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Paramount<\/p>\n
One can see Steven Spielberg’s career take a major shift in the early 2000s. The famed director had long rotated between large-scale, crowd-pleasing films and soulful, intense prestige projects. He made both “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” in the same year, for example. Not long after that, he doubled up again with “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “Amistad.” He also started to tell more adult stories, directing the likes of “Saving Private Ryan.” Spielberg then kicked off the 21st century by taking over Stanley Kubrick’s abandoned project “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,”<\/a> and nothing was ever the same after that. The filmmaker’s photographic choices changed, as did the way he paced and edited his movies. Perhaps getting into Kubrick’s head forced him to evolve as a director.<\/p>\n And while Spielberg made other sci-fi action films after 2000 (“Minority Report” is a standout), he seemed to lose interest in mainstream adventure movies. He started making broader, more thoughtful character pieces like “Catch Me If You Can” and “The Terminal.” Spielberg was also clearly marked by the events of 9\/11, releasing both “Munich” and “War of the Worlds” in 2005. “War of the Worlds,” both a remake of the 1953 film of the same name and a new adaptation of H.G. Wells’ source novel, was not a movie about stalwart humans holding out against invading outsiders. It was a litany of unchecked destruction. The characters all seemed doomed. Earth seemed doomed. Everything was bleak and sad and washed-out. It’s one of Spielberg’s bleakest, bitterest films.<\/p>\n That was, as he once confessed, by design. In a 2005 interview with Blackfilm<\/a>, Spielberg noted that he had always loved Wells’ book. However, when it came to his “War of the Worlds” adaptation, he wanted to emulate the tone of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic “Alien.”<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds was meant to feel like Alien<\/p>\n
20th Century Studios<\/p>\n One can see the similarities between “War of the Worlds” and “Alien” pretty easily. Both are dark, horrific tales of survival about unprepared humans being beset by aliens that they cannot understand or control. “Alien,” in contrast, is set on a spaceship and only following a handful of characters. “War of the Worlds,” on the other hand, tells its story through the eyes of a pathetic divorced dad (Tom Cruise), but the destruction is on a global scale. The aliens in “War of the Worlds” seem keen on killing everyone on Earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n When “War of the Worlds” came out in 2005, there was a mild outcry from some of Spielberg’s longtime fans that it wasn’t going to be like his films “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”\u00a0(both from decades earlier). Spielberg, the thinking went, was the “friendly alien” filmmaker and not the “scary alien” filmmaker. But Spielberg wanted to prove that he had the chops to do both, explaining to Blackfilm:\u00a0<\/p>\n “There wasn’t anything huge that changed in my life that made me do a scary alien movie. Maybe even the idea that everybody over here said, ‘Well, he’s the guy that only does scary alien movies. […] I thought, well, why can’t I try my hand at the kind of film? That Ridley Scott made when he did the first ‘Alien?’ Which was my favorite scary science fiction movies of all time. It was just something that I had always wanted to do.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
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