It dazzled me but didn't affect me. That would be my seven-word review for War of the Worlds.

This film encapsulates everything I like and loathe about Hollywood movies -- and Steven Spielberg sci-fi movies in particular. It's well-made, but predictable and kinda soulless.

Let's start with the plot. While I'm quite aware that Spielberg is working from a classic story, he's the auteur, and he has every right to reshape H.G. Wells's tale for 21st century sensibilities.

What he comes up with is crushingly conventional. If you see the film and want to amuse yourself or your companion, ask yourselves, "Gee, I wonder if this will happen next?" Feign surprise when it does -- and almost invariably, it will.

Besides an uncompelling storyline, the main characters didn't interest me that much.

Tom Cruise is Ray Ferrier, a muscle-car-loving Brooklyn dockworker who used to be married to Mary Ann Ferrier.

This had my raising my eyebrows, because there was more than a whiff of the upper middle class about her, and it made me wonder what would have ever drawn them together long enough to produce two kids about seven years in age apart.

Anyway, Mary Ann is now with Tim, the stiff, white-collar twit of her dreams, but it's Ray's weekend to take the kids.

Funnily enough, his teenage son Robbie is alienated from him (no pun intended), although he gets on better with his eerily precocious 10-year-old daughter Rachel (played by the ever-eerily precocious Dakota Fanning).

Anyways, the film gets right to the business at hand: A bizarre series of global storms hatches a vast army of death-dealing "tripods." And from there, it's a race to survive.

Actually, I would say minutes 15 to about 25 are among the most visually compelling of the film.

But while Cruise is a movie star, it's questionable whether he's a great actor -- particularly in this film.

His portrayal of Ray did absolutely nothing for me. If you see the film and you're feeling energetic, please try and convince me why I'd be wrong in finding Ray was just another generic Tom Cruise-ified character.

Robbie's character left me fairly cold too. He gets obsessed with fighting back against the invaders and screams "you have to let me go!" at Ray on the hillside of one such futile battle. Ray did. And thus did Robbie become a man. Or at least I assume that's what the point was.

While attempting to keep Rachel alive, Ray becomes trapped in a cellar with a wild-eyed ambulance driver named Jack, played by Tim Robbins.

Robbins, a certified Hollywood leftist, mutters one line about "no occupation has ever been successful" (I wonder if the anti-Iraq-war-activist begged Spielberg to put that line in).

Anyway, by the movie's end, I found myself having spent two hours with a story that didn't captivate me and with characters I didn't really give the proverbial rat's behind about.

Was there anything good?

Technically, the film is well made. There are some sequences which I did find genuinely gripping. I did see some stunning art direction in places, the kind that mark a Spielberg film at its best.

But even then, the visual lineage of some of the alien creatures could be traced right back to, well, Alien! That flick was released in 1979. Why have filmmakers stayed so static in their imaginings of predatory aliens? That's another reason why I found myself sighing, "I've seen this before."

While the movie doesn't deserve a total trashing, I certainly can't imagine under what circumstances I'll be seeing it again.

There are simply better scary alien monster movies out there.

Frankly, if it's scary you want, go see George A. Romero's Land of the Dead.

Addendum:

I posted this over at CanadianJournalist:

In the just-opened War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise's character stumbles out of the basement of his ex-wife's house (long story) the day after the alien invasion of earth has begun to find a jetliner has crashed in the neighborhood.

Also on the scene was a CBS TV news truck.

The journalist was trying frantically to upload images, but everyone was down. But she did show Cruise video of the lightning bolts, in which you could see aliens being transported down.

When it came time to part, she asked him: "Were you on that plane?" Cruise said no. "Too bad," she said, eyes glittering. "It would have made a great story."

Actually, while surviving a jet crash is normally a pretty good story, I think it's trumped by aliens coming to exterminate human life on earth. :)