Critics questioning film’s 9/ll reference

As the giant alien tripods begin to wreak havoc on New Jersey in the new blockbuster “War of the Worlds,” director Steven Spielberg makes perhaps the most explicit reference to the Sept. 11 tragedy in a film that is strewn with such allusions: little Dakota Fanning, screaming, “Is it the terrorists?”

The film’s association – equation, even – between New York’s darkest hours and a summer alien invasion flick troubled some of the region’s film critics, who felt the tragedy too fresh for harvesting.

“After masses of people have been slurped up by the aliens, their lifeless clothing drifts back to earth, echoing the limp bodies in freefall from the World Trade Center,” wrote Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News, which gave the movie two stars.

She docked the film a star or so because “it is nasty and mean-spirited, and plays on shocking allusions to Sept. 11 imagery. … These aren’t Martians, they’re sleeper cells hiding among us, waiting to activate. The first thing they destroy is a church steeple.”

Other 9/11 references include missing-person posters, a jetliner-turned-fireball and Tom Cruise’s ash-coated frame after the first wave of attacks.

“You use a sci-fi movie as a way to say something provocative about otherwise unspeakable things,” wrote Stephen Whitty in The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. “You don’t use otherwise unspeakable things just to add some extra spice to a sci-fi movie. Or, at least, you shouldn’t.”

The references to the Sept. 11 disaster are “merciless,” wrote Michael Atkinson in his review in The Village Voice.

“For me personally, and it’s really a purely subjective thing, it’s a matter of how close you were to downtown on Sept. 11,” Atkinson said in a phone interview. “Personally, I have not regained my appetite for destruction.”

The filmmakers have said they had no taste for blowing up New York City or universal landmarks, like the crowd-pleasing effects of the 1996 alien-resistance flick “Independence Day.”

Spielberg said he was more influenced by fear than destruction; he has cited one image in particular from the terrorist attacks, that of panicked New Yorkers fleeing across the George Washington Bridge.

In a Denver Post article, screenwriter David Koepp said it was “unrealistic” not to draw on the terrorist attacks.

“I feel that’s the world we live in,” he said. “What’s exploitative is if you don’t take it seriously.”

Not all New York film critics charged Spielberg with exploitation.

“I think that Sept. 11 is part of our collective consciousness,” said Lou Lumenick, who reviewed the film for The New York Post (and who found plenty of other things to dislike about it). “I don’t see any reason why it should be avoided as source material for a movie.”

The suggestions of Sept. 11, he said, were tasteful, though illogical. For example, the survivors have already posted pictures of their missing loved ones, but given that everyone is fleeing for their lives, when would they have time to do so?

But then, he said, “There are a lot of things in ‘War of the Worlds’ that don’t stand up to any real scrutiny.”