‘War of the Worlds’ thrills, but lacks a point

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, June 28, 2005

The first human being zapped by an alien in “War of the Worlds” is a guy with a camcorder.

Figures. If it’s true that genre movies reflect the anxieties of the era, then “War of the Worlds” is right on target. Hollywood is certainly anxious about illegal video-copying and bootlegging of its movies.

What? You say the subtext of this new “War of the Worlds” is actually post-Sept. 11 terrorism? Maybe my mind was clouded at the preview screening, after being searched at the door (patrons had to surrender their bags and cell phones) and watched in the darkened theater by infrared eyes. I still don’t know what the annoying clicking sound was throughout the screening – Martian machinery?

There was an actual movie: a Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise extravaganza, featuring state-of-the-art everything and copious echoes of the “war against terror.”

It’s based on H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, which was memorably filmed in 1953, and even more memorably the basis of a 1938 radio broadcast orchestrated by Orson Welles. Rendered in the style of a series of news reports interrupting regular programming, the show panicked listeners who hadn’t caught the disclaimer at the beginning.

Welles’ stunt is still one of the great spine-tingling sci-fi artifacts. There’s nothing in the new film to match it, although for much of its running time Spielberg presses the pedal rather effectively to the metal.

We begin in New Jersey, which was also the site of the initial strike in the radio broadcast. (The film, written by David Koepp, has many nods to Welles, as well as Wells.) Divorced dad Ray (Tom Cruise) is taking in his kids, with whom he has an awkward relationship, for the weekend.

They are teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and little Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Before they’re settled in, a freak storm hovers over the Hudson River, and lightning bolts pepper the area.

It follows that a giant machine, shaped like a tripod, erupts from under the pavement and pulverizes everything in sight with its deadly ray. Ray and family flee, aliens pursue, chaos takes over. Like Scientology attacking psychiatry, the visitors never slacken.

Spielberg has his nasty on, and the early set-pieces are armrest-grippers: the emergence of the first creature (a great moment for John Williams’ music), a wasteland with a crashed plane. A frightening sequence that has the family’s van attacked by animalistic people shows that Spielberg’s faith in man’s goodness has never recovered from “Schindler’s List.”

The movie slows for a long, curious sequence in a basement, where head case Tim Robbins has barricaded himself. It’s the most frustrating yet in some ways the most interesting segment of the film.

Because Spielberg carries the entire history of sci-fi in his head, he conjures some images – especially a Tripod stalking up over a hill – that will give a shiver to anybody who ever curled up over a 10-cent paperback of Ray Bradbury stories as a kid.

But elsewhere, you wonder what the point is. It’s technically marvelous, this spectacle of a gifted director exercising his talent, and the first hour is intense. But if the point was to draw parallels with terrorism, it feels clumsy, and the references to Sept. 11 are vulgar to the point of distraction. (And by the way, if these aliens are so brilliant, what’s with their strategy of killing the Earth’s population one by one? Even North Korea has the bomb.)

Cruise is wired tight. If it weren’t for his recent publicity proclaiming his grand amour and defending his belief system, maybe his disturbed performance would be praised. Now it now longer seems like he’s acting.

That unnerving kid actor Dakota Fanning actually carries a lot of the story’s weight. Spielberg still relates strongly to the look on a child’s face when something terrifying or wonderful is about to happen. That’s his signature shot, and a bigger special effect here than the alien hardware.