follows the basic beats of the original H.G. Wells novel from 1897. Through the perspective of a regular person, we watch as Martians erupt from the bowels of the Earth and begin attacking with tripod crafts, easily decimating the opposition. The Martians put the surviving humans into metal containers and drain their blood, which they use to make their food. The invasion ends as quickly as it began, however, as viruses on Earth infect and kill the Martins.It’s outrageous, yet the post-9/11 setting makes the entire story feel grounded, plausible, and finally terrifying. Cruise may be the Hollywood actor least suited to playing an everyman, but Spielberg manages to make him a believable loser, a hot shot who thinks that he’s too cool for his longshoreman day job or to be a good dad to his kids Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning). When the invasion begins 15 minutes into the movie, Cruise’s usual intensity kicks in, but until the end of the film, the script gives him nothing heroic to do. Instead we just follow the trio from terrible situation to terrible situation, making Cruise’s performance into the portrayal of a regular dad whose brain breaks in a desperate situation.The near refusal to let Ray be a hero makes War of the Worlds a fittingly bleak movie. Spielberg’s at full power here, and some of the sequences hold up with the best moments from his filmography. It is legitimately horrifying when a crowd of people descend on the van holding Ray and his kids, and a scene involving a serpentine Martian probe is a worthy sequel to the raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park. But where previous movies followed tense moments with bits of catharsis, War of the Worlds offers almost none, moving the family from one hopeless situation to the next.It’s that sense of hopelessness that makes War of the Worlds one of the best post-9/11 blockbusters. At the time, some argued that American triumphalism would make things right, that with stronger military presence and an empowered executive in President George W. Bush (“I’m the decider,” he famously declared), we could punish the evildoers and restore order. Yet save for the most hawkish or angry, plenty of us knew in our heart of hearts that this was just bluster, just as unrealistic as anything in a superhero movie.Hope or Horror?For its original audiences, War of the Worlds betrays its bleak convictions in the final act and Spielberg gives into his optimistic instincts (a common criticism directed against him at the time). First Ray gets his hero moment when he grabs a belt of grenades as he gets sucked into the Martian craft. When the people pull him out, he reveals that he pulled all the pins. The explosion destroys the craft, the first such victory against the invaders. Later Ray tells a platoon that the aliens’ forcefields are down, prompting them to launch a successful counterattack. They knock down a tripod as John Williams’ score turns celebratory.But it’s just those two moments that offer any hope, and they hardly stand up to the image of human blood being sprayed on the ground. As in the Wells novel, it’s not military might that stems the attack but Earth’s viruses. In the end, it wasn’t about human power, it wasn’t about the wisdom of a president and his advanced armed forces. It was just a disease that won the war.Some may hear the Freeman narration that closes the movie and take a different interpretation. When the narrator describes the “the toll of a billion deaths,” and humanity’s “right to survive,” they may recall the lead up to the War on Terror, in which we Americans considered our suffering unique and uniquely unjust, giving us a mandate to do whatever we wanted in the world to prevent it from happening again.But that interpretation misses the subject of the narration, not “enemy invaders,” but simple bugs, the viruses that killed countless people in plagues and famines. It was our vulnerability that gave us the right to survive. It was through those deaths that we gained the ability to live, because as the movie’s last words declare, “Neiither do men live nor die in vain.” The ambiguity in those final moments make War of the Worlds an important post-9/11 blockbuster. Its ability to evoke dread and the mix of hope and despair in its ending makes it a perfect snapshot of not just the state of movies 20 years ago, but of a conflicted national imagination.The post War of the Worlds and the Post-9/11 Blockbusters appeared first on Den of Geek.