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If you've seen the film, this review is for you.

While Dawn Patol is a flawed film, it's an ambitious attempt to explore serious and universal themes, set against a backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic meltdown of 2008.

The themes include racism, sexism, parenting, what it means to be loyal to friends and family, the search for purpose and the sense of alienation, connection with others and the search for self-identity. Most of the action revolves around Scott Eastwood's John, who has a problem connecting with his parents and who doesn't have a girlfriend (while his brother Ben has sex with every female within his eyesight). He lives with his parents and makes a meager living repairing surfboards, although he's doing arguably better than his father and his father's friends, who have lost their jobs in the recession.

The problem with the movie is a script with situations and dialog that veer into territory that is unintentionally campy. The editing is less less than stellar. As a result, there are some facets to the story that are probably going to be overlooked:

• The film title has a triple meaning. It refers to a military patrol, to surfers who hang out with each other in the morning while waiting for waves, and to the early morning discovery of the dead brother Ben, the budding surfing star and golden child to his parents, on the beach.

• The location of the movie takes place in the water, on the beach and in beach towns, except for one out-of-joint scene when John, is supposed to be in Afghanistan. The scenery, though set within sand dunes, is obviously the same scenery used earlier in the film for the beach, particularly late in the film.

While this may look like an expedient way to portray a desert-like setting it's also a metaphor linking cultural warfare to physical war: John is a fighting the same battle, whether at home with his parents or in a far away war at the behest of the government, a battle that pits the desire to find self-identity with the need to connect with with someone or something larger than himself.

• The underrated actress Julie Carmen plays a pivotal role as the mother of the slain Miguel. Eventually she's revealed as a wealthy, enigmatic, potentially criminal Hispanic living the good life. It's a life in a house behind gates that are the bars that lock her into a prison of her own making. She also serves as a counterpoint to the stereotypical low-life Mexicans we see at the start of the film, where John is hanging out with his father and Ben.

She puts on clothing meant to disguise her identity (presumeably in case she decides to kill John). She morphs into someone else: a Middle Eastern woman, who, like an aggrieved Muslim, insults John by striking him with her shoe.

And where do Mrs. Rivera and John find themselves when he reveals he killed Miguel? On the same sand dunes at the beach that also served as the stand-in for Afghanistan.

By the film's end, John's search for his own identity, for acceptance by his parents and for a deep connection with someone else has led him, sadder and wiser, to the place where that search began, a state of alienation.

Spielberg and company created a wonderful film that's incorporated some of H.G. Wells' original novel, and the 1953 film.

It took me a few viewings to spot some of the clever parts of the film. For example, when Tom Cruise's character shakes the white dust of disintegrated humans out of his hair, it's an homage to the part of the novel in which the hero's hair turns white (from fear).

Cruise's character (Ray, as in ray gun) is introduced to as as a person who operates a crane that lifts up truck trailers. The invaders have similar cranes - their scary, giant tripods - that can walk and lift up humans. And yes, the aliens have ray guns.

Ray's ex-wife admonishes him to make sure her son completes his school assignment by the end of the weekend, which is a paper about the occupation of Algeria by the French. Over the course of the weekend, which is the timeline in which the movie unfolds, Ray's son definitely completes his assignment, learning all about the occupation of earth by an alien force.

And of course, the grandparents glimpsed at the end of the film were the stars of the 1953 film.

I'm sure there's more allusions to the book and the earlier film, and homages to both. What I have picked up makes the movie even more satisfying for me.

Warning: Spoiler for DH and Frozen

The eponymous Dom Hemingway may not have Princess Elsa's signing style. In fact, he doesn't even sing. He shares, though, with Elsa the same story: they both come to a self- awareness of themselves as feeling and thinking human beings.

Yes, we can spend our lives without thinking much about who we are, or what we want from life. If we do think about ourselves, some of us can't think about anyone else. That's Dom. And it's Elsa, too. Both characters eventually come to the conclusion that finding fulfillment means letting go of themselves and finding themselves - and a life worth living - by loving someone else. And it doesn't have to be a romantic love.

There are, according to an old cliché, only so many stories that can be told. And Dom's and Elsa's stories are, in fact, a cliché about how we ought to live our lives. It's the details of such stories, though, that make them mundane or make them great. Dom Hemingway is a great story, made greater with Jude Law in what is, so far, his best star turn.

If you're a male, or maybe a female, this movie has Charlize Theron never looking more beautiful. Frankly, 'nuf said.

But wait, there's more. There's the wonderfully created creature, Might Joe Young, who will take you on a fantastic tour of iconic Los Angeles locations, from the Hollywood Sign to the Santa Monica Pier.

There's the wonderful link between past and present, because this film was made partly under the auspices of RKO, the company that made the original Mighty Joe Young.

And there's the predictable arc of Mighty Joe Young's sympathetic actions throughout the course of the film.

If I have one criticism, it's that events near the end of the film are a little too violent for the younger set.

Did I mention Charlize Theron?

I was primed to enjoy the film because some events in the book dovetail with my life. I wanted to see how it would be translated to film. I wasn't disappointed.

An enormous amount of the book was inside the film. Many of the comedic and tragic scenes in Garcia's book were included, well-captured by the dialog. The cinematography was a superb visual equivalent to the author's luminously written depictions of a fairytale world.

If I'd not read the book first, and if I didn't find some elements of my own life inside the book, I'm not sure what I would have made of the film. I can only base my review on the fact that I've read the book, and that the makers of the film obviously did their best to be as truthful to the book as possible. The core belief of the film as well as the book - that love, in various forms, can last a lifetime - is true.