Spielberg, Cruise shine in remake with tones of Sept. 11

Extraterrestrial raids on planet Earth come and go in the movies. But it was the alien-invasion films of the 1950s ("Invaders From Mars," "The Thing"), with their echoes of Cold War fears of nuclear catastrophe from the sky and subversion at home, that particularly resonated with America's collective imagination.

Steven Spielberg's remarkable remake of "War of the Worlds" achieves a similar, powerful resonance with the American experience in the 21st century. During the film's first astonishing scenes of mostly urban devastation (in a city never identified, but it feels like New York), wrought by an invading force of extraterrestrials that attacks, sans warning on an ordinary day, it's impossible not to recall the rage and grief felt watching the televised aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Indeed that's the point of the first and best half of "War," though Spielberg isn't trying to stoke the fire of interplanetary jingoism in the sense that Roland Emmerich's 1996 tongue-in-cheek "Independence Day" did. If anything, Spielberg, a constant student of visual styles that expand and strengthen his storytelling skills, captures and tweaks the look, feel and emotion of extensive documentary footage of Manhattan under siege on Sept. 11.

It's all here: The way the sky is blotted out by smoke and ash. The way strangers huddle, run en masse or stop to gaze back in disbelief at the unthinkable. The way a small, ordinarily forgettable event — say, a man running by with a girl in his arms — can fix itself in one's memory, much like the sharply remembered details recalled by so many Sept. 11 survivors

In "War of the Worlds," an off-screen narrator (Morgan Freeman) — reading directly from H.G. Wells' prose — tells us beings from afar have been watching Earth's development for some time. Following a long-planned invasion scenario, thousands of aliens are transported, via artificial lightning, from space into gigantic underground "tripods," i.e. three-legged robotic vehicles (the latest in several movie variations of Wells' original concept) capable of mass destruction.

	SURVEY
	Will you be in line for the Cruise/Spielberg opus? No thanks, I already have Cruise fatigue. Maybe. Do the tripods get him? I wouldn't miss it. View Results

As in "Independence Day," invaders simultaneously attack every corner of the planet. But it's with deft economy that Spielberg gets across this global reach of the alien blitz without resorting to labored, computer-generated images of Paris and New Delhi in flames.

In a brief encounter with a television news crew, the film's flawed hero, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise, outstanding in one of his least self-conscious performances), watches a few video highlights of tripods stomping their way around the world. Spielberg's point is clear: The horror may be everywhere, but our experience of it is going to be strategically narrow — seen, heard and felt through Ray's survival instincts and personal epiphanies.

We may not see Big Ben or other man-made wonders toppled by death rays, as in Wells' book or Byron Haskin's classic, 1953 film version (which gets a quick salute in Spielberg's movie via a couple of cameo appearances). But we will see the inner and outer journey of a man's urgent quest to find home (like E.T. or the lost boy in Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun"), a pet theme of the director's.

Cruise's Ray is a divorced dockworker who, prior to this crisis, was so self-centered as to be barely tolerated by his adolescent son, Robbie (Justin Chatwin), and young daughter, Rachel (a brilliant Dakota Fanning). Faced with annihilation, Ray devotes all his energy toward his children's survival, ultimately sacrificing much toward that end.

Dodging tripod blasts, fending off an angry mob and taking desperate action against a panicked survivalist (Tim Robbins in a spooky but sympathetic character role), Ray's private, compressed anguish keeps "War" from developing sci-fi flick clichés. Ray may figure out how to plant a few explosives on a tripod and save a dozen people, but that doesn't mean the White House will be calling him to lead the charge against the enemy. Instead, he simply moves on.

Inevitably, Spielberg looks back at some of his most effective set-pieces from his earlier alien films, particularly "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." In one nerve-racking scene, Ray and his kids are sealed within a house shaking from the vibrations of an unseen force just outside the door while blinding lights pierce the structure's narrow windows. It's very much like the moment in "Close Encounters" when a hysterical mother sees her young son abducted by unseen, intergalactic visitors.

In "War of the Worlds," however, the effect is not so much peekaboo as baldly terrifying. Like everything else in this post-Sept. 11 movie, even the innocence of Spielberg's vintage gambits has been stripped away.

But there are new discoveries: The sight of a passenger train whipping along a railroad track through Boston, its cars full of a roaring fire. The image of a crowd of people in the distance, walking rapidly down a hill in strangely speeded-up, jackhammer movements — surely a trick of the camera or a mirage.

Perhaps unavoidably, "War of the Worlds," while remaining tense and exciting, begins to lose its potency and contemporary relevance as the story works its way toward a conclusion. Drifting away from metaphorical possibilities, the script by David Koepp ("Jurassic Park") and Josh Friedman has to tie up loose ends. An abrupt ending doesn't help.

But that doesn't matter much. The genius of Spielberg and his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, in those early passages, redefining the meaning and look of action onscreen for a new, truly dangerous era, makes "War of the Worlds" an important film.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com