One of the things I most admire about Steven Spielberg is his ability–and his willingness–to balance his desire to make his deepely personal Films with his desire to make big-budget crowd-pleasing popcorn-chomping Flicks. He’s equally adept at making both kinds of movies and has created classic examples of each, though I have to admit I have something of a preference for his Flicks. When directors of his ability apply their talents to big action movies, you know that you’re usually going to get one of those all-too-rare combinations: a smart, well-made blockbuster.

So as soon as I heard that Spielberg was making War of the Worlds (based, of course, on the H.G. Wells novel), I knew the result would likely be something I was going to enjoy–Spielberg plus Scary Monsters of Some Sort plus Big Special Effects will almost always equal an entertaining movie in my book. When a director as completely in command of his skills as Spielberg decides its time to put a good scare into his audience, a scare is just what they’re gonna get. And make no mistake: War of the Worlds is far more horror movie than action movie.

Spielberg realizes that this story has been told plenty of times before: he knows that there’s an excellent chance that most of his audience has at least some familiarity with the basics of the story. The audience probably knows just who or what the attackers are, and they probably know the circumstances which eventually bring about the attackers’ defeat. In fact, Spielberg counts on that fact. Because his audience knows the plot, he can leave out some details and assume the viewers can fill in the blanks he intentionally leaves empty.

Spielberg keeps the focus of his movie on a very personal level, staying entirely with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning as a father and daughter with a less-than-ideal relationship. That choice proves to be what makes War of the Worlds different from the great many other aliens-inavde-planet-Earth movies that have featured largely the same plot–and what made the events of the movie so much more frightening. Neither the characters nor the audience ever get a clear confirmation as to just what’s happening. We–and they–get speculation and rumors from other characters (contradictory rumors and speculation, at that), but we never get those familiar scenes, for example, of The President Receiving Intelligence From His Staff and Making the Big Decisions. We get very little report of what’s happening with the Martian attackers in the rest of the world–we don’t, as a matter of fact, ever know for sure that they’re Martians (one of those details Spielberg left up to our common experience with this story). We never even find out definitively what’s happening outside the New York-Boston corridor.

An interesting side effect of Spielberg’s telling the story the way he did was the changes it necessitated in the type of protagonist he used. Cruise’s Ray Ferrier isn’t a typical Big Hollywood Action Spectacular Hero: he’s not particularly sympathetic (at first, anyway); he’s not the one leading the Forces of Good against the Evildoers; he’s not the Chosen One; he’s not the cause of or the focus of the aliens’ actions; he’s not the catalyst for the aliens’ downfall. He’s just a guy. He’s a guy focused entirely on trying to protect his children from the insanity destroying his world. He’s the focus of the story only because Spielberg chose to make him so, not because the larger story demanded it–Ferrier is completely inconsequential to the larger story, and that fact is what makes his journey so compelling.

There’s one drawback to Speilberg’s commitment to the personal, though: the ending of the movie felt startlingly contrived. When the focus is on the Big Picture, simply defeating the enemies would be enough to create a happy ending, but that doesn’t work as well when that focus is on the Very Small Picture. The details necessary to make sure the audience went home with smiles on their faces didn’t strike me as true in War of the Worlds; had Spielberg been completely honest with his story, he would’ve realized that this movie was one that likely shouldn’t have had a happy ending.