I’m not going to argue that Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a great, or even good, movie. It is a good index, I suspect, of just how traumatized Spielberg was by September 11, whose shadow is everywhere over this dark film. The movie is a direct descendant more of Jaws than of Jurassic Park, where the foreboding is leavened somewhat by the wonder at seeing its creatures in situ, and where the devastation is limited by the dinosaurs’ dietary restriction of being able to chomp up only bad people. But here the threat isn’t only in the water – it’s in the sky, in the streets & underground as well as floating with glowing danger under the Hudson River. It comes looking for our protagonist & his daughter with its giant tentacle eyeball down in the basement (shades of Minority Report’s far more effective spiders), and sends out recon teams of critters that appear to be teenage descendants of that malevolent mother in Alien. And there are some scenes, as when a mob overwhelms Tom Cruise & his kids in the only working vehicle around, or when they are “rescued” by the ambulance driver from hell, Tim Robbins, where the human race doesn’t appear any less horrific than them. Whoever them may be.

Spielberg taps effectively enough into the same vein of free-floating dread that George W. has been mining ever since 9/11. And Spielberg offers no solutions. This movie’s “happy” ending – which I suspect will piss off everyone in Boston – is so sappy that it makes the Matt Damon visit to the Normandy graveyard in Saving Private Ryan that fades into a giant, worn American flag look like punk nihilism. The audience we sat with on Friday night laughed at the final scene. But when we stepped outside to see not one but two fireworks displays off in the distant horizon – a kind of lightning without the thunder – it took us right back to the early scenes of the film.

In that it is a somewhat faithful rendering of the H.G. Wells story – I don’t recall there being this concern with dysfunctional families, or with families at all, in the original – Spielberg has held himself back here, so that – as is not the case in Minority Report, the strongest of his recent films – this movie is never stronger nor weaker than Tom Cruise can make his reaction shots to each new revelation of devastation. Cruise is a poser more than an actor & only now starting to age enough to get a little beyond the pretty boy movie lead impression he gives to all his films. Our own John Wayne, he perpetually plays Tom Cruise, which puts a lot of the film’s dramatic weight on the shoulders of its supporting actors. In War, it is Dakota Fanning – age 11, but probably only 9 or 10 when this was filmed – who carries much of the movie. The very same actress who provided the narration to the Henry Darger documentary I mentioned last Monday, who was the girl in I am Sam & who gets her first starring role in next year’s Charlotte’s Web, Fanning actually may deserve an Oscar nomination for supporting actress just for holding up the weight of this behemoth.