IT IS an affliction that affects us all, to a greater or lesser extent, and it’s called the Nero Complex. It was diagnosed in the 1950s by the French film theorist André Bazin, and it describes the vicarious pleasures experienced by popular cinemagoers who, like the bloodthirsty emperor, delight in the spectacular destruction of cities, towns and various conspicuous landmarks. From the fall of Babylon in D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance to the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind to the annihilation of the White House in Independence Day, there’s no catharsis greater than watching the neighbourhood get nuked.

This week the Nero Complex is back on the menu, thanks to Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and the mother of all alien invasion movies, War of the Worlds. “On July 1, 2005, Earth goes to War!” screams the film’s promotional material, teasing us with the prospect of global demolition – the Taj Mahal in pieces, St Peter’s Square in flames, Big Ben in smithereens!

And yet, amid all the giant tripods, laser blasters and creeping red vines, what War of the Worlds actually delivers is a sombre film (reviewed on page 12) that exists, according to Spielberg, its director, “in the shadow of 9/11”, a film that contradicts entirely the rules of the Nero Complex, and one that proves conclusively that the era of the noisy, big-bang disaster movie is truly over — for now, at any rate.

The era, which climaxed in the mid-1990s, was the high-water mark of the Nero Complex. Thanks to a quantum leap in special-effects technology, as evinced by Spielberg in Jurassic Park in 1993, film-makers realised that disaster movies would no longer be defined by exploding miniatures (The Towering Inferno, 1974) or the sight of Charlton Heston dodging a storm of Styrofoam bricks (Earthquake, also 1974). If, the thinking went, they could animate dinosaur skin, imagine what they could do with masonry.

Thus the German director Roland Emmerich destroyed half of New York in Independence Day (1996), much to the approbation of audiences (it took $800 million at the box office) and Nero-esque critics who described the obliteration of Manhattan as “exhilarating and gleeful” (The New York Times).

Independence Day was followed by a wave of movies that depicted the wholesale destruction of human environments in thrillingly precise detail. From the Spielberg-produced Twister and Deep Impact via the volcano flicks Dante’s Peak and Volcano to Emmerich’s Godzilla and Michael Bay’s Armageddon, these movies transformed mass tragedy into relentless, jaw-dropping spectacle. Armageddon in particular added queasy sadism to the genre, with workers plunging to their deaths from crumbling skyscrapers and the World Trade Centre’s south tower taking a full-bodied hit from a speeding asteroid.

It was no surprise, then, in the days after 9/11, that the same movies that informed the viewing pleasures of the Nero Complex were partially blamed for the Trade Centre attacks themselves. “The movies set the pattern, and these people (terrorists) copied the movies,” said Robert Altman.

As draconian self-censorship pervaded Hollywood (Collateral Damage was out, Family Man was in), and that great media project Gulf War II hijacked Hollywoodian set pieces, the idea of ever innocently thrilling again to the sight of an exploding apartment block seemed remote.

Even when Emmerich, that maestro of the disaster movie, stuck a tentative toe back into Nero waters with last year’s The Day After Tomorrow he did so with a new, softer eco-message, with mini-tornados and a family melodrama.

Which is why Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is such an oddity. Watching the movie is like watching the director, ever the populist, desperately trying to balance the tenets of the Nero Complex (mayhem, spectacle, devastation) with the impulse of the age (sentiment, moral, message). David Koepp, the movie’s screenwriter, says: “We made a list of things we shouldn’t have in the movie — no destruction of famous landmarks, no shots of Manhattan getting the crap kicked out of it.”

Instead, the clear ambition of the project was to be the first genuine post-9/11 blockbuster, a film that didn’t shy away from new geopolitical realities, but embraced them.

And yet there is something fundamentally paradoxical, and frankly odd, about Spielberg employing the very genre that he helped to establish and that supposedly contributed to 9/11 in an attempt to explain the meaning of 9/11 itself. It is akin to the producers of the Child’s Play horror flicks making a movie about the murder of James Bulger. Or J. D. Salinger writing a novel about Mark Chapman. At the most basic level surely there must be a conflict of interests here? Well, yes and no. While the movie is redolent with striking 9/11 imagery — ash-covered New Yorkers fleeing down city streets, downed passenger aircraft and makeshift message boards — it also strains from the effort of denying us the big-screen devastation that a $100 million disaster movie so clearly deserves.

Here, repeatedly, the Nero Complex money-shots occur off-camera. A 747 crash; the big climactic confrontation between the US military and the aliens; the very demise of the aliens themselves are all alluded to, rather than revealed.

And it’s not because Spielberg doesn’t want to show it, or doesn’t have the technical means to do so. No, the real lesson of War of the Worlds is that Spielberg doesn’t show it simply because he can’t. Because times have changed, because genres move on, and because somewhere in the shock therapy that attended 9/11 the Nero Complex was miraculously resolved.

OTHER WARS OF THE WORLDS

The H. G. Wells novel (1898) Octopus-like creatures on 100ft-tall tripods attack England. Bacteria saves the day.

Orson Welles broadcast (1938) His radio update set in New Jersey caused families to flee their homes.

The first movie (1953) Byron Haskin’s film cast the Martian invasion in California. Stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson have cameos in Spielberg’s film.

The concept album (1978) Jeff Wayne’s rock musical featured Phil Lynott, David Essex and Richard Burton.

The TV series (1988-90) Radiation revives the invaders — who turn out not to have come from Mars!

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