War Of The Worlds is just so-so

Humans are not under attack -- they are being exterminated.

Aliens are riding lightning to emerge from the bowels of the earth in giant tripods armed with beams that annihilate men, leaving only their clothes flapping in the wind. The tripods have shields -- a la Independence Day -- that protect them from earthly missiles and bombs.

And then, Steven Spielberg defenestrates the Hollywood cliché churner. Our hero Tom Cruise just flees.

War Of The Worlds is near

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There is no fight for humanity, no speech declaring we will not give up. Instead, there is chaos; there are dead bodies floating in streams, crashed planes, people fighting each other to survive.

Sadly, that is where the pluses for War Of The Worlds -- arguably the most successful movie director in the world's latest magnum opus -- almost end.

The movie kicks off with Morgan Freeman doing an Amitabh Bachchan -- lending his voice to a rather irritating narrative about how superior intelligences have been observing us like we observe organisms under a microscope.

Then you are led into the world of divorcee Ray Ferrier (Cruise), who is to baby-sit his 10-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) for a day while his former wife and her husband go to Boston. Interspersed with his children's indifference to a father who never cared for them are television bulletins about strange storms all over the world.

And then lightning strikes the town, repeatedly at one spot. Lights go out, phones go dead, cars conk off. Ray rushes with the rest of the town to find out. The earth splits, and the first tripod hits your senses.

Ray runs. He grabs his children and finds the only working car in town -- just one of the many loose ends -- and drives the hell out to his wife's place. But nowhere is safe anymore.

The rest of the movie is about very realistic special effects. And how Ray survives to deliver his daughter to her mom, who, strangely, is living where she is supposed to unscathed, and where Robbie, who Ray parts ways with because the teenager wants to stay put and fight and not run, has landed up, Bollywood-style.

There is nothing but good things to be said about the acting. Fanning is so extraordinary you wonder what kind of a human being she is going to grow into if she can act like this at 11 years of age.

Cruise -- who I blame for the girl I had the mother of all crushes on not giving me a second thought -- excels as the flawed hero who redeems himself in the eyes of his children. The dialogues are very realistic. Composer John Williams (not to be confused with the brilliant Western classical guitar player of the same name), whose filmography reads like a best of Hollywood compilation, shows why understatement is the pinnacle of skill.

But the aliens -- despite the bloodsucking -- never manage to scare you enough. Their superior intelligence does not seem too superior. Cruise survives disaster after catastrophe with typical Hollywood panache. Especially how he escapes from inside a tripod will make you ponder whether there is any reason for Bollywood-bashing.

The end, the explanation to why the tripods lose their protective shield and start behaving like drunk mortals, comes with Morgan Freeman delivering another irritating narrative.

A pity, because it is a twist that could lifted the movie -- from the just so-so it is -- to brilliant.