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On
the one hand it posits a soulless enemy as Other for which
one could substitute Terrorist or its implicit subcategories
Arab and Muslim; on the other hand it also implicates the
United States by making American moviegoers empathize with
those displaced and annihilated by an enemy technologically
superior and motivationally vague. The drama plays out over
Spielberg’s confrontation with his own past (Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.) and imitators
(“directors” Roland
Emmerich and Stephen
Sommers) in a sobering reminder of how good he is at the
basic skills of filmmaking and how rare that is in Hollywood.
For example, Lucas’ The Phantom Menace may
be embedded with stock racial stereotypes leftover from what
textbooks and dorks call the Golden Age of Cinema, but it
was its mystifying inability to even pretend to disguise that
racism as well as a parallel quest to be the Stupidest Shit
I Ever Seen that sent me spiraling into total fucking bewilderment
less than two minutes in. And while Spielberg’s idea
of What It Means to Be Human may be just this side of Cameron
Crowe, it’s still coherent if schmaltzy and sometimes
false, which is more than one can say for the technically
proficient but nincompoopish Michael
Bay (see 6th grade reading equivalency exam Armageddon
& treatise on gender Pearl Harbor, as well as
forthcoming fraternity recruitment video The Island).
Aside from a few Go Team moments (e.g. a group of despondent
strangers toughen up to save T.Cruise from being sucked up
a giant alien anus), the movie moves along deftly and erratically
with no major missteps until the very almost end, which misstep
provoked a mutual look of derailment between me and movie
companion Jamie and an “I’m not buyin’ it!”
from some anonymous audience representative for the collective
bullshit detector. But it wouldn’t be a late career
Spielberg movie without the adult in him stepping in and molesting
his own work (see codas to Schindler’s List,
Saving Private Ryan, A.I., et al) so it’s
kind of too obvious to criticize. People seem to have a problem
with the supposed exploitation of 9/11 “imagery”
in this movie, though I’m sure there were no self-reflexive
qualms the day after 9/11 as those same critics joined every
other American in watching the towers fall over and over again
on the TV. You could even call the engagement with post-9/11
fear and iconography a good-hearted (or naive if you’re
a cynic) attempt at bringing home the horror the American
military inflicts all over the world in the name of American
business interests and xenophobia. Any national tragedy is
already exploited for entertainment purposes the moment it's
captured anyway, so it’s retarded to criticize Spielberg
for trying to put it to empathetic use when that use might
actually encourage a theatergoer or two to not think so us-them,
or at least induce a transposing of themselves into the them
long enough to realize the thems are really usses. That the
movie itself is a multi-million dollar weapon of cultural
imperialism necessarily complicates this reading, but there’s
a tangible difference between homogenization and dropping
bombs, and at least Spielberg isn’t destroying an entire
country due to malicious incompetence and then telling the
world it’s worth it. |