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Same old same old, I agree ... but

The fractured family melodrama (see Jurassic Park, Close Encounters), pots shaking on the walls (Close E), lights shining from outside while the family is holed up inside (Close E), kids nimbly avoiding Raptors in the kitchen (this time it's the alien probe in a basement, the shaking camera from Private Ryan, throwing cars a people (Jurassic Park and Minority Report) ... some much or war of the worlds seems to comprise recycled set pieces from his earlier films. Worse still, aside from adding a soft chewy center in the form of the family melodrama to the original film's story line, there is really nothing new here, no surprises at all. Yet, Spielberg does from time to time seem to come up with a really stunning cinematic idea, and the film manages to hold the audience's attention as an exercise in cinematic spectacle and sheer kinetic energy hardly every seen before, and here served in heapin' helpin's.

All of Spielberg's films are uneven. Even Private Ryan, certainly his best, has flat sequences (like the Robbins sequence in this one), and a kind of excessive melodramatic touch that at times becomes offensive. He's a guy that's made a very huge reputation for himself while relying chiefly on others. After all, JAWS was certainly not a bad gig for a guy with HIS experience when he made it -- and it was at best a kind of juvenile exercise. George Lucas and industrial light and magic were very kind to him, too. He cemented Speilberg's reputation with the Indiana Jones movies -- none of which amount to anything more than trifling entertainments. ET was a little kids movie that somehow caught fire with the public; so did Rockie, but that doesn't make it a great movie either.

But Spielberg is a supremely capable technical director, and he deserves full credit for it. And his ability to deliver spectacle in a manner that would make DeMille blush certainly distinguishes him. But he is far from the cinematic genius that many make him out to be. But just when you're ready to give up on him, there's a flash of brilliance and intellect that seems to strike like lightening (Schindler's breakdown when he realizes he could have save MORE people, the aged Private Ryan's parting conversation with his long dead benefactor at the gravestone, and others). I wonder sometimes if he really sets out to make great movies at all, or, if he just kind of knocks them out, in the same way he did as a B-movie director, except that now, he's got a lot more toys to play with.

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