War of the Worlds

I saw War of the Worlds last night. After Tom Cruise's insane rantings over the last few weeks about Scientology and the evilness of psychiatry, several people I know declared that they would never again pay to see one of his movies. It reminded me of those people who were going to move to Canada if Bush was re-elected. In fact, I think they were the same people.

I don't know that I've ever paid to see a Tom Cruise movie before, but WotW got decent reviews, and it was a holiday weekend, and I hadn't seen a movie in a long time.

It was great. The aliens were scary (and had a terrific foghorn sound that announced their presence), the kid in peril was cute but not too cute, and Cruise is really good at these kind of everyman heroic roles. The ending is abrupt, and a little silly -- though faithful to the HG Wells novel, so what could they do? -- but there was one thing I didn't like.

I'm tired of 9/11 being referenced in pop culture. It's cheap. It's not that I think 9/11 should be held sacrosanct, and I know that artists have always used current events to inform their work. But for those people who were not in NYC on that day, it feels like an emotional shortcut. If aliens attacked Earth, we would feel as lost and confused as people did on that day, get it? For those of us who were here, for me anyway, it's jolting. It takes me out of the story, and back to remembering those awful weeks of constant sirens wailing and missing persons posters, and out of the movie.