The Watchers (2024)

Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: One doesn’t want to blindly impugn the work of a first time filmmaker, and there are things to recommend here. The film has an agreeable dark fairy tale vibe throughout, and much of the cinematography is pretty stellar. For the most part, when the script isn’t getting in their way, Fanning and the cast are solid.

That’s all I’ve got, unfortunately. The rest of the movie is a vague but insistent disappointment. All of the mood rather adeptly set up in the film’s first half beings to crumble away just as soon as the story feels the need to hemorrhage exposition to explain and give any degree of sense to its army of fairies*. Rules are spat at us and just as quickly ignored. Beyond that, the dialogue just gets plain dumb. “It’s a door!” one character exclaims, when a door is suddenly revealed. The creatures depicted are pointedly nothing special, made all the more derivative when the A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) played right before. These fairies jump out of the far end of the frame and rattle with the same vibe as the aliens in that series.

All of this might be tolerated if not completely forgiven when we see this as the first exploratory attempt of a new filmmaker. The inescapable problem really comes from the fact that this might only be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in film. I won’t indulge in any sort of discourse around nepo babies, but if I had the opportunity to direct a major motion picture before I turned 30 largely because my father is one of the more iconic—if not consistent—filmmakers of the last 30 years, I would be desperate not to make a film so insistently like the films my father produces. I’m not sure if the studio needed something that fit in with the Shyamalan brand, or if it never occurred to the filmmaker that something else would not only be needed, but appreciated. But more creative heads should have prevailed.

*Spoiler alert? Maybe.

War of the Worlds (2005)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins

Have I Seen it Before: Yes.

Did I Like It: Recently, I’ve been reading up on UFOlogy, for reasons. A chapter in the book I’m looking at currently (which isn’t very good) takes a turn into the War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. Naturally, I have some thoughts on that subject. However, in this book I was kind of mystified that the incident was only looked at through the prism of its effect on mass hysteria, which is incidentally somewhat disputed in recent discussions of the incident… That doesn’t really have anything to do with UFOlogy, so why are they discussing it?

Then again, that preceding paragraph has nothing to do with the film we’ve come here to discuss. Why am I bringing it up? The author of that book brings up actor Frank Readick, but not Orson Welles? I mean, really?

This film is far more in tune with the most famous adaptation of the original H.G. Wells novel. That’s the connection. Welles put his Martian invaders in the heart of New Jersey, and so does Spielberg. I like that a lot. Otherwise, the film is that interesting beast of being two seemingly disparate things. It is after the original era of Spielberg’s heyday. Let’s call it the true Amblin era. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Jurassic Park (1993). He now almost exclusive works in prestige drama. Schindler’s List (1993). Amistad (1997). The Post (2017) comes to mind as a recent example. This film, along with his other Tom Cruise collaboration, Minority Report (2002), takes place in that later era, but is still high-concept genre entertainment. 

It’s almost as if this film is the spiritual successor to Close Encounters, now that I think about that. The earlier film featured a man shedding all parental obligation in light of visitors from another world. Every interview I’ve ever seen with Spielberg on the subject of Close Encounters indicates he regretted that move, and this is his atonement*.

*I’m very tempted, but ultimately thought better of ending this review wondering if he will ever atone for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), especially now that he won’t be directing the next film in the series. It felt too snarky, especially in the context of a review for a film I legitimately enjoyed. Also, that film would be an example of a full-throttle attempt to go back to the Amblin era, and we all know how that worked. So, now it will be a footnote.