Clever guy, that Tom Cruise. "War of the Worlds" has been out, what, two days? And everybody’s still thinking it’s a Spielberg movie, that Cruise is just the high-priced window dressing.
C’mon people, wake up and smell the formaldehyde. "War" isn’t just another summer blockbuster, despite Spielberg’s name stamped across it like "Tide" is stamped across a box of detergent. No, no. It’s a message movie. And the message is scary enough to make Don Rumsfeld cry like a little girl: The aliens are coming. The end times are at hand.

And it’s Cruise’s message, not Spielberg’s. I don’t know what Spielberg is getting out of this deal — maybe he’s being blackmailed — but "War" is not his bag. He’s the guy who gave us "Close Encounters" and "E.T." He’s a squishy Hollywood liberal, remember, the man who sees aliens as benign, childlike beings who need a hug or two.

The way I see it — and my friends at flouridemakesyoublind.com agree with me on this one — "War of the Worlds" is a Scientology tract, a coded warning from Cruise to his minions that some bad muchachos from the Mother Planet are about to apply a big, nasty can of Raid to the roaches of the human race. It’s a heads-up to the Rapture.

Laugh if you want. But aren’t I the one who told you that "Batman Begins" was a blueprint for a neo-fascist takeover of the Eastern Seaboard by snooty Bush-hating Europeans? Aren’t I the one who warned you that Arnold Schwarzenegger takes his orders from corrupt Russian petro-chemical interests, that George Lucas is developing a nuclear weapon?

And all this strange behavior Cruise has been exhibiting in the lead-up to the film’s release? Messages, all of it. Jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. Cracking on Brooke Shields, chiding Matt Lauer. Cruise knows that he and the other Enlightened Ones won’t have to put up with the rest of us swine much longer. That’s what’s making him so annoyingly happy.

Cruise’s sweeping romance and abrupt engagement to Katie Holmes was the most sobering message of them all. It’s time to find some prime breeding stock, fellas. After the apocalypse, we’re going to have kick-start this species all over again. Let’s do it right this time.

Cruise is probably the most famous person on the face of the planet. Considering his gargantuan ego, his passionately held beliefs, his Messiah complex and his power as the top box-office star in the world, is it likely that he’d be content just collecting another multi-million dollar paycheck for just another tawdry blockbuster? Not very.

Hey, it’s all there in the movie. This "War of the Worlds" resembles the original H.G. Wells novel only in broad outline. Notice one thing about the new movie, if you will. When the aliens attack, all electrical power is shut down immediately, meaning there’s no media to tell you what’s happening (I hear you: they’d probably get it wrong anyway). So who the aliens are, where they came from or what they want is never explained, except in one instance.

In that scene, in which Cruise’s character meets up with a TV reporter in a news truck, he figures out that the aliens are destroying the earth in machines they had planted under the earth’s surface millions of years earlier.

One of the fundamental beliefs of the Scientologists and L. Ron Hubbard, the bad sci-fi writer who founded the "church," is that some extraterrestrial life form had visited the earth long before man came along to muck it up. Nice coincidental parallel, don’t you think?

After that, of course, the symbolism hits with tsunami-like force. Cruise is a blue-collar New Jersey guy who happens to be a lazy, inattentive father (like us complacent, greedy Americans, get it?). By chance, the weekend the world comes to an end, he’s entrusted to take care of his hostile teenage son and his luminous 10-year-old daughter.

So, for much of the film Cruise, punished by the gods for being such a lousy father, is trying to protect his kids, especially his golden lamb of a daughter, from the swiftly unfolding carnage around them. He’s like a cave man guarding the last ember of his fire against the raging rainstorm.

In one scene, a ferry boat pulls away from a dock with thousands of panicked people trying in vain to get on board. There’s no plausible reason why being on the boat would be safer than remaining on land, but everybody’s desperate to get on that boat. And there’s Cruise, safely on the boat, screaming at the men operating it: "There’s still room on the boat!"

There it is, in a nutshell, folks. Our cinema-age Messiah Tom Cruise warning us, there’s still room on the boat. There’s still time to get "clear" in Scientology parlance and avoid the fate of the blind, frightened masses.

But now you have to ask yourself: Is Cruise the Messiah trying to save his worthless species from pitiless aliens bent on annihilation? Or is he the lead agent of the aliens himself?

And Cruise, for all his alleged appeal, has always been just a tad off-center on the humanity scale, don’t you think? All that speculation about his sexual orientation, which goes back years, is really off track. The real speculation should be: Is this guy human? While we’re all looking askance at poor old Michael Jackson, maybe it’s Cruise who’s the real weirdo. I have it on very good authority — a shout-out to the guys at vaportrailscausecancer.com — that he eats boiled kitten heads for breakfast every morning.

And, again, it’s there in the movie. What, for instance, is Tom Cruise’s character’s name in "War of the Worlds"? That’s right, Ray. And what do the aliens use to vaporize every fleeing human in his/her tracks? A death ray.

Hey, I’m just saying ...