C+

The last time H.G. Wells’s famous book was made into a movie, it was called “Signs,” and M. Night Shyamalan, who didn’t advertise the dependence of his updating, eschewed its big canvas in favor of something more intimate, concentrating on a single family’s reaction to the alien invasion. Now Steven Spielberg returns not only to the original title (minus the introductory article)–and to Wells’s basic story arc (the narration intoned by the ubiquitous Morgan Freeman at the beginning and end comes almost directly from the book), though many details are naturally changed and incidents added–but also to the massive scenes of destruction and crowd panic that marked both George Pal’s 1953 adaptation (well directed by the underrated Byron Haskin) and another unacknowledged filmization, Roland Emmerich’s big, dumb 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day.” But he subtracts from both those movies as well as borrowing from them, avoiding Emmerich’s cartoonish sensibility and Haskin’s anti-communist subtext (which he replaces, it must be noted, with an anti-terrorist one); his picture is a somber, serious story about how human civilization can be threatened from outside. And he takes a page from Shyamalan’s notebook, adding a familial element by centering the piece on an absentee father who reunites with his children by protecting them from the invaders. Unfortunately, while “War of the Worlds” certainly succeeds in painting the big picture, it works much less well on the domestic side. Or to put it another way, the movie functions on all cylinders when it sticks to the alien side of things, but its human component is weak.

That’s rather a surprise coming from Spielberg, who’s previously shown considerable skill in balancing the two. Both “Close Encounters” and “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” had really affecting, if highly manipulative, family dramas to accompany the special-effects elements; they had an emotional core to enliven the sci-fi stuff. And even in his early movies that emphasized the mechanical aspects of the craft–“Duel” and “Jaws,” which were, after all, just brilliant Hitchcockian examples of audience manipulation–he took pains to feature characters who might have had a pulplish center but were really engaging.

That’s not really the case here. The director has a field day with the big sequences: the lightning storm that presages the initial attack is expertly staged and scored (although there’s surely an overabundance of sheets hung out to dry in the backyards of the working-class New Jersey neighborhood, merely to show us all the cloth flapping madly in the wind), and the first emergence of an alien attack vessel from beneath a city street, ripping the concrete apart in the process, is a great set-piece (even if the following shots of the hero running away while people and real estate are pulverized just behind him aren’t much more impressive than the rear-projection efforts familiar for fifty years). The later sequences of the so-called Tripods lumbering across the landscape, making what sound like hydraulic noises and occasionally emitting a fog-horn-like signal, are impressive, particularly as they’re photographed by ace cinematographer Janusz Kaminski in a grim, murky, smoke-filled style that gives them a haunting quality. (Here one feels in the visual design a curious cross between Pal’s sleeker flying ships and the clanking machine of Kurt Neumann’s rather wacky 1957 “Kronos.”) John Williams’ pulsating score enhances the atmosphere at these moments, too. And Spielberg is predictably at his best in the scenes where the aliens almost stumble upon the hiding humans–one in which a bunch of them amble around a basement, apparently just exploring, and even more in the inevitable sequence when the invaders’ snakelike periscope slithers around the same place, always just missing our heroes by inches. (Again, Williams’ music adds to the tension.)

But while one can admire the dexterity with which all the commotion and hide-and-seek are choreographed, the fact remains that the family members who serve as the audience surrogates never generate the emotional pull they need to make us care about the story (as opposed to appreciating the parade of visuals). Maybe that’s because Spielberg is once more paired with Tom Cruise, whose macho posturing and clench-jawed intensity don’t fit with the kind of slightly frumpy, seemingly ineffectual protagonist Spielberg’s always worked best with (remember that even in “Jaws,” Robert Shaw played second fiddle to Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss). “Minority Report,” their earlier joint effort, was more notable for its surface virtuosity than anything else, and the same is true here. It doesn’t help that Cruise’s character Cruise–divorced dock worker Ray Ferrier, who’s stuck with his kids Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin) on the weekend the invasion occurs–is sort of a self-centered jerk whose growing devotion to his children never really convinces. (Nor do the unique abilities the Josh Friedman-David Koepp script endows Ray with. Apparently’s he’s the only civilian who realizes how to get a car started again after the alien energy bursts immobilize them, apart from the TV news van that’s still conveniently running and all the military vehicles that are apparently unaffected; and later on he alone not only proves able to bring one of the Tripods down from the inside after being captured by the aliens but is also the first to notice that the alien force-field shielding their machines from bombardment has gone down.) But even within the limitations of the writing, Cruise’s performance never gets much below the surface. And the children aren’t any better. Fanning is as mannered as ever; she comes across as a stiff, porcelain figure whose main contribution to the proceedings is a piercing shriek that occurs with distressing frequency. Chatwin sulks decently as the rebellious Robbie, but he’s hamstrung by the one-note nature of the part. The only other cast members of consequence are Miranda Otto, as Ray’s beatifically pregnant ex-wife, and Tim Robbins, usually a subtle and refined actor, who under Spielberg’s curiously heavy-handed direction chews the scenery mercilessly as Ogilvy (the name comes from the book, too), an oddball who gives Ray and Rachel shelter in his cellar. (He does, however, get to declaim a line which, in real-life, he might, as an anti-Bush activist, agree with. “Occupations always fail,” Ogilvy says.)

The picture’s failure to bring its lead characters fully to life is repeated on the larger canvas as well. There’s an oddly misogynist tone to its overall depiction of humankind, most notably in a scene in which the Ferrier family is attacked in their van by a mob of crazed refugees and another involving a ferry (giving Spielberg an opportunity for another set-piece, “Titanic”-style this time). The absence of any real nobility in the admittedly grim circumstances (a problem that certainly didn’t afflict “Schindler’s List,” set in a similarly appalling situation)–with Ray’s final encounter with Ogilvy being perhaps the most savage example–leaves this “War” a curiously bloodless affair, despite all the carnage. It also makes the concluding “happy” ending in Boston seem unearned (as well as, quite frankly, unlikely from a practical perspective). But then, family and personal redemption must, one supposes, be celebrated at all cost, even the sacrifice of plausibility.

The verdict? This anti-“Close Encounters” is a spectacular technical exercise, but in the final analysis it’s as loud and soulless a piece of equipment as the aliens’ Tripod Death Stars.