A handful of important details stand out immediately in seeing Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds for the first time.

First, how remarkably loyal Spielberg was to the original novel.

Second, how much many of us knew about the story line although we didn't know we knew until we saw the film.

Third, how economical Spielberg was in the use of his sets, often making one set due for several key elements in the progression

Fourth, how - despite all the hype (some of which I can take blame for) - this is a remarkably intimate movie, a character development that just happens to have aliens at the driving force.

With all pre-production criticism of Spielberg for deviating from the original H.G. Wells concept of an invasion from Mars, this film follows that script remarkably well - giving us all the essential scenes we need but in a compacted, dramatic and more assuredly spectacular way. Although Spielberg inserted his usual family crisis into the center of the work - something that can be found in movie after movie - this only gives depth to the story that had for the most part in the novel been lacking.

In this regard, earlier essays on the craft of Spielberg that can be found elsewhere on this site had the story right: Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise, begins the tale as a somewhat questionable father figure. While his daughter's love is unquestioning, his son is troubled and rebellious, often to the point of open hostility. This may even be reflected in small details such as Ray's love of the New York Yankees causing the boy to adopt a Boston Red Sox hat - a clear call to war in any New York Yankee fan's mind.

Ray's frustration with his inability to reach his kids causes him to throw things, such as a baseball through the window of his house early in the movie and a peanut butter sandwich against another window when they get to their mother's house possibly in Brooklyn a short time later.

The father/son conflict becomes the central metaphor for the first half of the movie, although the conflict changes slightly as the boy begins to show his own frustration at their constant flight from the aliens instead of turning to fight.

At one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie, Ray is forced to choose between saving his son or his daughter, as his son pleads to be allowed to confront the demons from space.

Outside of this family conflict, the shift in location from England to New Jersey and America's East Coast, the film retains many of the essential elements of the original novel. This includes subsections we might call The Arrival, the cylinder opens, the death ray, the appearance of the machines, the frustrated military, the ferry crossing, the farm house scene, the crazy companion - Tim Robbins , the red weed scene, the killing of an alien and the concluding scenes.

In each case, the Spielberg movie recounts the novel with remarkable loyalty to the original book - although he gives us homage to the 1953 movie with the searching eye and later the grandparents. He may even have taken a shot at the 1939 broadcast with a shot at the press in one scene.

With the exception of how the aliens and their machines looked and the almost insignificant role of red weed, we saw significant clips in the accumulation of trailers covering nearly every aspect of the movie.

For those of us who wandered through Spielberg sets, the surprise came with his creative use of each. While Newark and Bayonne played clear roles in the film, and those scenes were done pretty much in tact, the Staten Island shoot and the Howell Township shoot did double duty.

Without giving too much away, the film starts in Newark (with home scenes filmed in Bayonne but meant to be Newark) and carries over onto Staten Island, where Cruise weaves through stalled traffic in the stolen van until he gets to his ex wife's home where the exteriors were filmed in Howell, the basement shots filmed at the movie studios in Bayonne, and the interior home shots most likely studios in Los Angeles. Dramatic events which I won't go into hear drive them to seek the wife at her parents' home in Boston. The next sequence of scenes incorporates military use in Virginia or West Virginia (I forget which) and the already well-known crossing at Athens. Where the scenes with Tim Robbins were shot - I confess - I don't know. But the aftermath of this scene brings us to the wooden red weed scenes filmed in Howell Township. We again return to Staten Island for the slow march towards Boston. The Boston scenes seem to have incorporated the Connecticut concrete plant and street scenes from Brooklyn.

My theory of aliens as dinosaur went out the window as soon as I saw the film, and relied less on unreliable sources to depict the play by play. While the plot was hatched millions of years ago, this appears to be more of a future investment, seeding the earth with machines for that day when the crop of blood-bearing human kind would be ready to harvest. There is one small inconsistency in this concept of a previous visit which has to do with the eventual outcome of succumbing to human disease. But we could argue those diseases did not yet exist, etc. The alien walking machines are a marvelous expansion on the idea of the spiders from Minority Report but with many more interesting and deadly additions that add to the terror. The aliens are a cross between the evolved creatures in Gremlins and the creatures found in the Aliens series of movies. But there is also a touch of ET in some of the mannerisms and their curious innocence. To me, the machines are much more terrifying.

Red Weed - which is depicted on my website at an early stage before fully deployed - proved the greatest disappointment. Although it received some animation, it retained the limited role it played in the book - meaning that it acted as a barometer of the fate the aliens would play and provided a remarkably dramatic landscape when Cruise reemerges from the basement.

Although a key turning point in the film, the capture of Cruise and Dakota is merely one more action scene in an escalating sequence.

War of the Worlds is on the whole a magnificent narrowly focused movie that allows us to follow the fate of a specific group of characters over a landscape that has been decimated by an alien attack. While we get reports of other place, the focus remains firmly on this flight from Newark to Boston, giving us the things these characters saw, allowing us to feel what they felt. In bringing us the broader scope of civilization ending, Independence Day loses much of the intimacy between characters. In War of the Worlds we understand that Ray's managing to bring his daughter home through the worst hell humanity has ever faced has proven his worth as a father and has changed him into someone worthy of respect and being called dad. While we do not know much about the aliens in War of the Worlds, we know much more about the people, who went through the experience together.

In fact, this film is mostly about humanity, its good, its bad and its ugly. Ray's passage brings us through various social elements, of well-meaning people seeking to do good, of desperate people scared into doing bad, of crazy people like the Tim Robbins character - a former ambulance driver who has theories about striking back and perhaps a few pedophile tenancies.

But most of all, we learn about Ray, watching him grow as a person and evolving into the hero of this tale - one who we might not have suspected of heroic tenancies from the tale's beginning. Cruise does an admirable job in this transition, bringing to the role aspects of performance he has used in other films to make this character convincing.

It is this aspect of characterization that allow this film to age well when many other summer block busters do not, and it will be Cruise's performance that makes that characterization possible. But don't discount the special effects. They are remarkable.