The Spielberg Ending
by Sean Weitner

Somehow I didn't see it coming — maybe the movie's ultracommercial nature lulled me — but, eight days from its release, there it was:

DefamerOps: war of the worlds … first 90 minutes good/great … ending ranks as one of the worst cinematic failures in the last 20 years.
DefamerOps: the end is truly awful. an abomination.

The only response is to sigh. Over the past decade, the endings of Spielberg's movies have become, in the public eye, the most prominent dimension of his auteurship, and not in a good way. The man cannot release a movie without a hue and cry going up that his instinct for sentimental, crowd-pleasing, self-indulgent, drawn-out endings has ruined it. The pragmatic comment would be that if crowd-pleasing was the aim, wouldn't he notice the displeased crowds? The real answer is that so many people have misapprehended what he's up to for so long that when he deviates from the formulas that Hollywood has derived from his successes, he's considered to have lost his touch.

So let's really consider those endings, starting with Spielberg's last Oscar at-bat. This isn't about being a fanboy — I've struggled with Spielberg in these pages for a long time — but about trying to take the long view of film history, in which all of this player-hating will seem short-sighted and viewers will acknowledge the director's efforts to take his huge audiences somewhere unexpected as the kind of artistic ambitiousness rarely seen at the multiplex.

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