Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. Rated 14A. Now playing at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas, Colossus Langley, Grande, Paramount Vancouver, and others

The shadows of many movies loom over Steven Spielberg's take on War of the Worlds like so many alien tripods. There's the 1953 version, of course, of the famous H.G. Wells novel, which had suave Gene Barry battling the strange predators. And is there any sci-fi movie that hasn't been influenced by the Alien series started by Ridley Scott in 1979? But the spookiest spectre in the impressive new film is that of the Holocaust.

While Spielberg tackled both the nuts and bolts and the moral dimension of Nazi atrocity in Schindler's List, here he lingers in the mood of it. The sense of being hopelessly outnumbered, of being subject to a ruthlessly malign force, is the state in which Tom Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier, finds himself for most of War's gripping two hours.

There's a brief quote from the Wells book-which finds Morgan Freeman switching from penguins to observing human behaviour "in its infinite complacency"-and just a few minutes establishing Ray's life as a macho crane jockey and all-around crappy dad and ex-husband. Then the negative thrill ride begins. Almost as soon as precocious daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), and sullen teenage son, Robbie (Nanaimo-born Justin Chatwin), are dropped off for the weekend a freak electrical storm strikes his urban hovel under the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the movie's most riveting CGI sequence, the storm triggers an eruption of saucerlike thingies that are obviously from some other place, and their intentions are not at all E.T.-like. Once these orbs take off and start blasting everything that moves, the sight of New York skies erupting in death, with white dust left behind, can't help but evoke a certain event that happened there almost four years ago.

The aura of dread purveyed by Spielberg, here working from an adaptation by Josh Friedman and Jurassic Park veteran David Koepp, doesn't just key into recent developments. There's something grossly and timelessly egocentric about this whole genre, in which unknowable others cover great distances to get us, specifically. You'd think a species advanced enough to bury time-release capsules and watch humans over the millennia would simply choke us with some deadly gas or send out heat rays (as they did in the book) or maybe pump up carbon-dioxide emissions and melt the polar ice caps-no, wait, we're doing that. But it's just so much more cinematic to have aliens come, like a race of tentacled Godzillas, to chase every last one of us down individually.

Is that fun? Well, the whole affair has a grimy, desaturated look, and Ray's connection with his family is clearly meant to be depressing. The movie's darkest moment comes when Rachel-definitely recalling the near-mute Newt in Aliens-stumbles onto a stream with floating horrors.

That may sound like a downer, but the movie still wraps up too quickly. This is fairly faithful to the book's schemata, but it's not exactly satisfying. Somehow, Spielberg couldn't bring himself to stay in this ghost-ridden world for a minute longer and decided to remind everyone that this is only a movie. But, as they always used to say at the end of '50s chillers, is it?