Quiet as the publicity department at Paramount has tried to keep it, the earth is under attack by aliens. I know what you're thinking: what, again? Once upon a time - for example, in 1938, when Orson Welles scared the bejesus out of America with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast - the pop-cultural spectacle of invasion from outer space could raise some real alarm. Of course, as a thousand think pieces over the next week or so are sure to remind us, Welles's Martians were symbolic displacements of actual threats, a role that marauding space creatures have often been happy to take on, especially during the cold war. But with "Mars Attacks!" and "Men in Black" - and even "Independence Day" - the aliens and their minions at the studios began to get a little self-conscious and somewhat less ambitious. The Martians were content to be temporary diversions from our true fears rather than allegorical crystallizations of them.

　　  

　　 "War of the Worlds," Steven Spielberg's reasonably entertaining rendering of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel that also inspired the other Welles, makes a gesture toward reversing that trend. Mr. Spielberg's extraterrestrials, who rampage across New Jersey in metal death-ray-shooting tripods are - I'm looking for the precise critical term here - wicked scary. And the terror they spread as they incinerate buildings and vaporize people cannot help recalling more immediate and painful scenes.

　　  

　　 "Is it the terrorists?" shrieks 10-year-old Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning) to her stressed-out father, Ray (Tom Cruise), as they flee Bayonne in a stolen minivan. He is perhaps too preoccupied to give the honest answer, which is: "Well, sort of, sweetheart. In a metaphorical sense, that is." (Morgan Freeman's voice-over narration, taken pretty much verbatim from the Wells novel, helps to underscore this point.)

　　  

　　 It is tempting, and not altogether out of place, to take "War of the Worlds" and last summer's Spielberg movie, "The Terminal," as the director's responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. "The Terminal" is a soothingly utopian post-9/11 movie, proposing decency, solidarity and good humor as antidotes to fear and anxiety, while "War of the Worlds" is nerve-rackingly apocalyptic, offering an occasional reprieve but not much solace. It is, in other words, a horror movie, and one that does not, for the most part, insist too heavily on its own topicality. As such, it takes Mr. Spielberg back to his early days as a maker of lean, sadistic, effective thrillers. Although the special effects are elaborate and expensive, "War of the Worlds" has some of the stripped-down ingenuity of "Jaws" and "Duel." Like those pictures, it is an elemental story of predator and prey. Unlike Mr. Spielberg's more recent films, in which he has used his unparalleled skill as a visual storyteller to create a complex tapestry of emotions, this one follows the thread of a single human reflex: fight or flight.

　　  

　　 Mostly flight. Ray is a divorced longshoreman with weekend custody of his two children, Rachel and her uncommunicative teenage brother, Robbie (Justin Chatwin). Ray is not exactly a candidate for father of the year; he keeps a V-8 engine on his kitchen table and little besides half-empty condiment bottles in his refrigerator, and bonds with his son mainly by browbeating him.英语影评 Once the aliens start vaporizing the neighborhood, Ray's reaction is less than exemplary, but he does manage to keep his family together and on the run, and thus buys a chance at the redemption you know is coming his way. Millions of deaths and incalculable property damage seem like pretty expensive family therapy, but it's heartening to know that even an alien invasion can provide an opportunity for learning and growth.

　　  

　　 In any case, the psychological drama occupies as narrow a compartment in Josh Friedman and David Koepp's script as the current-events allegory. Mr. Cruise has lately proven himself to be much more interesting and unpredictable as a talk show guest than as an actor, but he remains adept at playing - either with or against type, depending on how you look at it - a jerk brought low by circumstances beyond his control.

　　  

　　 Ms. Fanning, Hollywood's favorite endangered child, screams her head off, an appropriate enough response. The only other noteworthy piece of acting comes from Tim Robbins as a possibly deranged survivor hiding from the invaders in an abandoned barn. After a few minutes in his company, you can only wish that the Martians - or maybe the bloodthirsty puppets from "Team America" - would hurry up and do their job.

　　  

　　 But acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking. Think of "War of the Worlds" as a riposte to his competitors - Michael Bay, Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich and their profit-turning ilk - and as a primer on how to mix computer-generated imagery with the techniques of classic, large-scale cinema.

　　  

　　 The visual atmosphere of "War of the Worlds" is the work of a team - including the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the costume designer Joanna Johnston, the editor Michael Kahn and the production designer Rick Carter - who all have worked with Mr. Spielberg many times, and their collective expertise gives the picture a crisp, seamless texture. Another longtime Spielberg collaborator is John Williams, whose score is striking partly as a result of how sparingly it is used. For long stretches of the movie, you hear no music at all, which deepens both the realism and the dread, and immerses you more fully in what you are seeing.

　　  

　　 Which is, all in all, fairly spectacular. There are scenes and images in "War of the Worlds" that are especially stunning for seeming completely effortless. The first alien attack, in which a lightning storm from above is followed by the emergence of the tripod vessels from underground; a panicked crowd scene at a Hudson River ferry landing; a devastated suburban subdivision into which a plane has crashed - all of these are reminders of how sublime, how aesthetically complete, a few moments of film can be.

　　  

　　 "War of the Worlds" is perhaps best appreciated as an anthology of such moments, bound together by a serviceable, if familiar, conceit. The film also allows Mr. Spielberg to indulge in the minor vice of self-quotation. An alien thoughtfully fingers a bicycle wheel, perhaps thinking of his benevolent kinsman . The ear-splitting signal that the attack vessels emit sounds a bit like the first two notes of the "Close Encounters" siren song. An alien probe has the long, twisty neck of a "Jurassic Park" dinosaur and the eyeball of the surveillance spiders in "Minority Report." All of which serves as a reminder - perhaps superfluous - that this is only a movie, and a lesser Spielberg movie at that. But "War of the Worlds" also succeeds in reminding us that while Mr. Spielberg doesn't always make great movies, he seems almost constitutionally incapable of bad moviemaking. It's not much to think about, but it's certainly something to see.