¡QUÉ HORROR! 2020

Candidate #4

THE INVISIBLE MAN

(February 2020)

“He controlled how I looked and…  what I wore and what I ate. And… then it was controlling when I left the house and… what I said. And eventually… what I thought.”

Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) finally breaks free of controlling and abusive Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a “world leader in the field of optics” (a news article refers to him as an “optics groundbreaker”), leading to his apparent suicide.

Which is, of course, not where this story ends…

“He was always going to find you no matter what he had to do. He needs you because you don’t need him. No one’s ever left him before.”

Like writer/director Leigh Whannell’s ¡Qué horror! 2019 Candidate, Upgrade, The Invisible Man isn’t straight-forward horror. It’s peppered with strands of action, as well as another genre that would be telling if I revealed here. (Given the source material however, it should be fairly obvious.)

Suffice it to say, though, that, as with his performance on Upgrade, Whannell proves equal to the challenging task of juggling the varied tones and influences to produce a title that manages to successfully mine the tension of empty space, cannily making us wary of what, to the casual observer, would be the bland and painfully ordinary domestic geometries of a corridor, or a doorway, or a chair.

We don’t need to see the monster here for it to scare us, the beast ultimately becoming all the more frightening for being unseen.

“This is what he does. He makes me feel like I’m the crazy one. This is… this is what he does.

“And he’s doing it again.”

The Invisible Man is a terrifying metaphor for the institutionalized travails women suffer at the hands of men (whether “narcissist sociopaths” or just plain, ordinary chauvinists).

It’s all here: the blind eyes and the deaf ears, turned away from the apparently “hysterical” and “unstable”; the sense that no one believes anything that’s said, that no one’s even willing to listen, much less listen with an open mind.

By cutting down to the core idea--men are capable of the most horrendous things when unseen by others--Whannell gives H. G. Wells’ more-than-120 year old novel a smart, and much-needed 21^st century Me Too, heh, upgrade.

(The Invisible Man OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (20)
WAR OF THE WORLDS

With the latest Body Snatchers redux, The Invasion, about to hit theatres, I thought to look back at another recent alien invasion redux.

Steven Spielberg is the undisputed Popcorn Movie King: exhibits A and B—Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park. (By Popcorn Movie, I mean a movie that’s fun, and fun to watch, doesn’t have any deep moral truths in it, but doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence, either.)
And though there have been pretenders to the throne (Roland Emmerich: Independence Day and Godzilla; Stephen Sommers: The Mummy films and Van Helsing), and an upstart challenger (Kerry Conran: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), Spielberg still sits squarely on the throne.
It is in the milieu of the Popcorn Movie where Spielberg’s admittedly manipulative brand of storytelling is most at home, the button-pushing and emotion-cueing, welcome, and in point of fact, expected by the Popcorn Audience.
Spielberg’s post-millennial redux of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds however, is not a Popcorn Movie.

The thing is, though War is by no stretch of the imagination, a horrible movie, it really isn’t all that fun to watch. In this updated, Americanized version of Wells’ tale, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is a divorced father in charge of his two children, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning), for the weekend. This, of course, the weekend that cruel, bloodthirsty aliens decide to put their millennia-old plan of territorial take-over into effect.
Taking a page from M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, we are treated to the Everyman’s point of view of a global crisis.
In the past, protagonists of movies of this ilk were either military men or scientists, by virtue of their profession, at the forefront of the action. Alternately, if they were civilians, they would still invariably find themselves in the middle of things, reluctant heroes, pivotal roles thrust upon them, the fate of humanity in their hands.
In War, as in Signs, the main characters are on the far-flung periphery, their motivation, to weather the storm. To survive. Thoughts of “How are we going to stop this alien invasion?” dwarfed by questions like, “How do we get to Boston?” and “What’s my daughter going to eat if she’s allergic to peanut butter?”
Of course, given that this is a Steven Spielberg film, it’s got a whole lot of Hollywood in its celluloid DNA. It is, actually, rather like the Hollywood version of Signs. And I mean that in the best and worst possible ways.

It’s got all the gee-whiz-bang CGI explosions and property damage you could ask for (the sequences of the tripods in urban decimation mode are some of the most heart-stuttering, jaw-dropping scenes I’ve seen in any alien invasion movie), as well as characters so painfully Everyman, they’re generic.
What we know of Ray is the barest glimmer of a personality. All we know is, his children don’t really know who he is. Well, kids, to paraphrase Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, You are not alone.
Ray’s kids, meanwhile, are the Rebellious, Angry Teen and Screaming, High-Strung Little Girl. Not much hope there, either.
In the void of any honest emotional connection with the film’s characters, the audience is left to do the Everyman thing and project themselves onto the scenario, which sometimes works, and more often doesn’t.
But given the Hollywood genes in War, it’s no surprise that Ray, Everyman schmoe that he is, still somehow manages to, a) damage a tripod with an axe, when trained military forces couldn’t seem to dent it with heavy artillery, and b) fortuitously find some grenades just when they can most come in handy.

Which is not to say Spielberg’s War isn’t worth its price of admission: if cars and buildings going boom are your thing, hey, knock yourself out. And there is some truly evil camerawork (undoubtedly computer-aided) as Ray and kids make their exodus from the city on the freeway, courtesy of long-time Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.
It’s just that, as I said, it isn’t really fun to watch.
It’s isn’t fun seeing people get vaporized, or worse, turn on each other for a vehicle. Now, if this had been some sort of anti-war Statement, then perhaps I would have seen the point. But it isn’t.
It isn’t a Popcorn Movie. It isn’t a moving story of real, tangible individuals in a crisis (as was Signs). It isn’t a Statement Film.
So, in the end, I have to ask, What is it, then?

Parting Shot: Are all Earth-invading species inherently stupid? In Signs, a race whose Kryptonite is water attacks a planet that is 75% water. In War of the Worlds, they planned millennia for this, and didn’t think to bring along some cold medicine? Haven’t these people heard of advance scouts?

(War of the Worlds OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above review was previously published in 2005 under the title, “Sound and Fury.”)