#10 JAWS

      "Jaws" is an absolute classic. Many would say that it's Steven Spielberg's best movie even though it's only his first mainstream film. It would mark the brilliant beginning to a director who is synonymous with great event films and great films in general. "Jaws" is considered by many to be the first summer blockbuster and the film that influenced the very idea of the summer blockbuster.

      What makes this movie so scary and so exhilerating is that it's a monster movie about a real monster. This is a creature that has existed for thousands of years and is universally feared by everyone. We know going in that this is a movie about a man-eating shark but what Spielberg does is he takes this already very real monster and places it in a place of comfort and safety. He places it in an innocent beach resort town called Amity and into the lives of a family that we get to know and care about. Everything he does makes this experience more real, more terrifying and eventually more exciting.

      The movie opens with a bang, arguably one of the best opening scenes of all time. After showing us a classic night time beach scene with a group of kids relaxing near a bonfire, a woman decides to go for a night swim and the camera follows her as she runs towards the water. The camera feels aggressive and adventurous, and it raises the adrenaline level as it follows her and the admirer chasing after her. She swims to the first buoey. Her admirer, drunk, doesn't make it past the beach. We get a wide shot of the ocean with the woman looking almost lost in it, completely alone. Everything is dark, the sky, the water, and then we get a severe closeup that creates a jolting immediacy to the scene. It feels almost like the camera itself is dangerous, and by not allowing us to see anything in her periphery she seems vulnerable as do we, watching, waiting. The mood has shifted, edgier, and we get the shark-cam, a view lurking in the water underneath her, and it gets closer and closer as we hear the iconic John Williams "Jaws" theme music gradually increasing it's ferocity. Suddenly we get the same jolting closeup of her and this is when the scene goes to the land of "HOLY SHIT." She violently submerges and we know what it is but there's still an initial shock because of the suddenness of the attack. For the remainder of the scene we see the result of something under the water attacking her. We see her rapidly being forced in different directions in the water like a rag doll, screaming, going under, resurfacing, terrified, screaming "It hurts." The entire time we don't actually see the shark. Every time something suddenly terrifying and aggressive happens to her it becomes more terrifying and shocking for us because in a way we can identify with her. We can't see what's coming either. We also can only imagine what terrible monster is doing this to her and our imaginations are way beyond the real thing. The scene is gut-wrenching and your jaw drops pretty much the entire time. 

     The scene shifts from night to day, we hear the crashing waves, the seagulls, we see the same waters, but the association has changed from peaceful and friendly to dangerous, and as we get to know the town of Amity we realize that something bad is going to happen to this innocent beach resort town where the biggest emergency at the moment is kids karate chopping the town fences, a town where they've never had to make a "beach closed" sign, a town where there has never been a shark attack.

     The horrifying remains of the girl are found and the movie launches in to a tale of moral corruption where the town's mayor is in denial of the probability of a shark attack because he knows that if they close the beaches it will be catastrophic to the town financially with 4th of july days away. The sheriff Brody, played amazingly well by Roy Scheider, rushes around to do the right thing and the powers that be convince him not to. We know something bad is going to happen and the drama is amped up because those involved are going to be affected deeply by this. Brody wants to do something but doesn't and the mayor, in denial and being led by power and control, won't do anything. The great white shark is just waiting to take advantage of this and terrorize these waters.

     The thing that I always remember most about "Jaws" is the way in which the shark attack scenes are perfectly choreographed. I already discussed the opening scene, and the combination of suspense, paranoia, and sudden terror in the remaining two beach scenes is just awesome. Spielberg uses quick-cuts and closeups of people in the water in order to create chaos and tension. In the one scene we see a closeup of a boy on a raft, a dog fetching a stick, people playing in the water, a girl going under water, a black bathing cap that looks like a shark fin, all quick cutting, and throughout all of this there is splashing water which is disorienting and leads to a further state of unease. It seems like at any moment there's going to be an attack. All of a sudden we get the shark-cam again and that classic music, and as soon as it gets to it's victim there is sudden violence, blood spraying, the raft pushed up out of the water and screaming, panicked swimmers rushing to shore. When the attack happens we get a beautiful Hitchcockian pull forward closeup of the sheriff to show his sudden awareness of this terrible thing that is happening, an iconic moment. The second attack works amazingly well because of misdirection. We get the same technique of quick cutting closeups, helicopters flying above the water, shark watchers in boats, underwater shots, and a seriously paranoid Brody. Suddenly there's a shark fin in the water and everyone panics. A whistle blows and everyone rushes out of the water. The beach is bedlam and we soon find out that it was two pranksters with a cardboard fin. Everyone relaxes, we exhale, and then, just when we think everything is o.k. a girl sees a shark in the adjacent pond and screams "Shark. There's a shark in the pond." and because we are all lulled into a sense of false security it becomes eerier, almost like it's happening in slow motion, and we are more susceptible to the fear. To up the fear factor Brody's son is in the pond as well. Once again the attack is quick, violent , and gory, and until Brody's son gets out of the water safely we are on edge. Throughout all of these scenes we don't see the shark until this last attack and only for a second. This adds to the suspense and terror. It gives it a more monstrous quality. We've seen sharks but not this one. Only our imaginations have seen this one, a mythical creature created in our minds.

    Throughout the first half of the movie there is this combination of not showing us the shark but gradually revealing information about how dangerous these creatures are. Brody looks through a book on sharks and sees images of the scars from a shark attack, a shark eating through a boat, a great white's bite radius, and also learns that most shark attacks take place  in three feet of water, ten feet from the beach. He also learns that rogue sharks will stay around until the food supply is gone. This makes the whole movie scarier because we know that everything that has happened on the screen is normal, not extraordinary, because it happens in real life, bringing us closer to that pre-existing primal fear of sharks. When we see the attacks we are bringing this magnified fear coupled with the suspense of not having seen this creature that we have now created in our minds. It's an explosive double whammy.

    The second half of the movie is like another movie in itself. If the first part is the horror movie this is the adventure movie. It's this giant hunt between the archetypal sea captain, king of all shark hunters and the king of all sharks.

    Quint, this larger than life character has been hired to hunt and kill this shark, and Brody, and Hooper, a marine scientist specializing in sharks, played by Richard Dreyfuss join him on the journey.

     Quint, played by Robert Shaw, elevates this adventure to mythical levels. He has a swagger about him with his scottish accent and sea songs, and we are hypnotized by his seeming invulnerability. We are watching a powerful man in his element, walking his vessel as if it's an extension of himself. Almost every image of him is a closeup; Quint leaning against the forepeak of the boat with a grin, legs crossed, in complete control; Quint in the crow's nest gazing at the sea; Quint readying the massive fishing rod as if in his sleep.

     The dynamic between a man like this, who is also incredibly arrogant, brittle, and has control issues, and the other two men is enough to make this movie great by itself. Brody is completely out of his element with no knowledge of what to do on this boat, and terrified of water. He bumbles around fearful and disoriented and Quint gives him tasks as if pampering a child. Hooper has all sorts of state of the art equipment on board the boat and Quint hates his fancy equipment and his white-collar background. He excessively orders him around and the two become rivals.

    One of my favorite scenes and possibly the greatest moment in the movie is a scene taking place at night in the cabin of the boat. The three men are drunk and Quint and Hooper are comparing scars. It's obvious that both men have seen some serious action, and Brody points to Quint's arm and asks him "What's that?" What follows is a revealing story that on one level is the scariest moment in the film and the moment when we truly understand what is really motivating Quint on this hunt and previous hunts. On his arm had been a tattoo of the USS Indianapolis which he had removed. He tells the haunting story of what happened to him on the way back from delivering the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima during WWII. "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin back, from the island of Tinian Delady, just delivered the bomb. The hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour." Quint proceeds to tell a tale in which men formed themselves into box formations to protect the group, a tale in which by the first dawn one hundred men had been eaten, and by the fifth day in which he was rescued, only three hundred sixteen survived. We begin to understand why this man is so fiercely great at what he does, and why he is so hardened and strong.

    The second half of the film has night scenes of silence and tranquility, both hunter and hunted patiently awaiting the other's move and during the day an exhilerating chase, involving  the harpooning of barrels to the shark in order to force it to the surface. Both the men on the boat and the audience are continually impressed by the shark's strength, speed, and elusive nature. It is hunting them as well, the two sides consistently switching roles.

    The reveal scene is when things really get cooking. Spielberg uses the fact that we haven't really seen the shark yet to his advantage when finally revealing it. Brody is scooping fish guts into the water, bored, and his head is turned away from the sea when out of the water comes this massive shark right up close and nearly bites brody's arm off. It's shocking because we've been used to nothing and all of a sudden this huge shark seems like it's jumping almost out of the screen at us with absolutely no warning, no shark-cam, no music, no quick cuts. It works perfectly and leads to one of the most memorable lines in movies. "We're gonna need a bigger boat." It's also perfect timing. This is the adventure, not the horror portion of the movie. Not seeing the shark served it's purpose in the first half but it's time to see the shark in all it's glory. In order to truly feel the scope of this we have to be able to almost reach out and touch this creature.

    The ending doesn't disappoint. Simultaneously, the shark is chasing the boat and Quint is luring the shark into shallow waters. Quint thinks he's tricking the shark but he's so stubborn and arrogant and that becomes his undoing. He goes too fast, puts too much pressure on the engine, and fries it. It turns out the shark outsmarts Quint, attacks the stranded boat, and in the end, eats the great shark hunter. It's a classic case of a king destroying himself with the same thing that made him so great; his will, his fury, his determination, but with a single-minded blindness. Ironically, the terrified cluless brody ends up destroying the shark in the end. There is this great image of brody and hooper paddling back to shore on nothing but barrels. There's no boat, no shark, no Quint. The great hunters are dead and the companions are the only ones who have survived.  

#27 NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

       Alfred Hitchcock talked about "The Chase" being the key element to any great suspense movie. He talked about the chase taking many forms, but at it's core it's one character running from someone or something. At it's simplest The Cohen Brother's "No Country For Old Men" is about one great chase. It is a chase so flawlessly executed, with incredibly rich themes, and amazing characters that it transcends a mere suspense movie and reaches the peak of cinematic experience.

      The movie opens with the voice-over of a west texas sheriff, talking about his lineage of lawmen, and the fact that in the old days some of them never even wore a gun. We see a series of beautiful shots of the wide open west texas plains. The sheriff talks about crimes these days that are hard to fathom, the world making less and less sense. That to be a lawman in this day is to put your soul at hazard, to say "ok, i'll be a part of that world." Just as he is saying this we see a shot of Anton Chigur, the symbol in this film of the unfathomable world he's talking about, riding away in a cop car. This is a poetic opening that prepares us thematically for what is about to happen in this film. With the visions of the wide open plains it reminds us of a western, a place that is timeless, that hasn't changed, and the overriding theme of this movie, in the end, is that the sheriff of this unchanging county no longer belongs in this world, like the westerns where the cowboys no longer belong to a more complicated time.

      I can't continue talking about the movie without talking about it's main force, the almost god-like opposing force of will, Anton Chigur. Without the brilliance of this character and the performance by Javier Bardem this movie is an average suspense movie. Imagine "The Silence of the Lambs" without Hannibal Lecter and the performance by Anthony Hopkins. It's that significant. We feel the immovable power that is Chigur. He occupies almost all of the space in every scene that he appears in. You can't take your eyes off of him and you kind of want to because he's fucking scary. In his eyes you see absolute, single-minded cold willfulness. You look at him and you know to be afraid, but not to run because what's the point? He'll win. He creates a haunting atmosphere with just the look in his eyes or the way in which he speaks his words. Anton Chigur is the world moved on into a realm that the sheriff can't understand and fears to understand, and never before can I remember a film where one man symbolized so much. He is truly one of the greatest villains on screen ever. The brilliance of this character translates to the power of the main theme of this movie. The world in this movie has met an opposing force that can't be defeated, a colder, darker time.

      Chigur's first victim, the deputy who has him in custody, utters his last line to his superior on the telephone. "I've got it under control.", before he is brutally strangled. Our first real look at Chigur as the camera hovers over his face is a man on fire, eyes bulging, a kind of demon. The title of the movie "No Country For Old Men" translates to a world where the type of man living in this simple, old fashioned region can't understand or defeat a force such as Chigur or that which he represents. He continues to confront and then kill or threaten to kill the men in this world. Most of the men are older, but it is as much about what the men represent as it is about age. Lewellyn, the main protagonist, is symbolically represented as one of these old men because he symbolizes what they symbolize. He is old fashioned, a bit of a cowboy, lives a simple life and has a simple charm.  

      Chigur carries with him an air gun and it's significance to the overall theme of the film is told brilliantly in a conversation between the sheriff and the wife of Lewellyn, Carla Jean. The sheriff tells her how one of the local owners of a slaughterhouse used to kill the cattle by shooting them in the head, but one thrashed around once, the bullet grazed it's head, ricocheted and hit him in the shoulder. He says "Even in the contest between man and steer the issue isn't certain. course they slaughter steers a lot different these days. They use an air gun. Shoots out a rod about that big and the animal never knows what hit them." The air gun that Chigur uses represents his indestructability. The certainty that you won't survive. Evil has constantly been fucked over by good age after age. Evil has found the perfect instrument in Chigur and Chigur in this air gun. These are darker times. 

     Let's cut to the chase. The setup is a man named Lewellyn who happens upon the deathly remains of a drug deal gone wrong and a bag with a lot of money. After thinking about it very briefly he decides to take the money and goes home. If this was the end of it the story might have turned out differently. The lone survivor of the bloodbath, a dying man, had asked him for water, and later that night we get the same camera hovering over Lewellyn that we saw when we first encountered Chigur. He has awakened and decided to bring water to this man. As the camera revealed Chigur earlier it now reveals Lewellyn and he is a good man, the type of man who will risk his life to bring a dying man water. He knows that there is a good chance that he could die doing this but he does it anyways. He tells his wife Carla Jean "I'm fixing to do something dumber than hell but i'm going anyways. Tell your momma I love her." "She's dead." "Then i'll tell her myself." He gets to the man and the moment he realizes that the man has died he looks up and sees that he's not alone. There's a truck next to his on a hill in the distance. He sees some men letting the air out of his tires and the great chase is about to begin.      The chase is the meat of the movie and it's executed with precision, detail, and imagination. The truck on the hill suddenly lights up like a devil with it's headlights, rooflights, and searching strobelight glaring in the night. There is the loud rumble of the truck, the sound of crackling thunder, and we see a single bolt of lightning in front of the racing Lewellyn. He barely escapes after getting shot in the shoulder and he enters a river, paddling his way down current. The men's vicious dog has also entered the river and slowly paddles after him in probably my favorite image from the whole movie. It's a foreshadowing of what he's about to encounter from Chigur, a menacing will.

     My favorite part of the chase, and the most suspenseful and terrifying moment in the film is when Chigur, who has been hired to get the money back, is using a tracking device to find Lewellyn. Lewellyn, unknowingly is being tracked because there is a device inserted in his money bag. So Chigur knows, and more importantly for the building of the tension, so do we, when he is close to Lewellyn. The tracker begins to beep, and then beep more rapidly when it's close to the money. Just as Lewellyn finds the device in his hotel room, and realizes that he's being tracked, he hears the door of the hotel open and voices in the lobby. He calls the desk clerk. No answer. This is a bad sign and the tension builds. We hear footsteps coming down the hall and then we hear the beeping. The tension is now like a vise. The beeping becomes more rapid and we see the dark shadow of Chigur underneath the door. This scene seems influenced in some way by the last scene in Rear Window but uses a little more imagination and takes it to the next level. Awesome.

      The chase is told with very little dialogue. It continues to gradually build the story and the tension by simply showing the hunter and the hunted in fine detail with nothing of insignificance added. There is no meat left on the bone. It's tight and even though each scene slowly takes it's time the pace feels like a bullet.

      And suddenly we get the rug pulled out from under our feet and realize that this has been the sheriff's story all along. We cut to the sheriff in the midst of the chase and he discovers the dead body of Lewellyn at a motel. It's a shocking conclusion to Lewellyn's story and further emphasizes Chigur's power and Lewellyn's powerlessness. He didn't even get to finish his own story. We discovered it through the sheriff's eyes. It also changes our view of the film from a tale of the good guy running away from the villain, to a tale of a world in which the villain has complete control, and the old men are powerless against him.

      The movie ends with the sheriff discussing, with his wife, a dream that he had the night before. "I was with my father, both back in the older times, going through this pass in the mountains. He rode on past and kept on going. He had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. When I rode past I could see he was carrying fire in a horn. In the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixing to make a fire somewhere in that dark and I knew that whenever I got there he'd be there." It's a sad yet hopeful ending. The sheriff is outmatched and done with the fight but there is still a place of comfort waiting for him and his kind.

"Into The Wild" (2008)

         This is an incredibly personal movie. It reminds me of a time and a place so I can't write about it without writing about my connection to it. About 12 years ago I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of my rustic apartment on 24th st. in San Francisco and feeling tremendous pain as I was readying myself for a personal journey. I was crying, literally pulling my hair out, and rocking back and forth on the hardwood floor. I had been having a profound spiritual experience and I knew in my heart that the next step was to give up the life that I had known up to then. This meant giving up my belongings and my family and friends. I had no idea where I was going but I knew that I had to be alone. My friend Jeff was living in the same apartment at the time and I was explaining this to him and feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my entire life. I also felt this enormous guilt because I knew how much pain this was going to cause everyone. I spent a night stewing in it and by morning knew that I couldn't do it. It was too damaging to everyone. I felt relief and a new kind of guilt. I felt like a coward, like I was avoiding my true path and it honestly, to some degree haunts me to this day. I know I would have lost everything and I would have never met my future wife or my future children, so I know I made the right decision, but it still haunts me because I remember how at a deep soul level I knew that I had to give up my name and find myself.

         "Into The Wild" is the true story of a young man's journey to the Alaskan wild to find peace, freedom, and his true self. What it really is, however, is a story of incredible loss.

         The main character is Christopher McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, an adventurous soul who has recently graduated from Emery University. He hates what society represents, and the idea of the american dream. He believes his way to true happiness is to let go of all of society's conventions, to rid himself of his belongings and his name and to hitchhike across the country to the Alaskan Wild. He believes that only in living in this wild, in living apart from the lies of his old world and giving himself a new name, will he be free.

          Christopher's journey is filled with such a mixture of beauty and sorrow. There are scenes of magnificent forests, wide open plains, rivers, mountain vistas, and the quiet desert. When he arrives in a California city it's such a depressing jolt that we identify even more with his need to rid himself of his old world. Most of the beauty and sorrow come from the people that he meets along the way. As I met each of these characters I slowly fell in love with each of them. Three characters, in particular, were important in his journey, each of them a symbol of the family that he's left behind. There is a hippie woman, played by Catherine Keener, who takes to him right away. He reminds her of the son, about his age, that she hasn't seen for two years. She is a beautiful person, an earth mother of sorts, but there is a visible hole in her and a great sadness. He meets an old man, played by Hal Holbrook, who has isolated himself from the world ever since he lost his family to a drunk driver while he was in the war. He is so alone it's almost painful to watch and he truly loves this young man that he's barely just met. He even offers to adopt him after Christopher tells him he has no family. Thirdly, he meets an attractive, flirtatious sixteen year old girl, played by Kristen Stewart, who is about the same age as the sister he left behind. She is lonely and awkwardly isolated,  and seems to have found in Christopher someone who will fill a hole in her. There is so much love in these scenes that your heart almost can't take it. These people adore him, and their beauty expands in his presence. As he continues on his journey you feel such an overwhelming sense of loss. You feel the pain of these people that have to say goodbye to a light that filled them for a little while and you feel his loss as well. Even if he doesn't fully recognize it he has left his family again, a surrogate version, but a family that maybe loved and understood him more than his own.  

         Gradually, throughout the movie we learn that he has had a difficult childhood filled with violence and lies. His father repeatedly abused his mother in front of him and his sister, and his mother was complicit in his father's lies, one being that he was still married to another woman when he was born. This has resulted in anger and disillusionment. Christopher hates what his parents represent. His father is an incredibly succesfull NASA scientist who values prestige and success over anything else, and his mother is the perfect suburban housewife. Part of this journey is about them. There is an element of sado-masochism to the whole thing. He's angry and he's punishing them, but he's also turning that anger inward and punishing himself. He's not prepared for this journey. He brings no map, and little knowledge for survival in the wild, and as much as he's experiencing beauty and peace along this journey, he's also suffering.

         The story ends tragically with Christopher trapped on the other side of an untraversable river, with no food, and he mistakenly eats a poisonous root that causes slow paralysis and impairs the digestive process. At one point in the movie Christopher talks about how important it is to do things that don't necessarily make you strong but make you feel strong. One of the last images of the film is of him withered, weak, barely able to move and a bear comes upon him, huffing, taunting him and then walking away. Nature has kicked his ass. The bear at any moment could have torn him to shreds but his threat level was non-existent. It's almost as if the bear pities him. This journey wasn't pure. It was filled with rage and delusion as much as it was with love and truth.  He is suffering greatly in the end and right before his death, when it is too late, he realizes and writes in a book that true happiness is shared with others.

         Towards the end of the movie we have seen the effect that this quest to the Alaskan wild has had on Christopher's parents. They are absolutely decimated. They have lost their son. They weren't good parents and they were both fucked up people but they loved their son and now he was gone and they couldn't find him. There is an image of the father, played by William Hurt, sitting splayed out in the middle of the street clutching his knees and he is on the verge of madness. The mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden, sometimes hears him in her sleep. 

          It is a movie about loss. Every character connected to Christopher has suffered. They have felt the beauty of his soul, his greatness, and had to say goodbye. Christopher, in the end, realizes that he has time and time again left behind beautiful people in order to be alone and that it is the greatest mistake of his life. 

#21 WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005)

                       More than any other film that i've seen "War of the Worlds" reminds me of the feeling that I had on September 11th, 2001. There was a sudden act of annihilation from an outside force and there was this feeling of terror, helplessness, like nowhere was safe and all of a sudden this could happen anywhere at any time. It felt for that brief moment like the end of the world.

                       Never before on film have I witnessed a more pure realization of the atmosphere of apocalypse. The images and sounds in this movie are terrifying and unforgettable, building upon each other to immerse us in the ultimate feeling of doom.

                       It starts with an ominous sky that looks like a storm, but beyond anything we've ever seen. We then get loud and unsettling lightning bolts repeatedly striking the same place with ferocity. Next there appears to be a giant earthquake and something comes out of the earth. This is some serious biblical, apocalyptic imagery. Throughout all of this we see neighbors, who just minutes before were going about their daily routines, looking on in panic and terror. Wow. This is some heavy shit. The overall tone makes "Independance Day" feel like "Mary Poppins".

                      Out of the earth come the tripods and they are some ominous looking motherfuckers. They look like something both mechanical and biological, the form of giant mechanical insects with monstrous pyramid-like heads. And the sound they make, it's like a mechanical fog-horn from the underworld. It's loud, unsettling, and becomes a reflex for terror every time we hear it.

                     Within minutes the world has changed forever and these tripods are exterminating people in large numbers and it is incredibly uncomfortable to watch because it conjures up this deep archetypal feeling of holocaust. We are experiencing the end of life and the absolute powerlessness to do anything about it. Somehow Spielberg tapped into these deep unconscious fears and gave them truly vivid life. It's as if he went into the collective unconscious of all humankind and retrieved theses images that had always been waiting there, buried, unseen.

                     My favorite scene in the whole movie is the ferry scene. Spielberg masterfully captures mass-hysteria. He's proven this in "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan", and I think he does his best job here. There are images of large groups of people walking along the road because almost nothing mechanical works, so there are no other cars. There is sudden violence when a mob takes the protagonist's precious car, and soon after we have a beautiful shot of a large flock of birds flying rapidly past some tall trees and we know instantly that this a bad sign, as we realize that they are flying away from oncoming tripods. True panic sets in and everyone is rushing to get on this ferry, shoving, trampling, clinging for dear life, and as the ferry begins to move a tripod again comes out of the bowels, but this time the water. There is no escape and everyone is totally fucked as mechanical tentacles come down to claim everyone. The main characters make it out of the water to the other side and we, through their eyes see the absolute horror of it all. We are watching a holocaust. People are being plucked out of the water and a huge terrified crowd is running down a hillside as the tripods randomly vaporize one after another. There is no music, lending to the overall atmosphere of the scene. All you hear are the sounds of the tripods annihilating people and loud screaming. And it gets darker. Soon after we watch the military swatted aside like small insects. We see truly powerful images of tanks on fire and jets exploding.

                     We have a series of dark, powerful images in this movie. We see large groups of dead bodies floating down a stream, clothing falling from the sky because its owners are dead, and fertilizer from human blood being sprayed from the tripods onto a new, red veined earth.

                     One of the most powerful images in the film is a crashed plane in the middle of a suburb. It looks so out of place, as does everything in this film. A reporter near the plane explains the true scope of what's happening as we see images on a monitor of large groups of tripods in another area of the world. This is when we truly digest the magnitude of what is happening and realize that we can multiply exponentialy what we have already seen.