Hollywood has now managed to absorb on a conscious level that the failure of fatherhood is a central issue of our culture, and that people are desperate for stories which address this issue and offer images of fatherhood redeemed.
It's a subject that has always attracted Spielberg, at least on an intuitive level. He's always said that E. T. was about divorce -- about the ways a child scarred by divorce and an absent father can use fantasy to survive. The knowledge came from his own personal experience with the phenomenon as a youth.
In War Of the Worlds he takes on the subject from the father's, not the child's perspective -- and that may reflect his own maturity and experience as a father. It also takes us closer to the crux of the crisis.
Phenomenally successful films like The Lion King and The Sixth Sense dealt with the effect of fatherlessness on sons and, like E. T., offered coping mechanisms, images of transcendence. War Of the Worlds deals with the source of the pathology -- the emotionally self-indulgent and incompetent father himself.
As I say, Hollywood knows the appeal of the subject -- one finds it "layered" into otherwise conventional spectacles like The Day After Tomorrow, where it has the feel of a perfunctory marketing ploy. Spielberg, as usual, goes deeper.
Taking as his model the 50s-era sci-fi film, which exploited our fears of nuclear holocaust and alien (i. e. Communist) invasion, Spielberg taps the post-9/11 malaise for the subliminal terror of his tale. Alien sleeper-cell creatures erupt from within to devastate our civilization, and in the crisis our assumptions about everything are tested.
For Spielberg's protagonist, Ray Ferrier, a self-centered lifestyle, in which he has neglected the children of a failed marriage, who now live with their mother and her new husband, is shattered when he's forced by unimaginable disasters to step up to the plate and protect them. And to protect them, he needs to know them -- something he's failed so far to do.
It's a brilliant scheme, which places Ray's failure as a father center stage, and makes it far more unnerving and devastating than the lethal space invaders and their horrifying acts.
The greatness of the film is that it doesn't posit absolute redemption for Ray -- he has lost more through his failure as a father, and his children have lost more, than his last-minute heroics can ever restore. But he has come face to face with his failure, and has grown up in the process -- and that is more affecting, more real, than any contrived feel-good catharsis could ever be.
Ray remains a tragic figure, a reminder that the true lost souls of post-WWII America are not the children betrayed by feckless fathers, but the fathers themselves, who surrendered the deepest meaning of their lives for a transitory, an illusory freedom.
