Having seen War of the Worlds only twice since it came out 24 hours ago, I would be insane to think I could provide you with an unerring road map through its meaning and symbols.

But because this is H.G. Wells and Steven Spielberg, you can bet your house that symbolism in image and action take center stage in this production.

Since Wells' book centers on the concept of survival of the fittest, the film will, too.

By picking Ray Ferrier as the hero of the film, Spielberg presents us with a dilemma because Ray of all people on earth hardly seems fit to survive an interstellar disaster when he can't even keep food in his refrigerator and barely knows how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

But more important for the concept of survival as a species, Ray is an incompetent father, a man who has paid to little attention to the process of regeneration that he has alienated his son and doesn't even know what is daughter is allergic, too.

This is a story of rebirth, both of the alien species and human kind - a represented by one of the least competent members, Ray. Although ironically, Ray makes a perfect symbolic counter to the invader from space, and is presented in the opening scenes as the operator of a cargo container device that strangely resembles the machines which he will later encounter. In some ways, he is the symbolic representation of the alien. He is the alien he must overcome in order to save his human side. While one aches for him to take over one of these machines and turn it against the enemy at some later point, but that would be taking the story too far into fantasy, and the struggle for dominance over machines is more subtle, as Ray provides a repairman with knowledge that Ray can later take advantage of in his escape.

Everywhere, we look in this film, we see images of regeneration - birth and rebirth, symbolic representations of those elements that go into the process of creating the next generation.

While the most obvious of these symbols is the fact that Ray's ex-wife is pregnant, nearly every scene is endowed with images that reflect and enhance this idea, from the cascading pylons of the Bayonne Bridge to the concept of lifting out and laying down containers at the port.

The aliens are not immune to this symbolism, either, and, in fact, if we look at the alien invasion itself, their shapes impregnating the earth with bolts of lightning, we touch upon the fundamental differences between the alien ability to regenerate and human kind.

While not overtly defined, the aliens appear to be slow in regenerating, and parasitic, generating future generation and their source of food millions of years in advance, needing time and great energy to make the process work. Humanity breeds so quickly that we might seem like maggots - as one character called us - to the aliens, and we often act in the spur of the moment, without plans, and without being prepared as Ray's flight from disaster without food points to.

Much of the movie seems to be inside the alien regeneration process, as if all the tubes and veins that are hidden from view in human birth are exposed in the blood sucking, people grabbing devices the aliens use and the red weed that so much resembles human veins or placenta at birth.

This is a very macho movie, about what it means to be a man and to be a father.

In their invasion, the aliens manage to disable the ultimate symbol of masculine potency, the automobile. Everywhere we look we see hoods up and people stranded, made that much more helpless for the slaughter.

Again, Ray - who is a poor father, but apparently a pretty able man when pressed - is forced to go through a process of rebirths that will allow him to put all the pieces together in order to recapture male phallic superiority (i.e. sexual prowess). Early on, we get a hint of this when Ray's boss asks, "Do you know what's wrong with you, Ray?" and Ray responds, "I'll introduce you to a couple of women who can tell you."

But Ray lost his prowess as dominant male long before the aliens arrived, symbolized by the disabled car in his garage (barely shown in the film) and the engine in his kitchen which appears to be under repair. But more importantly, he has failed to keep his family together, a critical element in survival as a species. He gets frustrated often as this inability in one scene tossing a ball through a window, and in another, smacking the glass with a sandwich.

In myth as well as psychology, Ray simply refuses to grow up - something that can be said of larger portions of our population and is no doubt meant symbolically here. He is ill prepared to prepare the next generation for the challenge of survival, and thus we have a confused and angry son who lacks direction and respect. In some ways, father and son are more like siblings. This fact is made clear when the Dakota character - Ray's daughter - starts to lecture Ray and he asks, "Do you think you are your mother or mine?"

Ray begins the process of maturing almost from the moment of the invasion, as if some deeper instinct in him, some message from the primitive part of the human brain takes over and begins to call upon resources even he did not know he had. When he lectures his son to go take care of the Dakota character, Ray begins to sound like a real father.

But this regaining of potency will take time and powerfully escalating symbolic rebirths, a fact that makes human kind superior in the end to the aliens. Where the aliens took a million years or more to hatch this plot against humanity, human kind is capable of change within a single generation - no within a single life time.

These symbolic rebirths are part of the plot as the characters scurry from basement to basement to handle each assault of the aliens, rising from each just a little stronger, wiser and more potent than before, so that by the time Ray is drawn up into the body of the alien machine, he is reborn finally as a fully competent and potent force that even the alien machines cannot defeat - at least symbolically. This is the real moment of triumph and the subtext that Spielberg added to the traditional Wells' plot, and symbolically - as the aliens fall to the more biological aspect, they were already beaten symbolically by Ray's rebirth. Ray has become worthy to be father to his own children.

Symbolically, the film seems to say that mankind must be born again to live on his own world, and that this rebirth process is a perpetual task that allows us to pass on wisdom and other attributes to the next generation.

The alien is defeated because it cannot adapt to changing circumstances, and while it is born again onto this planet, it relies on others for its survival, depending upon machines to give it potency, sucking the blood of people to give it nourishment. In some ways, the alien never does emerge from the womb, except to die.