But if the aliens need blood, why do they spend so much time vaporizing helpless, fleeing civilians? Again, it seems Spielberg is simply tossing in every primal jolt that occurs to him, whether or not they're compatible. Late in the movie, Spielberg works in a vampiric twist-the aliens, it seems, have come to drink our blood. Why don't the cars there work? Perhaps because if they did, Spielberg would have no excuse for a scene in which an animalistic mob storms the minivan. But plenty of the places he and the kids go-Mom's house, for starters-haven't been hit by an electrical pulse. Why, for example, does Ray seem to have the only functioning automobile on the Eastern Seaboard? The other cars in his neighborhood were knocked out by an electrical pulse that accompanied the tripod's emergence.

The same is true of Spielberg's other provocations. Why would a passenger plane be in the air so many hours after the aliens began their global genocide? How would refugees in mid-flight stop to set up bulletin boards? The scenes seem shoehorned in, cheap manipulations that make little logical sense. Moreover, the nods to September 11 don't even fit Spielberg's story very comfortably. If a filmmaker with a worse social reputation-say, Jerry Bruckheimer-had done this, he'd have been pilloried. The appropriation of these tragic images for a sci-fi blockbuster has more than a whiff of sleaze to it. The film was inspired in part by September 11, and it is littered with references to that horrific day-the crashed airliner, the ash-like dust of disintegrated corpses (echoes, too, of Schindler), the bulletin board with names and photos of missing loved ones. Ray and the kids hop back in the car and head north toward Boston, along the way encountering more tripods, hordes of angry, frightened refugees, and a basement-dwelling mental case played by Tim Robbins. They don't stay there long though because a) Mom isn't there, having already departed for Boston and b) during the night a 747 crashes into the house, rendering it decidedly less cozy. The family first flees to Mom's tony suburban enclave, as yet mercifully untouched by the alien attack. Ray steals the only working vehicle in the neighborhood-an old wood-paneled minivan, natch-piles the kids in, and takes off. (The extraterrestrial invaders apparently buried it there thousands of years ago on the assumption that, sooner or later, northern Jersey would have to go.) But both get a chance to reassess their dad when, following a freak electrical storm, a 150-foot-tall squid-like alien 'tripod' emerges from the ground and begins vaporizing everything in sight. His teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) loathes him his ten-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) looks upon him with a mixture of bemusement and pity. Divorced dad Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is a New Jersey dockworker tasked by his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) with taking care of their two kids for the weekend while she and her new, more upscale husband visit family in Boston. In this iteration, the story of alien invasion is seen through the eyes of one frightened family. There are magnificent moments along the way-Spielberg's cinematic eye is as sharp as ever-but ultimately the film is undone by its director's obsession with exploring his dark side. The film plays as a kind of queasy hybrid, a serious take on a terribly unserious genre, E.T. There's little humor or joy or sense of adventure in War of the Worlds, just a lot of running and screaming and hiding and dying.

Spielberg knows our buttons and he presses them hard, with the fingers on both hands. Wells novel is an exceptionally grim one, drawing on anxieties both primeval (that harm might befall our children) and all-too-current (that another September 11 might take place, on a vastly larger scale). Just released on video, Spielberg's take on the classic H.G. This summer, the Big Daddy of good-guy American filmmakers, Steven Spielberg, made a proportionally larger statement with the alien genocide thriller War of the Worlds. Ron Howard, for example, showed there was more to him (or perhaps less) than 'Li'l Opie Cunningham' by directing the unpleasant 1996 kidnapping/revenge flick Ransom. (The leather jacket and sunglasses are givens.) The metamorphosis can be particularly disturbing in filmmakers, who after all have more vivid ways of dramatizing their states of mind than mere automobiles and accoutrements. For most men, such crises of character involve the midlife acquisition of a motorcycle or sports car, though in some cases an electric guitar suffices.

It's rarely an attractive sight when a lifelong good guy decides it's time to show everyone he can be bad.

War of the worlds first tripod