Aliens impress, but 'War of Worlds' lacks human pathos

After the box-office disappointment of his past four films, Steven Spielberg -- so the story goes -- decided it was high time to make a popcorn picture: one that would play to all his strengths as a showman and become his first blockbuster since 1993's "Jurassic Park."

MOVIE REVIEW

WAR OF THE WORLDS

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins

RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images.

GRADE: B+

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His new version of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" could well do the trick. It's the movies' ultimate disaster epic: a genuinely unsettling movie experience that uses the new technology to create an alien invasion of unprecedented scale and realism.

And yet it could prove to be too realistic for its box-office good. Spielberg's invasion is mounted with the gritty honesty of his "Saving Private Ryan." Not a moment of it is played for cheap thrills and its overall effect is the opposite of exhilarating.

At the same time, its human story -- a dysfunctional family mending itself amid the devastation -- is weak. Spielberg's heart is not in it, and we get the feeling that, if he ever did, he no longer believes that anyone is strengthened or ennobled by the horror of war.

Like the 1898 Wells novel and the famed 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation, the film starts out with a narrator (Morgan Freeman) telling us how Earth has long been watched by a "vast, cool and unsympathetic" alien intelligence that is finally ready to pounce.

(In all its previous incarnations -- including the much-respected 1953 version that won an Oscar for best special effects -- the aliens are from Mars, but, since we now know that planet is deserted, the movie makes no mention of the origin of the invaders.)

Our hero is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced, 40-ish working stiff, who, for reasons that are not apparent from the script, is loathed by the teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and young daughter (Dakota Fanning) whose custody he shares with his ex-wife (Miranda Otto).

One day, just as the kids have been dropped off with Ray for the weekend, a series of weird electrical storms activate a widely dispersed arsenal of long-buried machines -- gigantic tripods -- that pop out of the ground and start blasting everything in sight.

Though the aliens have made automobiles, batteries and electrical units inoperable, Ray is a whiz with motors and he figures out how to make a car work and soon has corralled his protesting kids for a journey to Boston, where their mother has gone to visit relatives.

In the course of this odyssey, it's one cliff-hanging situation after another as Ray and the kids bicker and struggle to survive in the face of a complete breakdown of civilization, a media blackout, mass panic and ever-increasing alien attacks.

It's impossible to praise too highly the verve, skill and authenticity with which Spielberg brings off his alien invasion. The combination of CGI, miniatures and real sets is seamless, relentlessly inventive and Boschian in its apocalyptic vision and terrible beauty.

To his credit as an artist, Spielberg avoids (with one exception) the usual crowd-pleasing nonsense and bogus movie-star heroics to show what it might really be like for an American to suddenly find himself the object of an ethnic cleansing and a refugee in his own country.

So the movie has a strange dichotomy. Spielberg half-heartedly wants to give his audience a rousing thrill-show, but -- 30 years after "Jaws" -- he's a different man and he can only see the story through what his experience has taught him about war and the Holocaust.

Despite all the action and effects, it's a somber affair, every bit as serious-minded and demanding as "AI: Artificial Intelligence" or "Minority Report," and -- defying the contemporary blockbuster formula -- a movie without an ounce of adolescent bravado in its soul.

This may have made the movie something truly special, of course -- an artistic triumph to stand beside his "Schindler's List" and "Empire of the Sun." But working against this is the sad fact the human element of the story just doesn't have much of an emotional pull.

The odyssey makes little sense, the family conflict is contrived, the boyish Cruise fails to nail his character, and the kids are annoying -- indeed, the usually endearing Fanning spends so much of the movie screaming her little head off that it becomes grating on the nerves.

For a film to really explode at the box-office these days it has to be a kid movie, or at least a family movie, and so Spielberg naturally wants his film to work as a cuddly, high-touch, family-healing movie on the order of "E.T." or "Close Encounters."

But he doesn't really have the stomach for it. As he nears 60, he well knows that few innocents caught up in the wars of the past century were elevated or healed by them.

And his effort to put that spin on "War of the Worlds" is forced and rings false.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.