In an interview given to Turner Classics Movies, Steven Spielberg said the War of the Worlds he did in 2005 is subtly different from the one he might have done prior to 9/11.

Prior to 9/11, Spielberg said he probably would have endowed the characters with more dynamics, showing them fighting back.

But one purpose of the current film is to show Americans as refugees.

As he spoke, images from the movie streamed across the TV screen, almost echoing scenes I had seen a few days earlier watching a video of Fiddler on the Roof, echoing perfectly some of the pre-Fascist Europe sentiments H.G. Wells seemed to want to project, showing a hapless human race running away from conflicts.

No wonder Spielberg sought to keep the details of War of the Worlds secret. This is not an image modern Post 9/11 Americans would want to see, regardless of how true it might be - and the masses of us who flocked into theaters to glimpse what we thought would be a summer blockbuster in which the hero wins the day, got to see the New York Metropolitan area population humiliated and broken, with all the military might of the American military unable to do anything about it. Box office sales would not have been nearly as good.

Although Spielberg paints the hero's son as sympathetic, the film maker also shapes him into a symbol of American youth rushing into a war we cannot win, driven by forces that we do not completely understand - just as many young men were driven into the military after the attacks on 9/11.

To view how dismal a picture Spielberg paints in shaping American in a refugee filled 1930s Europe, you only have to compare it to the film Spielberg would likely have made - Independence Day.

I deliberately avoided seeing Independence Day after 9/11. I thought I could not handle how well George Lucas' special effect people managed to bring down the Empire State Building - the image of smoke and debris choking lower Manhattan locked in my brain like a looped video.

Although in pre-release interviews, Spielberg claimed we would not witness lasered buildings, offering some relief to me. Unfortunately, he forgot to mention the bodies floating in the river, the streams of people fleeing the disaster area and the heads covered with dust that included human remains.

Because Spielberg claimed he was put off the remake of War of the Worlds by the release of Independence Day, I decided to check out the film again prior to the release of War of the Worlds. He claimed Independence Day had taken all the best parts of the book, so I had to see what Spielberg meant.

Spielberg enhanced similarities between his film and Independence Day when he decided to have his aliens come from a planet other than Mars.

Despite sentimental purists (of which I include myself to some degree) Spielberg had an overriding reason to do away with the Martians. In creating the illusion, Spielberg knew no reasonable person would believe down deep that the invasion had its source on Mars.

Man had been to Mars (or his robots had) and we already knew no advanced civilization resided there, or we would have seen the signs.

But the films have many other similarities. The aliens are absolutely hostile to human kind. The aliens are totally immune to human weapons. And the aliens manage to destroy most of the earth before their advance is halted.

Spielberg in some ways decided to play off existing UFO mythology as he had in prior films, drawing largely from the same well of information as Independence Day.

Spielberg, of course, added textures that Independence Day lacked, such as the overlay of family troubles, and the mythological, religious and - of course - 9/11 and Holocaust references Independence Day lacked.

In reviewing Independence Day again after so many years, I was actually surprised. While shocked by the film's special effects, I had never particularly liked the film. But I do now.

I had also failed to notice the cheap shots Independence Day took at Spielberg, one mock reference to ET and another to Close Encounters - as well as a shot at those who might welcome aliens with open arms as depicted in Close Encounters as well.

Both films have the aliens coming to earth at some prior point to the actual invasion.

Independence Day presents us with a roving band of aliens that strips worlds of all their resource and then move on. We are left to assume that the ship captured by earthlings at Roswell in 1947 was some sort of scout ship looking ahead for possible targets thought this is not expressly stated.

Spielberg's aliens visited earth at some point prior to mankind's evolution. One character claimed this happened a million years ago. During that prior visit, his aliens buried ships underground for the eventual time when the aliens would come back to strip the planet - not of its natural resources, but of its people, an endless supply of blood upon which they feed.

Since the first alien craft we encounter in the film was buried in the Iron Bound section of Newark, the aliens must have buried the ships at a point before the shifting of continental plates. They were probably looking for Paris at the time. While the cops at the scene were careful to note that no water main, subways or other things ran under the streets at the corner they picked, Newark is a city with utility hook ups and such that make this less than a credible

But the idea of buried space ships that come to life later is not a new one for science fiction, and Spielberg probably derived the idea from a British film in which devil like creatures rise up from a space ship that is uncovered during the digging of a subway tunnel in London.

Whereas the alien ships of Independence Day sail down from a massive mother ship in outer space to hover over each of the principle cities of the world, Spielberg's aliens arrive via lightning bolts, which break the surface of the ground and carry them into the buried machines.

Just where the lightning bolts originate is not explained.

In Independence Day, we as viewers are apprized of nearly every action, following world wide exploits through the eyes of a number of characters. We know, for instance, that troops in Europe, Asia and Africa suffer the same problems that we in America do. While we get a sense of this through Spielberg's usual clever use of media, his story limits us to the experiences of a single character and since he told the New York Post that even the main character doesn't know exactly what is going on, neither do we. This leaves the audience to learn information as the main character does and to suffer through the horrors that the main character suffers.

This deviates only slightly from the original novel in which Wells recounts the adventures of two characters during the evasion, but these two offer a wider view of the action since they are located at different points in the conflict. We learn about the main character's ferry crossing and his being trapped in the house with the minister and the aliens, but we also get a vision of a panicked London and the hordes of people seeking to escape. Spielberg appears to combine both of these voices into one character thread, although this might be a deception.

At several points, Spielberg appears poised to widen the scope of the film by allowing us to follow one or two of the other characters as they deal with the alien menace, but shies back either from the need to edit down the film for time or from some other reason we do not know. The need to know what the son experience after he is separated from his father is a necessary element for us to get the full emotional impact of their reunion.

While both films have plenty of action, Spielberg's film presents us with a much less satisfying conclusion. In a presentation done on TMC, he said he intentionally wanted to show American refugees, and indeed, we get plenty of hapless, frustrating characters that seemed to fly in the face of the concept of American ingenuity. We become the ever wandering tribes of Israel driven from place to place and are saved not by some action of our own, but by the grace of God or evolution.

Independence Day gives us heroes that come up with solutions to problems, that use the enemy's captured vehicle against the otherwise overwhelming opponent, and in the end, we get rousing speeches and effective action, that expect for brief moments such as the rescue of the Dakota character, the Spielberg film denies us.

What we get in this Post 9/11 film, is that we are not masters of our fate, that we are helpless to some forces until we can be saved by luck or fortune, and this, combined with the images of 9/11 and The Holocaust make War of the Worlds a more difficult film to experience despite all of the visual similarities to 9/11 that Independence Day gives us.

While Spielberg's film is richer in meaning than Independence Day, it is an uncomfortable meaning for many of us who actually witnessed the events of 9/11 and are as helpless in our theater seats as we were when we confronted the attack back then. Americans do not like to be made to feel helpless, and for that reason, War of the Worlds will likely sell better to overseas markets than it will in the United States - causing those who need to hear its message most to miss it. This is an important film, but it may not be popular enough to please Paramount.