One of my favorite movies as a kid was the 1954 George Pal/Byron Haskin film of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. The sound effect that they used for the spaceships' weaponry is still fresh in my mind as an adult, and despite the dated nature of the effects, the sequence in the farmhouse, in which scientists Gene Barry and Ann Robinson first catch a glimpse of one of the aliens remains one of the most fun suspense set pieces I've ever seen in a movie.

So, the idea of a remake (or, more precisely, a second film version of the same novel) wasn't something I felt a burning need to see. But I kept hearing what a hardcore, scary movie this new version was going to be, and, hopeful and open-minded, I plunked down my matinee ticket price in the hopes I was in store for a real chair-lifter. (This term comes from horror master John Carpenter, who described the 1950's version of The Thing in that manner -- so scary he jumped out of his seat and spilled popcorn everywhere.)

Maybe I'm too hardcore. Maybe I've seen to many of these movies to be terrified anymore. Whatever the reason, I'm sad to say that the scares never came. The movie is certainly suspenseful. It's certainly chock full of action and narrow escapes from death. There's even bloodsucking going on. But no scares.

This version, like the Pal/Haskin version, is set in the modern day. (Actually, H.G. Wells' original novel was a contemporary tale at the time of its publication.) It follows the course of the invasion through the eyes of one family, in particular the family's immature father, Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise. Now, Mr. Cruise has been acting nine million kinds of crazy off camera as of late, but he plays it pretty straight in this movie and I think it pays off. When the movie begins, he's half an hour late picking up his kids from his ex-wife and you get the feeling he spent that half-hour tooling around in his midlife-crisis sports car.

Needless to say, the kids are not too keen on dear old dad. In a telling character detail, he watches his ten year old daughter try to lug around her heavy suitcase and continues to refuse lending a hand even when his very pregnant ex-wife picks up the heavy baggage and hauls it up the stairs.

There are tv news stories glimpsed that describe strange lightning storms and power outages in other parts of the world, but the kids (and Ray) don't feel too much like paying attention to these reports and watch Spongebob Squarepants instead. Soon enough, however, the strange lightning storms strike their neighborhood and (I hope this isn't spoiling it for you) alien war machines come crashing up out from under the ground and blasting folks.

The effects are, as can be expected from a Steven Spielberg/ILM collaboration, very, very improved over the 50's version, and when folks get blown away by the martian death rays it looks really, really cool.

But there are some lapses in the science part of the story that leapt out at me in this scene and kept me from being completely enthralled by it. You see, the aliens have electromagnetic pulse technology and they use it to plunge an area into blackout before they attack. Electromagnetic pulse, for those of you not up on your doomsday weapon reading, is a means to render all power sources completely useless. Not even batteries can work if they're in the radius of the pulse. (Supposedly our government has been developing these kinds of weapons for the last few years -- their use would be a lot less messy than our current method of shooting missiles at power plants before we invade cities with ground troops.)

Anyhow, as a result of this technology, everything goes dead. Power lines, phone lines, car and plane engines -- everything goes dead. Yet somehow, some yahoo is able to turn on his camcorder and shoot footage of the aliens rising out of the Earth. I'm sure Spielberg put that little detail in to set up a cool-looking shot later, as the cameraman is disintegrated and we see the aliens' tripod war machines advancing through the camcorder's display screen when it drops to the ground. But I felt like Spielberg should have known better.

And, to stretch the credibility even further, there somehow is one working car that Ray and his kids manage to get inside of and escape certain death when the Jersey turnpike rains down on the town after being blown apart by alien death rays. (The movie does offer up an explanation as to why this car works when the others don't, but I wasn't buying it.)

Science qualms aside, the scene is intense -- the movie may not be a chair lifter, but it is a nail-biter. For the next hour or so of the movie, Ray and his kids are on the run from the aliens and heading toward Boston, so Ray can get the kids back to the more sensible care of his ex-wife.

Dakota Fanning, the latest in a long line of creepily precocious child actors to appear in Mr. Spielberg's pictures, spends a lot of this hour screaming her head off, which is what I imagine most ten-year-old girls would do when confronted with the end of the world at the hands of alien invaders while mommy isn't around. So while her banshee wails bothered me as a viewer, they were true to her character.

Justin Chatwin, who plays Cruise's teenage son, isn't too pleased with being stuck with Dad when the world is ending either. He and his sister are on to the fact that they have their shit together more than their dad ever has -- one very amusing little moment has Cruise rummaging through a box of food his son packed before they got into the van, annoyed that there's nothing in the box but condiments. "I told you to pack food," Cruise snaps at Chatwin, who replies "That's all that was in your refrigerator".

The thing is, being stuck with a bickering family with no other real characters to distract us gets a little tiresome after a while. By the time Tim Robbins shows up as a shell-shocked widower late in the film, the main characters had worn me to my last nerve. Maybe that's why the big scares never came for me in the film. I kept hoping that these folks would get struck down by Martian death rays.

They certainly aren't without opportunities to buy the farm throughout the film, and yet they always manage to escape. And when they aren't being threatened by aliens, there is plenty of danger to be had from other people. (One of the movie's best moments is when they are overtaken by an angry mob who want to get their hands on the car the family is riding in.)

And I mentioned bloodsucking earlier. I don't want to spoil it for you, (although I guess I've let the cat out of the bag a little) but there is a detail from Wells' novel that was not used in the previous film version, in which the martians are covering the earth in a mysterious substance.

Like Spielberg's earlier film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, this film has a final scene that is so infuriating that you might want to get up and leave as soon as the alien crawls out of the mothership, the same way you wished you got up and left when Haley Joel Osment was trapped underwater speaking to the blue fairy in the previous film. Even a brief cameo by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, stars of my beloved childhood favorite, can't really erase the annoyance I felt during the scene (and by the way, if you blink you might miss the two actors, as they are cut away from very quickly).

All in all, this is a well-made popcorn movie with some great scenes and high-caliber special effects, but in the end it didn't convince me that this was a story that needed to be retold. I'd expect a bit more when I see the credit "directed by Steven Spielberg" appear onscreen.