Now, in 2005, midway through our current decade, Spielberg is still writing the script on how his work will be remembered for this era. His latest, War of the Worlds, currently one of the top five most popular films across the country, is a bit problematic in that regard.

Although it began over the Fourth of July holiday weekend as the highest grossing opener for Paramount Pictures and star Tom Cruise, I would go so far as to say it will not go down in the annals as one of Spielberg’s top offerings. In fact, for a film with such high pedigree (it is based on H.G. Wells’ well-regarded 1898 novel, which itself spawned Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio broadcast and George Pal’s popular 1953 movie), it is difficult to see the finished product as anything but a disappointment.

War of the Worlds follows Ray Ferrier (Cruise), a selfish, divorced everyman from Jersey, who is stuck with his kids, teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and precocious prepubescent Rachel (Dakota Fanning), one fateful weekend when aliens (from where, we don’t know) attack and begin laying siege to the planet. Ray and his kids bicker and scream at each other while trying to evade the aliens’ marauding, menacing tripods as well as mean-spirited humans looking to commandeer their car… and all while attempting to safely journey north from Jersey to reunite with the kids’ mom up in Boston.

Whereas previous adaptations of Wells’ novel had their fingers on the pulse of the current zeitgeist – Welles’ broadcast, known for terrifying listeners because they believed our nation was truly being invaded by alien attackers, presaged the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and Pal’s film is rife with chilling, Cold War tropes – Spielberg’s latest toys with some of our current fears about terrorist attacks (in fact, one character, in confused horror at the carnage left by one particular flurry of activity, screams, “Is it the terrorists?!?!”), and even evokes some imagery from the real-life horror of 9/11.

While it certainly plays with still-raw wounds, this is not an inherently wrong choice, but Spielberg, working from an unfocused script by David Koepp and Josh Friedman, can’t seem to decide if he wants this film to be a scary allegory about our fears of an increasingly violent world in which terrorism abounds, or if it’s meant to be a metaphor about the increasing dysfunction within families and the difficulties of raising children. As it is, he misfires on both accounts, giving unsatisfactory handling of the terrorist aspect of the story, and a shamefully trite treatment on the “redemption” of Ray Ferrier, the formerly wayward dad.

Cruise, to his credit, is not the problem here. He goes out of his way to make it clear he’s a normal guy, not action-hero Tom Cruise.

Nor is there fault with the film’s production values, which are stellar due to the inestimable work of the Industrial Light & Magic effects crew and the top-notch cinematography by frequent Spielberg collaborator, Janusz Kaminski.

But the main problem here is the film’s dark, uneven tone, which makes the film less an entertainment and more an upsetting, harrowing endurance race, and its unclear message, which undercuts the film from having any lasting impact. In a recent Entertainment Weekly article, Spielberg was quoted as saying of the film, “I’m not asking a lot, I just want it to scare the crap out of the audience.”

Well, if that was his goal, he would have been better served to jettison the family dynamics altogether and should have stuck to using his protagonist as an outside observer, as he was in Wells’ novel. Perhaps then his film would have been a leaner, meaner, scarier machine… instead of a flawed, unentertaining exercise from a gifted filmmaker.

War of the Worlds is rated PG-13 for disturbing images and frightening scenes of sci-fi violence.