For practically the entirety of his career, Steven Spielberg has asked us to believe. His films have regularly introduced threats so that they might be neutralized in spectacular fashion, be they thoroughly abstract natural archetypes (Jaws) victim-slaves vaguely referencing reality (Temple of Doom), or genuine historical horrors (Schindler’s List). He’s known on some deep Freudian level that you can’t have release without tension, and he’s applied this logic to make us feel that problems are eminently surmountable with the right father-god at the helm.

Why, then, is all not well in War of the Worlds? The only father figure in sight is an irresponsible jerk named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) who can’t relate to his children and takes them for weekends from his ex-wife because only because he has to. He’s rather like the child-man Roy Neary in Close Encounters—except that he’s not rewarded for desiring lift off into the mothership, and he’s positioned as a leader instead of an adoring supplicant. The child/parent relationship that runs through Spielberg is wrapped up in one person, and he’s not up to the task of juggling roles—he’s resolutely underwhelming, if not contemptible, and it’s hard to understand what he’s doing at the helm of a Spielberg movie.

But that’s the least of our problems. This is, after all, War of the Worlds, from the H.G. Wells novel in which attackers from Mars lay waste to the earth without any fears of meaningful struggle. It’s an odd selection for a Spielberg libretto, because there’s no real opportunity for resistance—human weapons are useless, and people die early and often with no responsive payoff from an earthbound hero. We expect our man to get around this, because he usually does: even the profoundly traumatic A.I. credulously granted its child-robot’s wish to be re-united with his mother. But over and over again, people die in War of the Worlds, and their deaths are pointedly not avenged. Death is for once not a provocation to action, it’s merely an ugly fact, and its stench chokes the fort/da dynamic out of the movie.

There is a reason for this turnaround. When it was Reagan’s morning in America, the threat was somewhere out there: there was the bomb to worry about, but no genuine homeland threat that was real enough to touch. And so Spielberg was free to invent threats, and act as though they could be easily dispelled through common heroism. All through the “end of history,” he and his legion of less talented imitators managed to convince us that the messiah was coming and that this would be enough to get us by—no matter how many died, no matter what the cost. We’d always have our Indiana Jones’s and Oskar Schindler’s. But then the year 2001 came and went.

Thus the relentlessly Aristotelian rising-and-falling action of the old films has given way to the picaresque. War of the Worlds imposes no order on the events; Ray wanders the countryside with his children as they endure unimaginable horrors, and that’s that. Civilization collapses; survival depends on whether you’ve got the only working car or whether you can find a cellar beyond the aliens’ sight. Mobs of people fight each other until the aliens vaporize or harvest them, and for the first time there is absolutely no authority to turn to. The tripods are not cool machines to make into toys, never the aliens you love to hate. They are more like the Gestapo searching for Jews, slinking phallic sensors into buildings to exterminate the race of men for no other reason but that they can.

There are times when the film resembles nothing so much as Haneke’s Time of the Wolf : an abstract conflict responding to the psychic damage of a concrete one. Substitute 9/11 and the Holocaust for Haneke’s invocation of Sarajevo and you have the personal inpoints for this particular horror show. Unlike his approach to the real-life traumas of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg can no longer rattle off phenomena like someone doing a research paper. He will simply drop you in the middle of hell and tell you that all the complaints in the world won’t change its gravity. This is the response to Egoyan’s veiled shots at Schindler in Ararat—and as a riposte it more than does the job.

Of course he’ll try to back-pedal, tacking a spectacular cop-out ending that leaves the central family intact and Wells’s final upbeat words nonsensically used as a coda. But where before this was something he did gladly, it’s now done out of cynicism. It’s like clapping the lid on Pandora’s Box after all the sorrows of the world have escaped—Spierlberg feels compelled to do so, even knowing it won’t make much of a difference (except, perhaps, in terms of box office). The rest of the movie turns on chaos and sorrow, as is only befitting its subject, and it shows a filmmaker totally disenchanted with the concept of entertainment he helped pioneer. It’s a new beginning: the man with the finger on the pulse of the last phase of our culture now has it planted on the current one. And he’s responded to its rhythms in chilling, bravura fashion.