laura_seabrook | War of the Worlds

I saw Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds yesterday over at Jenny's. I was reasonably impressed - it could have been much worse!

Now of course the H.G. Wells's novel was one of the first fiction books that I can recall reading (the other being Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, both from the school library) and I guess it left an impression on me. Always been a fan of Wells every since, and always found adaptations of his work of interest, even though they aren't always as faithful as they could have been. Often, the original gets lost in translation. That almost happens here.

Without H.G. Wells, without his War of the Worlds, there would have been no: George Pal film version, or Jeff Wayne double album; either version of Invaders from Mars; Independence Day (an obvious rip-off) or Earth vs The Flying Saucers and imitators et al; John Christopher's Tripod trilogy; far fewer of the American SF pulps from the 1920s and 30s; none of the Aliens series of films; Star Wars (probably, though it really descended via Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon); New Worlds; P. Craig Russell drawing Killraven, and much more.

Wells's book was less about the Martians as such, and more with how humans behave under pressure, about the thin line between "civilisation" and "barbarity", themes which he repeated in books like The War in the Air. It also hi-lights the attitudes that western culture (as a whole) had (in the late 19th century) to animals and other cultures.

The FilmThe film updates the setting and some of the technology - the aliens (not Martians, as no one knows what they are) come from out of the ground, not the sky, and in a sense this gives them a "supernatural" origin and nature. The design of the tripods and how they move is great, and has much of the feel of the book. The aliens seem inspired more by the ones in Independence Day and the George Pal version, rather than the book (where they were blobs with tentacles), But in any case they retain an strangeness about them that helps alienate the audience. We never learn their motives in attacking earth. Are they "interplanetary gourmets"? Is Earth a garden farm and humans the harvest? In the end it really doesn't matter - what does is the gap between us and them, like ants to men (as Wells put it). And the heat ray (and its effects) look cool.

The big difference of course is the main characters used. In the book, the narrator is an unnamed reporter who has a fiancée, but she plays very little part in the book. In the film the main character, Ray, has a family, and most of the film revolves around his efforts in protecting them. Also, the character Ogilvy is a combination of three characters from the book: the noted Astronomer (of the same name); the Curate (who goes mad with despair and is killed by the reporter); and the Artilleryman (clearly a prototype survivalist).

By having a family to protect, the audience can emphasize with Ray, and feel the danger present. The biggest shock for me in the film is where Ray deliberately kills someone else. People may be plucked wholesale from the crows and sucked dry of blood by alien fiends, but that's not so shocking as murder. I wasn't so keen about the later heroic, but as the film's star is Tom Cruise I guess that was inevitable.

Almost all the action scenes, except the first encounter and the last, happen at night. This heightens the tension and is probably easier to do effects for. The scene that left the most lasting impression on me however was where an express train all ablaze passes by a fleeing crowd, who've stopped (maybe out of habit) to let it pass.

Cool version of a classic story.