Robert (I'll withhold his last name) from New York wrote me about several things this week. He was very concerned about how loyal Steven Spielberg's representation of War of the Worlds will be. To begin with, he believed the aliens should be Martians. In making reference to the original H.G. Wells book, he said, "Ogilvy should be the one who discovers that huge volcano, Olympus Mons, erupting, followed by those strange flying meteors heading towards…"

Mars during the turn of the century when Wells wrote his book was of particular fascination because of the emerging theories that there might be life there, and the mistaken observations that the planet had canals.

Since Tim Robbins is supposed to play the role of an astronomer, we might find that there is significant loyalty to the book. But Spielberg being Spielberg - having visions of his own - nothing is guaranteed.

This can be a problem for Spielberg since Mars is a key piece of what gives HG Wells' masterpiece its' edge. And without Mars as a backdrop, many fans may simply see this as another "Independence Day" void of any real historic connection to the original work, except in superficial details.

Like most fans of Wells, I agree with Robert that. The invasion should come from Mars. I don't mind Spielberg updating the story to modern times, but I hope he keep Wells themes in tact. We are being invaded because Mars is dying and the Martians see our world as their only hope to survive. I suspect, however, that Spielberg will interject his own good-and-evil twist. Cruise said the aliens would be "truly evil," and I think that loses the point of their own desperation.

While he may not heed such criticism about authenticity, Spielberg does appear to be reacting to some questions fans raise, and may be a little nervous about the reception film will get - claiming on one website that his film won't be anything those cheesy as the 1953 movie.

I never thought the 1953 version of War of the Worlds was cheesy (or whatever word Mr. Spielberg used), but always accepted it as part of the lexicon of Science Fiction that became the required viewing of any boy so hungry for the limited volume of material available at that time. My favorite and still remains Forbidden Planet (now there's a film Spielberg should remake), but most of that era's films created a solid foundation upon Spielberg's great films later were built, each film adding a new layer of expectations that over time made the earliest films seem cheesy.

Despite claims of some critics, Spielberg has always provided us with a quality product, stuffed with thought-providing material (sometimes disguised as fluff).

But even when Spielberg has used the work of genius such as in Jurassic Park, he has always added his own twist - this always adding to the final product, not subtracting from it.

In selecting War of the Worlds as his vehicle, Spielberg, however, has tapped into one of the great geniuses of science fiction, and into themes that are so powerful that we expect even more than we would with other Spielberg films.

During one interview on the internet to answer fans' questions, Spielberg said he had gone back to the novel and discovered materials which had not been co-opted by various other films over the last few decades. And there is a host of material from which he can draw inspiration, and good reason why fans of H.G. Wells hopes he will stay as close to the script as possible in presenting his update. One German website in reviewing the red weed pages on my site actually sounded relieved to find the environmental aspects of the book kept in tact.

But Wells went far beyond most SF books in providing a remarkable depth to his aliens that the 1953 film hardly contained, giving us a chilling portrait of the invades that many of us hope Spielberg can also bring to the screen next June.

In the 1953 film, the war was one-sided. The aliens came, the aliens killed, the aliens conquered. But in several scenes in Wells, the war was never so easy, as the death scenes along the English Channel proved when metal-sided ships managed to bring down two alien machines to the cheers of crowds fleeing their homeland.

Wells gives us details about alien life, sometimes with such economy, that in one or two lines we learn their social order and their means of breeding.

"The Martians," Wells noted, "were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men."

While Wells paints a race of beings that are free of the hormonal influences that lead to bar fights over women, he also portrays a race of reasoning beings killing coldly and without mercy - a sad fate for an evolution of thinking in which we all hoped reason could be the answer to violence in our society when as the Nazis proved, merely transforms it into butchery. These aliens do not kill us because we are their equal or that we pose a threat to them, or out of some rage. We have no significance except as food, and our intelligence, our dreams, hopes and ambitious are meanlessly insignificant to their own ambitions.

Yet Wells also pointed out that these aliens did have children, and even showed some "giving birth" during the war.

"A young Martian there can now be no dispute was really born upon earth during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially budded off, just as young lily bulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the fresh water polyp," Wells wrote.

In these pages, we learn much about how the alien race thinks, feeds, breeds and mourns, and gauging from past Spielberg films, these may be details he also would like to explore - time provided, each capable of adding to the level of horror the film can provide.

Wells paints the aliens as a race that has suppressed "the animal side of the organism by intelligence," but also noted that "to me, it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hand at the expense of the rest of their body. Without the body, the brain would become a mere selfish intelligence."

As mentioned earlier in this piece, Cruise commented in one interview that the aliens were truly evil.

This is where Spielberg may differ sharply from Wells.

Spielberg films are heavy with concepts of good and evil.

In Wells, the true horror of the invasion is the misuse of intelligence - almost predicting the Nazi and the misuse of technology for slaughter. It is the indifference that is the real horror.

Because the aliens descended from beings like us, War of the Worlds becomes a classic vampire story in which the aliens feed off a more primitive species of their own kind - a true mockery of an evolving intelligence. We are little more than cattle to be slaughtered, ruthlessly, but with cold calculation of a species that has evolved beyond human emotion.

Wells - following in the gothic tradition of Shelly's Frankenstein - continues to question the concept of "progress," and sides perhaps with the more animal side, suggesting that we in fact need those emotions that often cause us the most grief.

But he is not blind to the folly of human kind - showing that when it comes to survival - we strip ourselves of those aspects that we celebrate most, shoving other people off the ferry when we can save ourselves - as Spielberg seems to point out in several scenes in his move.

Wells' World of the Worlds is almost too rich for any film to capture in its entirety, so I suspect - even for the Hines film being released in England and supposedly presenting us with a transcription closer to Wells'.

Spielberg has a knack for capturing things symbolically in his films, which often escape literal translation. Although I intend to see both films when they come out, I suspect Spielberg's will likely better embody the soul of Wells than the one that claims to remain most loyal to the original story line.

I just hope that no future film maker looks back at the work Rick Carter and Steven Spielberg have done here and say, "my film won't be as cheesy as that."