Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins (I)

6 out of 10 stars: Steven Spielberg used to have an inerrant ability to understand how the audience was experiencing his films, to know where we were emotionally and why. In recent years, as evidenced in his last four uneven movies, he's lost some of that innate ability: A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal all suffered from a distinctly tin ear. But this phase reaches its apex (and final iteration, I hope) with War of the Worlds.

Masterfully made but resoundingly depressing, War of the Worlds bills itself as a summer ride but is more like a sci-fi Holocaust film; it invokes terrorism, genocide, chaos, and extinction. Ooooh, that's why Tom Cruise has been flogging this film so hard. It really does need it! The folks at Paramount realized it's no fun!

The no fun starts quickly. We meet rascally Ray Ferrier (Cruise), a dock worker who moves cargo vans. He arrives home just as his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) is dropping off their two children, Robbie (Justin Chatwin, worth watching) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Soon after there are news reports of unexplained lightning storms that are plunging the Ukraine into darkness and clouds ominously appear over Ray's house (Spielberg uses the same ominous single eye of the cloud that he has employed so well in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Prince of Egypt, Poltergeist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and others; Steven's a cloud guy). The lightning strikes emit an electronic pulse that disables all electronic devices and they bring to life massive vehicles that have been buried under the ground, which rise and begin to zap everything around them. Ray grabs his two children and steals a working van, driving like a fiend over the highway of stalled vehicles and migrating people (which allows Spielberg to do something he couldn't quite pull off in Sugarland Express - a full pan around a speeding car). Soon a bonafide war between mankind and the invading force is on, with refugees heading for safety, the machines in hot pursuit.

But Spielberg used to know how to build tension to an almost unbearable point and then give the audience a rest, leavened with humor, only to build yet again. In WOTW, it's as though he hasn't been watching the previous footage. After their escape from the city the nuclear-Ferrier family moves into the basement of their mother's abandoned house. They've dodged thousands of cars, watched an entire expressway get overturned along with the deaths of hundreds of people, at least, and Rachel Ferrier proclaims she wants to sleep in her own bed; "I've got back problems," she quips. What little girl would ever say this?

In a completely stupid moment, Ray meets an investigative team from CBS who get to provide us with a global perspective of the action (they show him tapes of squadrons of the machines tromping over cities). They're outside of the wreckage of a downed airplane and, (after they've provided their David Koepp-inspired Jurassic Park exposition) the reporter asks Ray if he was one of the passangers on the downed plane. "No," he answers. "Too bad," she says, "It would have been a really great story." Geesh lady, haven't you been watching your own tape? I think "World Attacked! Cities in Ruin! Millions Killed!" would pretty much marginalize "Guy Survives Plane Crash." Why didn't Spielberg think about it?

A little later, in a painfully unbelievable sequence, the Ferriers pull off the side of the road because Rachel has to go to the bathroom. This little girl, who at points is hysterical, at other points in shock, decides she needs to go behind a tree, way across an open field, so no one will see her. One can imagine this happening with one of the Spielberg children on a road trip and Steven taking that and insisting it be in his movie (maybe it was screenwriter David Koepp's idea, that's possible too). Except it doesn't fit. Any normal individual, who had just watched a good portion of New York wiped out by something that remains unexplained, would pee by the back tire. What's worse is that this moment of levity leads to a grisly vision for Rachel, as she sees a river jammed full of dead bodies.

What happens over the next twenty minutes, including a long passage in a farmhouse basement, the appearance of Tim Robbins as a loose cannon named Ogilvy, and a further twist to the alien's master plan, is long and bordering on painful when it's not just damn tedious. It's most certainly not entertaining (well, the aliens are impressive). What's worse for Spielberg is that it feels like he's copying M. Night Shyamalan and his film Signs, the man who has made a career of scrupulously copying HIM. But Shymalan had the common sense to make Signs about the immediate attack on the home and effect on the family, as the CBS news van scene shows Spielberg wanted a broader canvas.

Then there's Tom Cruise, who is like a Porsche to me. I can admire the sleekness of the car, I know it's expensive and desired but I can't see me in one and I can't find anything of myself in his performances. He is so tense he nearly vibrates; even his rakish laugh has an underlying "Is this a good rakish laugh? Isn't this how an easy-going guy would laugh" sense to it.

As is bizarrely true of almost every Spielberg film, the children are fantastic. Dakota Fanning, delivers the most frayed, believable performance since Shelly Duvall in The Shining. In the latter half of the film, after she's been battered and bruised, her face becomes motionless she projects an intense, childlike serenity behind her catatonic state.

Justin Chatwin also makes the most of the role of Ray's rebellious (though goodhearted) son. In his confrontational scenes with Cruise it's Chatwin who makes it credible, as if he's actually witnessed a fight between a father and son that wasn't resolved by the nanny stepping in.

There are also number of logical quandaries in this film, real head-scratchers that go from the merely annoying to the plain unbelievable. Though the electrical pulses knock out everything a camcorder still functions? The aliens have scouted us out yet they attack the Ukraine first? The aliens planted their vehicles of mass destruction in the earth millennia ago…and we've never dug one up? The aliens have watched our planet with envious eyes (as the narrator, Morgan Freeman, says in the introduction, using the original Wells narration), and even been here before, yet they didn't notice the bacteria in the water and air? Whether it was the rush to get the thing filmed on a tight schedule or whatever, it's sloppy.

But then again, this is Spielberg. His worst stuff is still impressive. He creates several memorable moments such as an attack on a docked ferry and a chilling scene at a railroad crossing. The sound effects and editing are truly impressive and create part of the oppressive atmosphere of the onslaught. Cinematographer and long-time collaborator Janusz Kaminski almost compartmentalizes the various phases of the war, finding a richer, more realistic approach than his last few attempts, which were gauzy with dream-like edges. War of the Worlds is a technical marvel.

SPOILERS AHEAD

War is faithful to the book and the 1953 film's ultimate resolution. The aliens are taken out by microbes, which their bodies can't defend against. The machines topple. As one alien pulls its diseased body out of its smoking wreck, one almost expects it to say, "Hey, just kidding. We come in peace." It's utterly lacking in satisfying catharses. And after everything Spielberg has put us through, it's too passive an ending. His solution, to make up for that by having everyone in the Ferrier family survive, is almost an insult (if they'd have had a pet chipmunk we'd have seen that scampering out of Mary Ann Ferrier's Boston brownstone too). War of the Worlds goes out with a whimper, not a bang, and we leave the theater wondering when Steven Spielberg will come back to us.