Films directed by Steven Spielberg

549 quotes found

"I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know."

- Jurassic Park (film)

0 likesAdventure filmsFilms based on novelsFilms directed by Steven SpielbergJurassic Park filmsScreenplays by Michael Crichton
"Though War of the Worlds may have been based on an H.G. Wells novel from 1897, the film is very much about a specific, confusing, terrible time in American history: the period directly following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how we, as a country, reacted to it. The movie tries to work through this collective angst and trauma, a fact that is, somehow, even more obvious watching it more than a decade after its initial release. The story begins in New York City, where Tom Cruise's Ray works on the docks and lives in New Jersey. When the alien attack first begins, greater New York City is the "ground zero" we see it depicted from. Ray's New Jersey community, filled with a sense of tight-knit camraderie and friendly neighborhood cops that feel totally different in the context of post-9/11 than they do in our current cultural context, is where this all begins for us. From there, we get several iconic images Americans have come to associate with 9/11: from traumatized people covered in ash to hordes of weary people walking across bridges to the signs people have made to look for their missing loved ones. At one point, when Ray and his kids are driving away from NYC, Dakota Fanning's Rachel asks if it is "the terrorists" as the city is destroyed behind them. This movie is also really pro-military. Pretty much whenever there is a heroic moment, it is a military man leading the way. The National Guard makes recurring appearances, somehow still in operation in the midst of this batshit crazy alien attack that the Earth is wholly unprepared for. This is not only an allegory for the police and firemen whose heroism has become a central tenet of our 9/11 narrative, but of the Iraq War that began probably around the time of this film's initial development."

- War of the Worlds (2005 film)

0 likes2000s American filmsScience fiction filmsFilms based on novelsRemake filmsFilms directed by Steven Spielberg
"The problem may be with the alien invasion itself. It is not very interesting. We learn that countless years ago, invaders presumably but not necessarily from Mars buried huge machines all over the Earth. Now they activate them with lightning bolts, each one containing an alien (in what form, it is hard to say). With the aliens at the controls, these machines crash up out of the Earth, stand on three towering but spindly legs and begin to zap the planet with death rays. Later, their tentacles suck our blood and fill steel baskets with our writhing bodies. To what purpose? Why zap what you later want to harvest? Why harvest humans? And, for that matter, why balance these towering machines on ill-designed supports? If evolution has taught us anything, it is that limbs of living things, from men to dinosaurs to spiders to centipedes, tend to come in numbers divisible by two. Three legs are inherently not stable, as the movie demonstrates when one leg of a giant tripod is damaged, and it falls helplessly to the ground. The tripods are indeed faithful to the original illustrations for H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, and to the machines described in the historic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast. But the book and radio program depended on our imaginations to make them believable, and the movie came at a time of lower expectations in visual effects. You look at Spielberg's machines and you don't get much worked up, because you're seeing not alien menace but clumsy retro design. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to set the movie in 1898, at the time of Wells' novel, when the tripods represented a state-of-the-art alien invasion."

- War of the Worlds (2005 film)

0 likes2000s American filmsScience fiction filmsFilms based on novelsRemake filmsFilms directed by Steven Spielberg