THE Martians are back. Exactly 107 years after they invaded Woking — a ghastly map-reading error for which many tentacles presumably rolled — the aliens have finally scored a direct hit. Spielberg’s version of H. G. Wells’s novel, War of the Worlds, is quite simply the greatest B-movie ever made. Despite the Hollywood change of address, Josh Friedman and David Koepp’s screenplay is loyal to the original 1898 book, and the author’s delicious sense of sadism. After slaughtering his bourgeois Woking neighbours as painfully as possible, Wells then selected South Kensington for — as he put it in a letter at the time — “feats of peculiar atrocity”.

Spielberg imposes the same horrors on contemporary New Jersey. A sudden and spectacular storm knocks out every power source for square miles. The sky is a whorl of snarling clouds. The lightning strikes are lethal. And colour drains from the picture like bathwater down a plughole.

Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced dockworker, is standing at a junction staring at a pothole when the road splits open like an over-ripe fruit. A large metal pod supported on three giraffe-like legs bursts out of the ground and starts zapping everything in sight. A legion of these alien killing machines sprouts up like mushrooms and the screaming extras are powerless to resist. It’s not the most subtle scenario in the science-fiction pantheon, but as one-sided matches go it’s a fabulously good watch.

To what do we owe this fatal attraction? According to the doomsday narrator, Morgan Freeman, it is “alien envy” of our planet, and alien disgust at our “infinite complacency”.

How refreshing to see Spielberg rock the boat with nothing more shocking than pure old-fashioned fear. He prises the story away from kick-ass American presidents, sexy scientists, insane generals and Orson Welles’s famous 1938 radio broadcast, which caused nationwide chaos when millions believed that the Martians had indeed docked in New Jersey. Thus the usual handholds are missing. There are no ingenious bits of resistance and no TV anchormen telling us the score. In fact, the lack of any useful information at all is the clever and disorientating joy.

The story is shot almost exclusively from Ray’s point of view, and Ray is a shambolic, frightened man. Cruise plays him as if stranded between a panic attack and tears. His one stroke of genius is to hijack the only working car on the Eastern seaboard. His blind mission is to save his two tetchy children (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) from being vaporised or worse. Their journey north is like hitching a boat trip to Cambodia with Martin Sheen. They pass a river full of bloated bodies, a ghost train blundering through the night in flames and a feral mob of refugees trying to scramble on an overloaded ferry. You half expect the Doors to sing The End over the public address system.

Fear wraps every scene as tightly as clingfilm. Several nights cowering in a dismal cellar with Tim Robbins’s spooky farmer doesn’t exactly ease the claustrophobia. Meanwhile, the grunting tripods squelch their way across America. Their spidery, bulb-headed operators have a taste for human blood, and no respect for table manners. Unwary humans are sucked up metal straws like ketchup.

Elements of almost every Spielberg classic have gone into the making of this film including Duel, Jurassic Park and Jaws. But it’s the snapshots of fleeing humans incinerated by alien lasers, their shredded garments gently floating in the wind, that inspire the most haunting images. It’s impossible to look, and not be reminded of Spielberg’s career preoccupation with the Holocaust. There’s a scene where Cruise scrambles back to his apartment covered in human dust. “What’s that?” asks his daughter. He can’t speak.

Inevitably, there’s a soft centre to this visceral carnage. It doesn’t take much finding. Spielberg is addicted to squeaky values in the way that Bob Geldof is addicted to leaky causes. Here, it’s a homily about careless fathers. If they don’t shape up like Tom Cruise, their children will drop them like hot bricks at the first whiff of an interplanetary crisis. Frankly, several pounds of cynicism wouldn’t go amiss.

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