The second approach, far more difficult for a director to pull off, is to underlay these thrills and chills with deeper significance. For example, M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), which, while flawed in many respects, contained its share of tautly-directed scenes dramatizing the tension between its main characters. These scenes underscored the point Shyamalan intended to make about the efficacy of divine Providence.

The chief problem with Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) is that it falls uncomfortably between these two poles. Its protagonists aren’t genial ciphers but they aren’t exactly believable, well-rounded characters, either. What they are instead is a standard-issue Hollywood dysfunctional family. They bicker. They squabble. They fight. And they do all of this while society is falling to pieces around them and the aliens are zapping everything in sight. In one scene, driving along at night after having narrowly escaped their ruined hometown, dad Ray (Tom Cruise) chews out son Robbie for calling him ‘Ray’ instead of ‘Dad.’ I don’t know about you, but if the Tripods of the Apocalypse were upon me, I’d have bigger things to worry about than the semantics of what to call my parents.

The constant bickering of the main characters wouldn’t be so much of a problem if a) there was some thematic point to be made by it, or b) we cared about them more. Sadly, neither is the case. Tom Cruise is badly miscast as Ray Ferrier, a dockworker (when was the last time you saw a stevedore with capped teeth?) seriously in need of some parenting classes. Cruise doesn’t inhabit the role so much as he rents it. He doesn’t act poorly, nor is he distracting; he’s just kind of . . . there. We react to the place he fills (Bad Dad, Unwilling Hero) and the dialogue he’s been given, but not to his acting. Dakota Fanning, on the other hand, is a good little actress, so much so that we fear for her character’s mental health once the events of the movie are over. Unfortunately, in scene after scene Fanning is required to shriek at the top of her shrill little lungs. After a while, she begins to grate on the ears as well as the nerves, which made me start wishing the aliens would put a stop to her (as well as my) misery.

The disagreeable characters would be easier to put up with had Spielberg some reason for making them that way. But he doesn’t really have anything to say about Family or Society or Faith; he merely gestures in that direction by, say, having a church be the first building to crumble once the tripods arise, or by bracketing the film with portentous voiceovers about the destiny of mankind. Here the film stands in sharp contrast to H. G. Wells’s novel: Wells’s narrator is a callous, self-involved windbag, irritating in his own way but hardly as distracting as the Ferrier family. The difference is that Wells wants you to read past the narrator, and to shudder at his complacency and lack of insight. The pompous voiceovers which Spielberg uses without irony (the aliens are “slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things [i. e., microbes] that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth,” Morgan Freeman intones) are taken almost verbatim from this book’s first-person account. Wells’s novel is a cogent critique of Victorian imperialism, intended to shock the British into realizing that their empire would not last forever. Spielberg, on the other hand, only hints in this direction (“Is it the terrorists?” one of the kids asks early on in the disaster) but the anticlimactic happy ending he tacks on to the film leaves the viewer wondering what, if anything, he meant to say with this movie. War of the Worlds would have been a far more pleasing film had Spielberg stuck to what he does best: entertainment.