Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
We see Steven Spielberg’s career take a major turn in the early 2000s. The famous director has long alternated between large-scale, crowd-pleasing films and intense, moving prestige projects. For example, he directed “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” in the same year. Soon after, he doubled down again with “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “Amistad.” He also began telling more adult stories, directing films like Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg then kicked off the 21st century by taking up Stanley Kubrick’s abandoned project “AI Artificial Intelligence”, and nothing was the same after that. The filmmaker’s photographic choices changed, as did the way he paced and edited his films. Perhaps getting inside Kubrick’s head forced him to evolve as a director.
And while Spielberg made other sci-fi action films after 2000 (“Minority Report” is a notable example), he seemed to lose interest in mainstream adventure films. He began creating broader, more thoughtful character pieces like “Catch Me If You Can” and “The Terminal.” Spielberg was also clearly affected by the events of 9/11, releasing “Munich” and “War of the Worlds” in 2005. “War of the Worlds,” both a remake of the 1953 film of the same name and a new adaptation of HG Wells’ source novel, was not a film about valiant humans resisting foreign invaders. It was a litany of uncontrolled destruction. The characters all seemed doomed. The Earth seemed doomed. Everything was dark, sad and faded. This is one of Spielberg’s darkest and bitterest films.
It was intentional, as he once admitted. In a 2005 interview with Film noirSpielberg noted that he had always loved Wells’ book. However, when it came to his adaptation of “War of the Worlds”, he wanted to emulate the tone of “Alien,” Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic.
Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds was supposed to be like Alien
We can see the similarities between “War of the Worlds” and “Alien” quite easily. Both are dark and horrific tales of survival about unprepared humans beset by aliens they can neither understand nor control. “Alien,” on the other hand, takes place on a spaceship and only follows a handful of characters. “War of the Worlds,” on the other hand, tells its story through the eyes of a pathetic divorced father (Tom Cruise), but the destruction is on a global scale. The aliens in “War of the Worlds” seem to want to kill everyone on Earth.
When “War of the Worlds” was released in 2005, some longtime Spielberg fans raised a minor outcry, saying it wasn’t going to be like his films “ET the Extra-Terrestrial” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (both from decades earlier). Spielberg, it was thought, was the “friendly alien” filmmaker, not the “scary alien” filmmaker. But Spielberg wanted to prove he had the skills to do both, explaining to Blackfilm:
“There wasn’t anything huge that changed in my life that made me want to make an alien horror movie. Maybe even the idea that everyone here was like, ‘Well, he’s the guy who only makes alien horror movies.’ […] I asked myself: why can’t I try my hand at this kind of film? What Ridley Scott did when he made the first “Alien”? This was my favorite scary sci-fi movie of all time. It was just something I always wanted to do.”
He was never the “friendly alien” type, it seems. Indeed, we could recall that “ET” was originally intended to be a horror film. Rather, Spielberg simply didn’t make his “scary alien” movie until 2005.
Spielberg always loved HG Wells’ original novel, The War of the Worlds.
As mentioned, Spielberg had always been a fan of Wells’ novel, first published in 1898. When he began thinking about the project, he worked closely with Cruise, who had starred in “Minority Report” a few years earlier. It seems that Spielberg has dreamed of remaking “War of the Worlds” since he was a teenager. It was an academic pipe dream, conceived before he even considered becoming a professional filmmaker. The film was never really convincingly made until 2005.
Spielberg continued to reject the idea that “War of the Worlds” was the antithesis of “ET,” instead saying that it was a great story and a great movie before he even got into it. As he said:
“It’s a great piece of classic 19th century literature. It started an entire revolution in science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion; Jules Verne and HG Wells – and it was a film that I really respected when it was first made by George Pal in 1953. […] and I just thought we could do a slightly closer, darker version of the original novel.”
Spielberg updated the timeline (his film is set in the present, not 1898), but the tone is exactly right.
In a later interview on the TV series “The Movies That Made Us,” Spielberg noted that he still loved “Alien” and tossed out a fun idea for how it would add to the franchise. His suggestion, however, proves that he may be a sentimentalist at heart. He believed his potential film “Alien” would feature a creature that was not a killer monster, but a fearful and misunderstood visitor. He wanted to soften it a little.
