August 24, 1814. The British had just finished beating Napoleon in Europe, and now they turned 4,500 battle-hardened veterans loose on the young American republic. Major General Robert Ross landed at Benedict, Maryland, marched on Washington, and at Bladensburg scattered the American defenders in what was later called the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms. President James Madison watched the rout from the field, then ran.
By about eight that evening the redcoats were inside the nearly empty capital. They walked into the White House and found dinner still laid out for forty guests. British officers sat down, ate the meal, then set the building on fire. Over the next 24 hours they burned the Capitol and its Library of Congress, the Treasury, the White House. The fires were hot enough that glass melted and marble burned to lime.
Dolley Madison had left barely ahead of them, ordering the frame of the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington broken so the canvas could be rolled up and carried off. State Department clerks hauled the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution out to Leesburg, Virginia. A tornado ripped through the city on August 25. The British held Washington for all of 26 hours before pulling back toward Baltimore, where Fort McHenry stopped them and Francis Scott Key found a song in the rockets’ red glare. The White House reopened in 1817, the Capitol in 1819. The republic stayed put.
Now hold that picture in your head, and switch on tonight’s film.
War of the Worlds (2005) is Steven Spielberg doing exactly this to the whole planet. Josh Friedman and David Koepp wrote it from H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel. Tom Cruise is Ray Ferrier, a Brooklyn dockworker with a crane cab and a failed marriage, handed his estranged kids Robbie and Rachel for the weekend. A storm beats down on an intersection, lightning strikes the same spot again and again, every car and phone dies, and then the ground opens and a tripod climbs out and turns the crowd to ash.
From there the film just runs. Ray grabs a minivan and goes. News crews show tripods tearing through cities behind shields that no army can scratch. The pilots did not fly here in ships; they rode the lightning into machines buried under our feet a long, long time ago. A mob takes the van. A ferry gets flipped. Robbie runs off to join a counterattack that we never see him survive. Ray and Rachel hole up with Tim Robbins’s Harlan Ogilvy, a man losing his mind, until Ray has to silence him. The invader does not fall to a hero with a rifle. It falls to Earth’s own bacteria, exactly as Wells wrote it, because the aliens never accounted for the planet itself.
What I keep coming back to is how post-9/11 this feels. Critics like Kelly Konda at We Minored in Film read it almost entirely through 2001: the ash covering everyone, the walls of missing-person flyers, the crowds pouring out of a city on foot. The Haughty Culturist called it an anthem of the damned. It is not a cheerful film. But Spielberg, like the young American republic, refuses to let the burning be the last word.
So tonight, press play. Let the capital fall once on the page in 1814, and once more on the screen, and notice how both stories end with the people still standing.
What else could have been tonight
Ukraine declares independence from the Soviet Union (1991) · film: The Island (2005)
On this same day in 1991, August 24, the Ukrainian parliament voted 346 to 1 to leave the Soviet Union. It was a Saturday, the session ran twelve hours and went out live, and it came three days after a failed coup by Communist hardliners against Mikhail Gorbachev had broken the old center for good. Leonid Kravchuk, the parliamentary speaker who had wavered during the coup, swung behind independence, and a December 1 referendum sealed it with 92.3 percent of the vote on 84 percent turnout. Within weeks the USSR was gone.
That is the same pulse running through The Island (2005). Michael Bay directed, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta, and they live in a clean underground compound where a weekly lottery supposedly sends one resident to Earth’s last clean paradise. Lincoln follows a moth through a vent one night and finds a “winner” opened up on a surgical table. They are clones, agnates, registered as inventory for wealthy sponsors who will harvest them. The pair get out, reach the real America, and bring the compound down with them. The system told both the clones and the Ukrainians a story about who they belonged to. Both answered the same way.
NATO established (1949) · film: Starship Troopers (1997)
The treaty came into force on this day in 1949, when all twelve founding nations deposited their ratifications in Washington. The product of fifteen months of negotiation after the Czechoslovak coup, the Berlin blockade, and the Communist gains in Italy’s elections, it contained Article 5: an armed attack against one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” It was the first peacetime military alliance the United States joined outside the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet Union answered with its own atomic bomb that same year and the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), very loosely from Heinlein’s 1959 novel, takes the alliance logic to its limit. Earth is governed by the United Citizen Federation, where you earn the vote only through federal service, and the whole species is mobilized as one army against the Arachnids. The FedNet broadcasts, all “Want to know more?” recruitment ads and cheerful atrocity footage, are Article 5 turned into a 24-hour channel. Reviewers in 1997 mostly missed the joke and called the film fascist; later critics read it as one of the sharpest satires of war propaganda ever studio-financed, with a $100 million budget and Phil Tippett’s Oscar-nominated bugs.
Sources
1814 · British forces burn Washington, D.C. (main event)
American Battlefield Trust, “The Capture and Burning of Washington, D.C.” (4,500 veterans under Ross, landing at Benedict, burning of White House and Capitol, 1817 reopening). https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/burning-washington-dc
World History Encyclopedia, “Burning of Washington” (Battle of Bladensburg, British officers feasting at the White House, the August 25 tornado). https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2631/burning-of-washington/
White House Historical Association, “Rescue of the Papers of State During the Burning of Washington” (Dolley Madison, Declaration and Constitution evacuated to Leesburg, Virginia). https://www.whitehousehistory.org/rescue-of-the-papers-of-state-during-the-burning-of-washington
War of the Worlds (2005)
Wikipedia, “War of the Worlds (2005 film)” (Spielberg, Friedman and Koepp script from Wells’s 1898 novel, Cruise, Fanning, Robbins, the microbial defeat). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2005_film)
IMDb, “War of the Worlds (2005)”, tt0407304 (directed by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407304/
Kelly Konda, We Minored in Film, “Revisiting Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: The 9/11 Parable is Strong in This One” (April 12, 2018; ash-covered crowds and missing-person walls as post-9/11 imagery). https://weminoredinfilm.com/2018/04/12/revisiting-spielbergs-war-of-the-worlds-the-9-11-parable-is-strong-in-this-one/
Ukraine declares independence from the Soviet Union (1991) · film: The Island (2005)
Kyiv Post, Bohdan Nahaylo, “33 Years Ago Today - How Ukraine Reaffirmed Its Independence” (the 12-hour Saturday session, the 346-1-3 vote, Kravchuk’s shift after the Moscow coup). https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37792
Encyclopedia of Ukraine, “Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence, 1991” (December 1, 1991 referendum: 92.3 percent yes on 84 percent turnout, end of the USSR within weeks). https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\U\K\UkrainehDAsDeclarationofIndependence1991.htm
IMDb, “The Island (2005)”, tt0399201 (directed by Michael Bay, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/
NATO established (1949), film: Starship Troopers (1997)
North Atlantic Treaty, April 4, 1949 (Article 5 collective defense, the twelve founding members, entry into force upon ratification). https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1949/04/04/the-north-atlantic-treaty
U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian, “The North Atlantic Treaty, 1949” (the Czechoslovak coup, the Berlin blockade, the first peacetime U.S. alliance outside the Western Hemisphere). https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/nato
IMDb, “Starship Troopers (1997)”, tt0120201 (directed by Paul Verhoeven, from Heinlein’s novel, the United Citizen Federation). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/