Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins
Director: Steven Spielberg

Thank god H.G. Wells isn't around any more. He would've certainly felt threatened by Spielberg's war of flamboyance.

"War of the Worlds" unleashes a fury and fiesta of fear-filled flamboyance. It is almost like watching a supermarket of scares where cheap thrills aren't at all scarce.

The trick of Spielberg doing an apocalyptic movie is to make the pyrotechnics more advanced in their vision than what we have seen so far in the biggest Hollywood disaster movies.

Unlike, say, "The Attack Of The 50-Foot Woman", "Armageddon" or "King Kong" where humanity ran scared in a direction opposite to the threatening presence, in "War of the Worlds" Tom Cruise and his little daughter (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) have nowhere to run to.

For starters, Spielberg makes the father-daughter pair a victim of unknown terror. Mid-way when machines from outer space are shown on screen the narrative loses both enigma and terror.

And the way the tussle ends suddenly with soldiers blowing the machine into smithereens! Really, now... If only the wars that we fight with both the demons within and outside were that easy to vanquish!

Still, it is interesting to see how Spielberg defines and redefines the disaster epic.

While he approaches the material with a vision that is distinctly old-fashioned, he somehow misses out on creating emotions beyond the preen-and-pout. The sequence where Cruise and his daughter are separated from his brother amidst the brouhaha of mass destruction is so flat you wonder what happened to the epic filmmaker who made us weep at his vision of Nazi atrocities in "Schindler's List".

Perhaps Spielberg meant this work to be slight... and, if one may say so, somewhat silly. There is nothing here to grip our senses or make us want to embrace the characters and protect them from the disaster that they encounter so blatantly.

There are strange jumps in emotion. One minute you see Cruise's daughter shrieking hysterically in the car. The next minute there is a funny what-shall-we-eat sequence in Dakota Fanning's foster mother's home.

Spielberg lightens the load at the cost of the narrative's emotional graph.

You look at the film as a veritable playground of disaster. You don't really get involved with the characters or their predicament. But you do keep watching just to see where the tale takes the rather unlikely father-daughter pair.

Oh yes, daughter Dakota Fanning gives a far more compelling account of a disaster-distressed civilian than father Cruise, who looks a bit too spick-and-span to be calamity-struck. Watch out for the gifted Tim Robbins as an undercover refugee who provides shelter to the father-daughter pair.