So Steven Spielberg won't let the press review his film before opening day?

So what?

Anyone who has followed these pages over the last half year knows more about what the film will be like than the average viewer. But since no other pre-view will be done in the world, I'll just sum up what I know as an exclusive review of the movie.

The great film director is not going to deviate much from his usual script, adapting the book to his own anti-science needs.

The story will depict the usual broken family and will develop a subplot of how a greater threat helps that family reunite. The hero, Tom Cruise, will be a cross between the good cop in Minority Report and the carefree character he played in The Color of Money.

The movie will open with his character getting off from his job at Port Newark and heading home to his house where his exwife is waiting to drop off his two kids, a boy and a girl.

Ray - that's Cruise - is an irresponsible jerk whose attitude helped drive away his wife, although he still keeps her name on the mail box - covered over with electrical tape.

She complains about his being late. He shrugs it off.

But she wants something from him - which is not yet clear from the trailers. But I suspect that she does not want to be saddled with the children, that her new husband wants to start fresh with the baby she is about to have. (this is pure speculation).

For all of his flaws, he appears to love his kids, partly because he is still a kid himself. A slob (which wins him over for me because I am, too), his house is a mixture of pizza boxes and auto parts. His garage contains the hulk of a Mustang he is constantly working on.

Out in the yard - while he is playing ball with his son - a storm approaches. Or at least, he thinks it's a storm. His daughter - somewhat psychic - senses something more and warns him that this is something serious. He goes to downtown Newark (The Iron Bound) section to find out more, and a rain of small meteors hits, leaving holes in the ground - out of which the aliens begin to emerge.

With Newark falling to pieces behind him, he rushes home in a panic, yells at his kids to get stuff together for an emergency - radio, flashlight etc, and food, then he rushes out of their house to the local gas station where he -confronts the gas station owner - but steals a van.

It is just in the nick of time. One of the alien craft rises up from earth, destroying the gas station and the bridge as the van rushes away.

In flight from the invasion, Cruise drags his kids back to their mother's home but find no one there.

Ray's daughter, apparently wanders into the local woods where she is attacked by the alien plant growth, red weed, from which Cruise heroically saves her.

The flight continues as they made their way north - apparently towards the grandparents house near Boston - fighting their way across the ferry crossing, where snake-like tentacles with eyes grab up bodies to feed the insatiable alien appetite for human flesh.

At one point, Cruise's son may or may not actually die.

The military engage the aliens at one point, but they cannot beat back the invasion.

But Cruise saves his daughter and they take refuge in an abandoned house where the aliens sniff them out.

The aliens look a little like the Dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, except more stone-like in their features, a kind of combination of a pet rock and classic Grey aliens from Area 51 (or was that 41?)

Again after a dramatic escape, Cruise moves on with his daughter - finding the approaches to Boston crowded with people, hordes of desperate people seeking to save themselves from being the main dish in alien's diet.

As in the book, mankind cannot stop the aliens despite all we do, and eventually, because the aliens have been feasting on us, they die off from having clogged arteries and other typical human diseases.

Cruise will give us a typical performance, not up to the par of Rain Main or Jerry McGuire, but adequate in his role as hero. He will have grown more mature by the time he gets to deliver his kid to the grandparents at the end. He will have learned a life lesson that no ordinary earthbound disaster could have taught him.

It will take a war of the worlds to make this man over into a responsible, respectable parent, and make him appreciate his duties.

Although the special effects will wow audiences, giving us thrill after thrill, they are things we have already seen. The red weed will resemble the plants from Minority Report. The alien walkers will resemble the spiders used in Minority Report. And the aliens will look like slightly perverted dinosaurs. There will be dramatic explosions, crashing air planes and wreckage beyond belief.

War of the Worlds is loaded with in jokes to other science fiction films as well as to Orson Wells. You will see the original stars from the 1953 War of the Worlds, a walk-on by the owner of the Grover Corner farm which the radio play depicts. There will also be likely staff from the original radio broadcast.

The music will be powerful as in Star Wars and Superman, with Williams adding allusions from other scores.

In the end, audiences will leave the theater shaken by the sound effects, awed by the special effects, and perhaps instructed on the moral lack of humanity that invited such an invasion to take place.