We may not be seeing as many movies as we used to, but at least we’re hitting all the top-shelf summer blockbusters. Star Wars Episode III was a pleasant surprise. Batman Begins just may steal the title of Best Comic Book Movie Ever from Spider-Man 2. Saturday night was a date night, and I offered Stephanie the option of seeing Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but dodged a bullet when she said she’d rather see War of the Worlds instead. I’ve already read a couple of reviews, and I feel less original if I then turn around and write my own. Like I’ve poisoned the well of my own opinion by reading someone else’s. So I’ll call this a collection of unpolished impressions instead. Minor spoilers follow, but for anyone who’s read the H.G. Wells book, there are no surprises here.

What I liked:

• Four years after September 11, disaster films seem to be back in style, or at least tolerated. The destruction shown here is on a smaller scale, though. Steven Spielberg skips the pulverizing of landmarks for the most part, instead sticking to mob scenes, flung cars, and traumatized children. This works for a couple of reasons: it stays away from 9/11 territory (except for a few shots of bulletin boards covered with photos of the missing), it sets Worlds apart from last year’s The Day After Tomorrow, and it humanizes the apocalypse.

• Spielberg shifts back into Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan gear to capture the trauma of the alien invasion. There are no dismembered limbs or gunshot wounds in this invasion, though; victims are vaporized right out of their clothes. There is a positively eerie scene where said clothes float down out of the sky, amid the ashes of their owners; there is a spooky tableau involving a wrecked airliner that is straight out of Lost.

• Tom Cruise makes his character’s transformation to likability — from deadbeat dad to role model — believable and subtle. Cruise has considerable skill but, as a big-movie actor, is generally underrated. A lesser actor would have picked one of the character’s several turning-point scenes and beaten us over the head with it. I barely remember Born on the Fourth of July, the movie for which Cruise received the most acclaim, but I seem to recall that he pulled off a similar transformation in that movie as well.

What I didn’t:

• The aliens (when we finally catch a glimpse of them) are barely distinguishable from the aliens in the inferior Independence Day. Maybe after we beat them with a computer virus in the first movie, they came back five years later, only to be wiped out by the biological version.

• No summer sci-fi extravaganza is complete without plot holes. Cars, boats and electricity failed when required by the plot, and conveniently worked at other times.

• Dakota Fanning was really the only choice for the role of the daughter. Like Kirsten Dunst before her, she’s been typecast as the spooky-quirky-cute little girl. She’s handicapped by the script, which gives her a lot of screaming and saucer-eyed gasping, and not much else. She’s dangerously close to becoming an underutilized blockbuster actor along with Cruise. Let’s hope she survives the transition to adult roles as Dunst did.

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