Cinema is my Religion

With “War Horse”, Mr. Spielberg brings to the forefront his publicity machine along with his great talent for self-promotion. Are we amazed his cloud of sycophants declare “War Horse” a sure Oscar contender while film is still running through the gate? We would be amazed if “War Horse” could claim ownership of a story with a beginning, middle, and a dramatic end, not just a place where he called a wrap as the music swells (“Lassie, come home”). 

His attempts at capturing the mood of the films of his sainted youth works occasionally as in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. In fact it works so well he rolls it out over and over again when he is in need of easy cash after a shot at the adults. “Is this a children’s film?” “I really don’t know the age of the filmmakers, Sir.” When Spielberg has a novel with an adult theme and good story, he ignores it in favor of a series of great looking sequences, which fit together like a badly cut jigsaw puzzle. “How was the film?” “Great dinosaurs”. 

Do we really need another “Jurassic Park” movie; not that Spielberg bothered himself with either of the stories Michael Crichton gave us. His attack on Philip K. Dick’s, “Minority Report” kept the title and little else. The screenplay failed to note the “Precrime” police unit could only exist in a police state in which the Bill of Rights had been discarded. Tom Cruise’s Precrime Chief John Anderson is shown to be a drug addict, but there it ends. His addiction adds nothing to the story. The biggest howler is the introduction at the film’s conclusion of the 1861 Smith&Wesson .32-short-caliber Model 2 revolver. It is claimed this revolver was given to Civil War generals at the war’s end, a fact generals Grant and Sherman failed to mention in their memoirs. Civil War officers, including general officers, preferred large bore, hard hitting .44 caliber revolvers. The Robert Urich series, “The Lazarus Man” tried to pass off similar nonsense with the Colt .31 caliber Pocket Revolver. 

There is no doubt about Wells’, “War of the Worlds”. Wells pointedly explained the social purpose of this novel in Chapter One. It is doubtful Spielberg read Wells’ novel. Doubtless he relied on the Cliff Notes of Hollywood, the story analyst’s report. Spielberg jettisoned Wells’ idea for yet another rehash of his “reuniting families” theme. “War of the Worlds” will survive this hack attack. We can only wonder why Spielberg employed François Truffaut as an actor in the absurdly dreadful “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, when he might have invited the Master to direct a film from a good script. A good script would preclude employment of his gallery of gag writers. To paraphrase Victor Hugo,''Cinema is our religion and the theater is our church.  Spielberg has desecrated the altar; he has blasphemed.