Alien Versus Zombie

Not that anyone needs pointers, but here's one surefire way to tell a Steven Spielberg movie from a George A. Romero movie: In Spielberg, no matter how bad things get, you know they'll get better; in Romero's movies, you can't be so sure. Exhibits A and B are Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Romero's Land of the Dead, now playing at a multiplex near you.

Spielberg's latest is an adaptation of H.G. Wells' pioneering work of Invasion Lit, in which death-ray-spewing tripods slow-roast humanity while a divorced dockworker named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) wanders the rubble trying to protect his two kids. The crisis effectively erases racial, geographical and class differences, teaching a pampered nation what real deprivation looks like, and uniting its citizens in fear and resolve. War of the Worlds depicts humankind at its best and its worst (mostly its best); it sends you home reassured that the species is fundamentally decent, that crises build character and that even the worst horrors will end someday.

Romero's vision is Spielberg's turned inside out. The 65-year old B-movie maestro's first zombie picture since 1985's Day of the Dead is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape that's essentially a bloody, depopulated, allegorical version of today's urban America. Tower-dwelling rich folks and hardscrabble working poor live in a fortified coastal city ringed by zombie ghettos. The privileged, represented by Dennis Hopper's gangster-mogul Kaufman, have preserved the status quo in microcosm. The city's productive mortals (represented by commandos-for-hire Simon Baker, Robert Joy and John Leguizamo, and Asia Argento's hooker-turned-insurgent) serve Kaufman directly, by going into zombie country to retrieve nonperishable goods, and indirectly, by indulging in vices controlled by Kaufman. At first they resist fighting Kaufman, figuring an inequitable society is better than none. But in time they'll realize the zombies' bald-faced hunger is preferable to their capitalist dictator's covert bloodsucking. In the meantime, a zombie known as Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) grows outraged by mortal soldiers' massacres of the undead and leads a shambling invasion of the central city, hoping to invade the tower, kill Kaufman and avenge the destruction of his comrades.

Land of the Dead is imperfect and unsubtle. While it's better directed, acted, edited, scored and shot than any other Romero zombie picture (Miroslaw Baszak's crisp, dynamic, all-nighttime CinemaScope photography is especially impressive), it still becomes repetitious after an hour or so (a problem with all of Romero's zombie movies except the original Night of the Living Dead). Romero's four-way crosscutting between Kaufman, Big Daddy and rival mercenary factions, while ambitious, confounds the audience's sympathies (on purpose, no doubt) and turns his allegory into mush. (If the zombies represent society's untouchables, shouldn't a proudly leftist movie root against the mortal middle class that's trying to keep them out of the city?)

But if you accept zombie movies as a legitimate, adaptable genre, there's much to like here. Land is corrosively funny-more a gore-soaked political satire than a straight-up fright flick-and it's the most visually inventive film of Romero's career. Every few minutes there's a rhetorically expressive composition: a rack-focus from a spider in a spiderweb to a mercenary's all-terrain vehicle rumbling toward an impending zombie massacre; distracted and protected city-dwellers gathered around a Punch and Judy puppet show staged inside the husk of a tv set; Big Daddy's undead army massed on a seawall across the water from the city, gazing at Kaufman's tower with slack-jawed fascination, like Stanley Kubrick's ape-men regarding the monolith. (When they rise from the water en masse, it's like Diabolique times 1000.)

And no matter how over the top the violence gets, Romero keeps it in metaphoric context and reserves the right to be appalled by its implications. (Kaufman is a rich sociopath par excellence; after cruelly murdering an underling, he vaguely concedes: "I just did something I would not have done otherwise.") More than any previous Romero zombie movie, Land implies that the dead don't lose their humanity just because they're dead, and that while it's less of a crime to destroy them than to kill a mortal, the act kills something precious within the destroyer. (When Joy's sweet, scarred dimwit Charlie calls attention to some "nice shooting," Baker's soldier of fortune responds, "That's good shooting, Charlie-there's no such thing as nice shooting.")

Worlds is is a bigger, slicker, better-paced, more technically sophisticated movie than Land of the Dead, and as such, it's bound to please moviegoers who like Spielberg best when he's a showman-a ringmaster of darkness and light. Despite its brutality and terror, it's ultimately one of his more escapist pictures-a Jurassic Park with bloodthirsty aliens. Pleasurably unrelenting, it knocks you to the ground in the first 20 minutes and keeps its foot on your throat for another 100. And then (like Wells' novel and the original 1953 movie) it just sort of stops. (Both Jurassic Park movies just sort of stopped, too.)

The director's knack for primal terror remains unsurpassed; this film does for lightning what Jaws did for beaches, and retroactively contaminates beloved images from his "good alien" movies. (The tripods' war cry darkly mirrors the mother ship's bass notes in Close Encounters, and when the Worlds aliens finally appear, they might be E.T.'s thug relatives.) Spielberg and screenwriters David Koepp (Jurassic Park) and Josh Friedman spike World's already-upsetting visuals with head-on references to real-world carnage. But while some of these are potent, even poignant, others feel contrived or obligatory. Buildings are toppled, jetliners dashed to earth; fleeing pedestrians trample each other in the street; survivors return home covered in white ash; families post missing loved ones' photos on a wall.

Ray filters Rachel's (Dakota Fanning) firsthand knowledge of the invasion, literally covering her eyes so she won't see the worst of it. ("Is it the terrorists?" she asks him.) Ray's teenage son, Robbie (Justin Chatwin), is mesmerized by the National Guard's Humvee motorcades and talks of joining them to dish out payback. (Robbie's fascination with military machinery links him to Jim in Empire of the Sun, another Spielberg fable about innocents surviving an occupation.) Worlds goes so far as to describe the tripods as extraterrestrial sleeper cells, buried here millions of years ago to fulfill a genocidal plot. "This is not a war," a wild-eyed hermit (Tim Robbins) assures Ray, "any more than there's a war between men and maggots." In the back of our minds, we know that no harm can possibly come to Ray or his family, and that the terror will soon reach its divinely ordained endpoint-finished, in Wells' words, "by the littlest things that God in his wisdom had put upon this Earth."

The main difference isn't one of style or temperament, but philosophy. Deep down, Spielberg is an optimist who considers humanity innocent until proven guilty and sees the silver lining in every cloud; Romero is his opposite, a congenital skeptic who knows crises are more likely to give large numbers of people an excuse to behave horribly, and to enjoy doing it. Spielberg is a humanist who looks for commonality and decency, while Romero's a punk satirist who highlights social divisions and selfishness. Worlds is a bad dream from which audiences are privileged to awake; Dead feels like one small chapter of an extended nightmare that began a long time ago (1968, to be exact) and will probably never end.