fine Geoffrey O'Brien on Spielberg's (and Wells') "War of the Worlds"--

"The aura of virtual historical reality that Spielberg labored to create for the ghetto takeover in Schindler's List or the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan is here imparted to an invasion that might as well be historical: the devastation of twenty-first-century New Jersey by illustrations from a Victorian scientific romance. These almost fussily perfect vistas, like the extraordinary moment when the alien machines are seen from a distance standing knee-deep in the Hudson to feed on their human prey, evoke a peculiar kind of history painting: Landscape with Tripods, perhaps, an exercise in the Spielbergian sublime, where what devastates us does, from a certain angle, possess an undeniable abstract beauty. These spacious set-ups have a gaudy splendor far removed from the cramped dullness of the ordinary world on which the aliens intruded, a world in which the sole note of aesthetic liveliness was provided by a children's cartoon show. "