While home can mean a lot of things in Spielberg, the concept usually involves a physical structure that becomes the symbolic image throughout the film - the home of the woman and child in Close Encounters, the fortress in Jurassic Park, the unusual shaped home with peaked roof above the door in ET. In each case, this home or sanctuary is invaded by hostile forces. In Close Encounters the home is attacked by UFOs apparently seeking to abduct the woman's child. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs attack. In ET, the home is violated by a hostile human population seeking to abduct the alien the children are protecting.
In each cast, the people - the woman, the scientists and the kids - believe the building can protect them from the intrusion, when in each case the homes are simply cages - a fact that even the film work in Jurassic Park reflects. This is an important pattern that seems destined to be replayed in Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
How this will be played out, however, is one of the secrets of Spielberg's script? Will the aliens attack the Bayonne house, turning the house itself against the inhabitants as he presented in Close Encounters, doors opening, ordinary household items turning into alien tools for attack? Or will the assault be similar to the one in Jurassic Park, where the alien-like monsters from the world's distant past assault the home with pure animal hostility. Or will the attack come in some disguise, as hinted at by the War of the World trailer that suggests the aliens are already here, listening in on the home the way the alien-like adults of ET did planning a more devious assault?
After touring the sets in Bayonne, I can have no doubt about Spielberg's intention to continue this theme of invaded personal space and the illusion of safety the home provides.
Although Spielberg has a tendency to think better of Aliens than most of us who grew up with the 1950s films - such as in his mini series last year, ET, and Close Encounters, he has also proven his ability in Jurassic Park to create the truly monstrous and remote enemies of mankind, and to avoid his tendency to soften their character or find some redeeming quality that makes the aliens seem more like angels. Even in ET, Spielberg seemed unable to make up his mind about the nature of the adults - painting them in the beginning as intrusive invades as alien as any of the creatures he produced in other films. The aliens in one part of Close Encounters shake up the woman's house with remarkable fury, kidnap her kid, and then later, give the kid back as if nothing had happened. Spielberg's almost magnificent TV mini series fell into the same confused pattern, painting the aliens in such horrific terms for most of the episodes only to wrap them up in bows so that no one could possibly hate them during the last episode. Spielberg's spirits in Poltergeist came closer to the mark (and indeed perfected the concept of invading the home space from within), as did the monsters in Jurassic Park. If Spielberg can put the alien mask on the dinosaurs for War of the Worlds, we may be cringing down in our seats when the film opens in June. But H.G. Wells has given Spielberg way to cop out, painting the aliens at a people caught between exterminating us or their own extinction due to their dying planet.
In coming to this film, most viewers expect the aliens to be hostile and cold, a sharp contrast from the doe-like creature Spielberg brought to us in ET.
Jurassic Park indeed makes a good model for War of the Worlds in that it showed most vividly that no place is safe, and brings us the kind of alien that is perfectly capable of thoughtless mass slaughter. The big difference between Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds - and that one that promises to shape War of the Worlds into an even more acutely terrifying experience is the geography of home. In Jurassic Park, the savagery happened in a remote place from which the humans can eventually escape. Even in later versions of the film when foolish people seek to sneak the creatures into America, the film doesn't bring the story in our own back yards - although I suspect a close examination will find more than a few allusions to Japanese monsters stomping on cities.
By using some of the imagery to the much more innocent film ET - shaping the main character into an average American living in an average home the way Cruise's character is being betrayed, Spielberg may be succeeding in providing us with a dramatic and horror-filled ultimate invasion of our sanctuary that will shake us to the core.