‘War of the Worlds’: The movie Steven Spielberg made out of spite
Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has made all kinds of movies. He may be most closely associated with a particular brand of Amblin-esque family adventure picture, but he has also dabbled in historical epics, biopics, political dramas, animation, spy thrillers, and horror.
In fact, if there’s one thing very few people can get away with, it’s telling Spielberg what he can and can’t do with his career. After all, in the mid-2000s, he dove headfirst into the kind of film naysayers had consistently declared was outside his wheelhouse – mainly to spite anyone who said he couldn’t pull it off.
The origin of this particular spite picture may go back to the late ’70s when Columbia Pictures told Spielberg that it wanted a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The legendary director didn’t think that tale of benevolent aliens making contact with a blue-collar family man needed a follow-up, but he also didn’t want Columbia to take the matter out of his hands by making a sequel without his involvement. So, he began developing an idea that would be much more frightening than Close Encounters – a movie about scary aliens terrorising a family in their rural farmhouse.
Spielberg titled the project Night Skies, but it never got off the ground, and Columbia soon abandoned the idea of a Close Encounters sequel. Eventually, though, many of its ideas found their way into two hit 1982 films: Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, which Spielberg produced and may have also shadow-directed.
Fast forward more than two decades, and Spielberg was once again developing a project about malevolent aliens: his 2005 adaptation of the HG Wells classic War of the Worlds. He had previously gotten cold feet about depicting beings from another world in a horrific manner and instead decided to embrace the same tender, spiritual tone of Close Encounters with E.T. This time, though, he was determined that the aliens in War were going to be terrifying – mostly because people in the last two decades had repeatedly told him he’d never make his “scary alien” movie.
At a press conference in 2005, Spielberg explained, “Everybody over the years said, ‘Here’s the guy who can’t make a scary alien movie.'”
He admitted, “That goaded me into thinking, ‘Why can’t I try my hand at the kind of film that Ridley Scott made when he made the first Alien, which is one of my favourite scary science-fiction movies? It’s just something that I always wanted to do.”
Interestingly, Spielberg was adamant that no leftover ideas from Night Skies found their way into War of the Worlds. Instead, he explained that this particular sci-fi horror vision took its cues more from the real-life atrocities and shaky political situation of the mid-2000s. For instance, Spielberg infused the film with imagery that would remind people of the aftermath of natural disasters and terrorist attacks like 9/11.
He mused, “The image that stands out in my mind the most was the image of everybody in Manhattan fleeing across the George Washington Bridge in the shadow of 9/11” and added, “This is partially about the American refugee experience because it’s certainly about Americans fleeing for their lives.”
It was a stark change of pace for a man whose films once promised kindness, heart, and friendly aliens who just wanted to phone home, but Spielberg felt it was a necessary change. He also revealed that he tried not to make the political intentions of the film overt, as he wanted audiences to make up their own minds. However, he had to admit, “I certainly think I gave you enough rope to hang me with.”
