SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A lot like Minority Report, the first 90% of War of the Worlds is among the best movies of the year and the last 10% is among the worst. Spielberg is the only one who can ruin his films and he does it over and over again because he's Peter Pan in a Captain Hook world. There has never been a more gifted visual storyteller than Steven Spielberg; in the five minutes of shorthand that opens his War of the Worlds, he creates three characters we care about, a world that we recognize, and a real hope that this time, this one time, he'll be courageous enough to follow a narrative through to its logical end instead of the one he thinks will least disturb his audience. His audience being one that he underestimates with such stunning regularity that it can be said with confidence at this point that he's not really underestimating anybody--that he knows for whom he's making movies, posterity be damned. War of the Worlds is a work of obvious genius that is about nothing, which is an amazing and disheartening thing to say because so much of the picture is composed of jaw-dropping--I mean it, it's astonishing--Holocaust tableaux mixed with 9/11 imagery.

The film has a moment in a wood where ash and clothing starts raining, ghostly, from the sky, and another where a passenger train on fire hurtles through a crossing, alight with the fury of atrocities past and future. It is pure rapture for long stretches, a kinetic tribute to the great paranoid, joyously-nonsensical science-fiction of the 1950s (it's stupid, but it's awesome!) that, alas, similarly lacks the stones to have Dana Wynter wake up a pod, or have Klaatu declare us a lost cause. War of the Worlds is one stunning moment after another: any ten minutes of it is indisputable showcase material. But they're just runaway set-pieces hooked to a thematic nothing, a disturbing suggestion that for all the things we've lost then and now (thousands of brave soldiers, thousands of neighbours we didn't know), we haven't lost anything. It's neither satire nor a critique of being disconnected, but rather a disconnected film. A celebration of splendid isolation in which a billion people die so that Tom Cruise can become a better daddy.

He's Ray, the world's shortest blue-collar dockworker and a bad dad to troubled Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and precocious hypochondriac Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Ray is divorced from pregnant (natch) wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), who leaves the kids with him for a weekend while she visits her parents in Boston. Why the kids aren't invited isn't as important as the fact that because this is a Spielberg film, the true tension is whether Spielberg will kill the grandparents when the hammer falls or have another of his patented dewy-eyed denouements where the hero hugs the pregnant wife in front of generations of approving upper-class kinfolk. Opening with Morgan Freeman doing more homey voiceover work that contextualizes an anachronistic white hero (Tim Robbins has an extended cameo, digging another winking Shawshank tunnel--and the self-reference continues when the evil ETs play with a bike), aliens come calling, riding giant ATATs dubbed "tripods" in what seems more like a nod to paparazzi than it does fidelity to previous tellings of the story. (Likewise, the camcorders that don't stop working once an electro-magnetic pulse wipes out every other form of electrical appliance. (Although it makes no narrative sense, by framing the initial scenes of carnage through the miniature screen of a digital camcorder, Spielberg threatens to exhibit self-knowledge about the remoteness of the film.)) The scenes of havoc are gritty and expert--Spielberg doesn't take vaporizing populations lightly, but by the same token, in sparing the characters we care about, he doesn't take it very seriously, either.

The best scene in the film unfolds on the side of a hill as the National Guard rushes to what they know is their doom just to give a fleeing populace a few extra moments of flight. Robbie is determined to join the rush, Ray is determined to stop him, and Spielberg allows the soundtrack to overwhelm the dialogue so that all that's left is a father trying to keep his son from throwing his life away in a war he knows he'd be fighting if he were a younger man. It's a timeless moment in a film full of the most purely cinematic moments of any this year, a picture that flirts, like Batman Begins, with the idea of our heroes being born underground along with our fears--shoved into our subconscious by the oppressive spirit of this age. But then comes the ending. The H.G. Wells novel is home to one of the great cop-outs in history (and if you haven't read it or seen the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin version, you should stop reading now) as the common cold kills the invaders (wouldn't superior beings possess knowledge of microbes and inoculations?); the problem isn't solved by Spielberg's film despite that the use of biological weapons would've found a cozy home in a film that is essentially about 9/11. In fact, if you look at the picture as a 9/11 allegory, then it's safe to call this conclusion glib and insulting.

But the real problem of this War of the Worlds is Spielberg's absolute inability, at least since the magnificently cynical close of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and with the exception of Catch Me If You Can, to conclude a film without a Hallmark moment. I lately want Spielberg films to reveal themselves as ironic fantasies--I want Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report to be in a tube dreaming of a happy ending instead of rubbing the belly of his knocked-up wife for real. And so when Ray arrives in Boston to see his family alive and well and languishing, completely unshaken, in a brownstone with no explanation of how the world could be flattened except for this 'burb, I wanted, badly, the scene where Ray wakes up, hooked to a machine with a horde of aliens probing him in an L. Ron Hubbard fever dream. Spielberg is the only one who can mess up a Spielberg film. That a filmmaker of his calibre, his non-paraleil skill within the medium, has only made a handful of indelible films (even if he's responsible for a multitude of indelible moments), speaks to how often he simply can't help himself. War of the Worlds is A.I. is Minority Report. I've never seen their equal until their finales, and then I've seldom felt more disappointed and betrayed.-Walter Chaw

1.82:1 DVD capture: War of the Worlds

Wow. At the risk of hyperbole, War of the Worlds features the most demo-worthy A/V presentation I've ever come across. As with Saving Private Ryan, the 1.82:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is purposefully grainy, but the compression is flawless, and I can't get over how much it 'behaves' like film in its interplay of light and shadow; a more uncanny approximation of celluloid latitude I've yet to encounter. But it's the audio, specifically the 5.1 DTS track, that seals the deal: at long last, Steven Spielberg has trumped Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach sequence for sonic fury and indelibility with the first tripod attack (chapters 5 ("The Machine Emerges") and 6 ("Heat-Ray") on the DVD), whose unnerving use of the subwoofer literally had my shirt-sleeves fluttering. Sidewall imaging is used to make the aforementioned heat-rays hellishly present, while even a comparatively quiet set-piece like the alien infiltration of Harlan Ogilvy's cellar puts all six channels to work in ingenious, joy-buzzer fashion. It's a great mix rendered with startling fidelity; relatively new to the field, sound designer Michael Babcock is going to need a bigger trophy cabinet. The only extra on this single-platter release* is the cursory "Designing the Enemy: Tripods and Aliens" (14 mins.), in which the likes of Doug Chiang and Dennis Muren--ILM refugees, both--touch on the various philosophies behind War of the Worlds' visual effects. Producer Kathleen Kennedy obliquely suggests that John Sayles' screenplay for Spielberg's abortive E.T.-meets-Poltergeist project Night Skies was strip-mined for War of the Worlds, but like most of the interesting topics broached therein, it's a tangent left unconsummated.-Bill Chambers

*Day-and-date, DreamWorks will concurrently issue War of the Worlds in widescreen, fullscreen, and widescreen 2-Disc Limited editions, the latter of which was unavailable for review at presstime.

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