'War of the Worlds' is no big deal

As a divorced dad, Cruise alternates through a succession of explosive action scenes and uninspired exchanges with his two screeching and moaning kids. Among disappointments of modern Hollywood, "War of the Worlds" ranks with "Pearl Harbor" and the "Planet of the Apes" remake, two other bloated spectacles conceived as blockbusters first, human dramas second.

This is Spielberg's "Attack of the Clones," a movie burdened with stiff dialogue and fatuous relationships, dolled up with the gloss of computer animation into a big-screen video game with puny humans as targets.

Millions are dying, yet unlike the wonderful blend of humanity and horror in George Pal's 1953 take on Wells' story, this "War of the Worlds" presents the masses as anonymous chaff. The only three people who matter here are Cruise's Ray, an undependable father, his 10-year-old daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), and his teenage son, Robbie (Justin Chatwin). We're talking civilization on the ropes, about to go down, and Spielberg's spinning a tedious tale of a manchild who only learns to be a responsible father when space invaders land in his backyard.

In the opening minutes, the screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp sets Ray up as a stereotype of the paternal ne'er-do-well, a guy who can't even manage to stock the fridge with food when his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) and her new hubby drop the kids off for the weekend.

After this superficial start, the fireworks begin. The skies turn blackish, bolts of blue lightning zap the earth, and towering machines bust out of the ground, wandering about on three legs and zapping people into dust and buildings into rubble.

Some visual effects, notably the alien tripods emerging, are remarkable and thrilling. Elsewhere, particularly in battle scenes involving the futile American military, Spielberg falls back on loud sound effects, colored lights beyond the horizon and close-ups of Ray and his terrified kids, as though time did not permit the filmmakers to finish the visuals on the drawing board.

Ray always seems to find himself at the heart of the storm, and though the screenwriters have told us he's a lunkhead, he manages to stay five steps ahead of the rest of the scurrying rabble and even pauses to point out a battle-strategy opportunity to oblivious soldiers.

He's like an "X-Men" superhero whose mutant power is a mega-dose of street smarts. Conveniently commandeering a minivan that's the only civilian vehicle still operating after the aliens' electromagnetic pulses fry our circuitry, Ray dashes away with his kids, a clear path somehow always appearing amid abandoned cars and mounds of debris.

Tim Robbins enters the movie with jarring abruptness as a semi-demented survivalist railing about payback against the aliens, and he departs just as suddenly. NASA's Mars landings have scotched Wells' notion of invaders from the red planet, so Spielberg opts for aliens of unspecified origin. He retains some of Wells' other trappings, including the gnarly red weed that spreads across the landscape, and Morgan Freeman delivers opening and closing narration largely lifted from the novel.

Flying machines have been the norm in science fiction, so it's refreshing that Spielberg stuck to Wells' terrifying conception of mechanical monstrosities on stilts. Yet with their fluid motion, the alien tripods look like something grabbed off the reject pile from "The Matrix" movies and given a fresh shine.

Likewise, in the few glimpses we get of them, the aliens look like computer-generated concoctions begged, borrowed and stolen from any and every recent movie about space beasties. The creatures are more frightening when Spielberg only offers a peek; once we see them full on, they're nondescript and boring.

Given his sensational body of work, Spielberg's entitled to a clunker, but it's odd how generic "War of the Worlds" feels, lacking any real stamp of who's behind the camera.

This might as well be the hokey crowd-pleaser "Independence Day," another not-so-short film about alien invasions. And sadly and strangely, a better one.