by MARK SLUTSKY

It's the battle of the '70s blockbuster boys this summer, as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg go head-to-head with their latest offerings. Lucas, of course, had Revenge of the Sith, and Spielberg's got his second Tom Cruise sci-fi flick, an adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. And although the Spielberg movie may be less of a cultural event than the last of the Star Wars saga, in almost every way it's a better, more entertaining, more exciting, even darker movie - though not without its flaws. This is Spielberg we're talking about - what he giveth, he so often taketh away, and for the last decade-and-a-half we've always had to suffer a little for the good stuff.

In a lot of ways, War of the Worlds is reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, if the latter movie were actually good (not that it doesn't have anything going for it, but, well, I'll save that for another day). Both films use the same ant's-eye-view of an alien invasion: no President meeting with his generals, no NASA scientists, no spaceships, even.

The movie opens in Brooklyn, where Ray (Cruise) lives and works as a cargo-loader. His ex-wife (Miranda Otto) drops his kids (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) off for the weekend just before a bizarro lightning storm shorts out almost all the electric equipment in the area. It also has the effect of waking a gigantic slumbering three-legged, metal alien, death robot ship-thing - a "tripod," as they're referred to both here and in Wells's book. Ray manages to flee with his kids, but as luck would have it, there are a shitload more tripods roaming the countryside, and, well, they're pretty good at destroying stuff.

The first half of War of the Worlds, which chronicles the terror, the confusion, the escape, the total panic, is pretty great. From the moment the first tripod bursts out of the Brooklyn ground and starts zapping people, you're committed; the sense of confused calamity is totally gripping. The music is sparse, the camerawork is shaky and Spielberg basically films the stuff in the gritty handheld style that he and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski developed in Saving Private Ryan. One sequence in particular, on a crowded ferry, is amazingly tense and scary - Spielberg really works the panicked crowds well here, like the alien monster cousin of Titanic.

Things, however, start to stall a little with a dumb subplot involving Ray's kid wanting to join the army, and then a basement sequence with Tim Robbins that starts out pretty well but lingers way too long. And frankly, though the tripods look terrific, when you actually see the aliens themselves they're pretty much the same as any other uncreative movie aliens, and way too CGI - showing them kinda cuts the terror and is probably a mistake. The last third of the film is a bit of a choke (and the last five minutes are head-shakingly bad). But as an exciting, dark and quite scary summer sci-fi movie, it kicks Star Wars' sorry ass right around the block.

War of the Worlds is now playing

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