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Feature: War of the Worlds

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It will go down in motion picture history as a travesty, and a great opportunity missed. Tony Earnshaw considers the dubious merits of War of the Worlds - the movie that should be re-named Spielberg’s Folly.

It could all have been so very different.

Not so long ago, when the Hollywood rumour mill began buzzing about a new, blockbuster version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, anyone with an interest in the story or a love of the novel hoped it would fall into Steven Spielberg’s lap.

The most commercially successful filmmaker on the planet had the requisite clout to make the definitive version of the granddaddy of all science fiction stories. He alone, perhaps, had bottomless pots of cash at his disposal. He could call on the talents of any A-list star on the face of the planet to make what could – should – have been possibly the biggest movie the world had ever seen: an intelligent, multi-layered rendering of a classic novel of menace, helplessness and mass extermination.
And then he blew it.

It all started to go wrong when the mooted Victorian milieu – as in Wells’ novel – was ditched in favour of setting the story in contemporary America. Tom Cruise was hired as the lead. A script was developed that paid only air-kiss lip service to the original source.

And with a convenient window in the schedules of both director and leading man, the film was stampeded into production.
The warning signs were there from the outset.

“I really have great respect for the book, but not to the extent that I would set the movie back in 1898. I was not going to do a Victorian science fiction movie,” said Spielberg when the 21st Century setting was unveiled to a sceptical Press.

Instead he spoke about re-routing the story away from anything remotely Wellsian. Jules Verne-style adventurers and explorers were out. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the film would be set in modern-day America and focus on one dysfunctional blue-collar family.

It was a monumental miscalculation – and this from the man who went out of his way to snap up the last extant script from Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds. One would assume he’d been bitten by the bug to do it right. Apparently not.

The real roots of the travesty that is Spielberg’s War of the Worlds lie in the window of opportunity that led him to collaborate once more with Tom Cruise after their first effort, Minority Report, three years ago.

Both men were seeking a new project. Both jumped at the prospect of The War of the Worlds. But the limited availability of both meant that the estimated $128 million movie was up and running before anyone had time to catch a breath.

Shot between November 2004 and March this year, it was racing to beat a deadline that could only augur badly for content, style, drama, and the sense of sheer golly-gosh excitement that should accompany such a huge movie.

Except that Spielberg had decided he wasn’t going to make an epic. Unlike Wells’ story, which was about “the rout of civilisation, the massacre of mankind”, this was about family values and a patriarch who was a slobby divorcee.

Between them screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp have filleted Wells’ novel, taking from it only those elements that they can readily adapt to the environs of 21st century New York. Thus we witness gigantic metal war machines, something resembling a heat-ray, the insidious red weed and a hint of the madness that extraterrestrial invasion might bring with it.

Then there are the Spielbergian moments that lift his films above the merely ordinary: a corpse, floating in a swollen river, silently heralds the rush of scores of others; a speeding passenger train, its carriages ablaze with flame, lights up the night; a fleeing woman, touched by the aliens’ heat-ray, vaporises before our eyes.

These are glimpses of what could have been – the movie that Spielberg might have made had he taken more time and effort. Instead it slowly becomes apparent that this is a blatant bastardisation of a great book – a story in which the invaders are not actually Martians at all and which has been dumbed down to the extent that what was once The War of the Worlds becomes simply War of the Worlds.

I half expected the film to become WoW - just another hyped-up youth-friendly acronym, like MiB (Men in Black) or LXG (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Instead Paramount Pictures threw the film beneath a draconian international media blanket, limiting the number of previews and running them with over-the-top security measures that included confiscating mobile phones and imposing conditions upon reviewers “that you do not publish any review of the film before June 29 2005”.

Around the globe, critics’ antennae started twitching. The last time this happened was around the release of Warner Bros’ The Avengers in 1998 – a film that turned out to be a dog. Would War of the Worlds be a planet-sized turkey, too?

In truth they were running scared. Despite the combined wallop of Spielberg and Cruise, War of the Worlds was a significantly underwhelming experience. It had all been seen before – in Independence Day, in Signs and, half a century before, in the first movie version of The War of the Worlds.

Cruise attended the film’s UK premiere but did not deign to offer himself up for a Press conference. He seemed not to have read the book. And Spielberg didn’t even bother to turn up.

As for H.G. Wells, what would he think? In the 1930s Hollywood swooped on his oeuvre, lensing almost back-to-back versions of The Invisible Man and Island of Lost Souls (based on The Island of Dr Moreau). Even then there were plans for a version of The War of the Worlds – albeit set in the American mid-west, with Sergei Eisenstein directing.

Perhaps that was the time to do it, when Victoriana, imperialism and the sprawling land of empire was still vivid in memory and imagination. The restrictions of finance and big business put paid to anything even remotely unique coming out of Hollywood – why pay $250 million for the headache of creating a period piece when contemporary America works just as well, and for half the price?

Finally, there are two more versions of the story ready or almost ready to enter the fray. The first, a three-hour Z-grade epic boasting a hundredth of the budget of Spielberg’s film and a cast of unknowns was released in the US earlier this month.

Billed as “the first authentic movie adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells classic novel”, Pendragon Pictures’ version of The War of the Worlds opened to hoots of derision despite sticking to the era of Wells’ novel.

Then there is an animated version of Jeff Wayne’s musical, set squarely in turn-of-the-century England. Lovingly crafted, taking advantage of the latest computer-generated artistry and boasting that glorious soundtrack, it’s earmarked for 2006 and looks set to be the film of choice for aficionados of the book.

If it fails, then HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds will truly remain the Holy Grail of sci-fi cinema.

- This article originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post (June 29 2005)

Review: War of the Worlds (12A)

Star rating: **

And so the golden goose lays a rotten egg.

Rushed into production, boasting wholesale changes and barely recognisable as coming from the imagination of the father of modern science-fiction, the Spielberg/Cruise version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is the result of too little preparation, too much dilution and an over abundance of tinkering.

Consequently it never equals the sum of its parts – the world’s biggest movie star teamed with the world’s most successful modern director – and fails to hit the heights as what it should always have been: a bonafide sci-fi epic.

Instead screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp have transplanted what was a story of 19th Century empire-building gone awry to a 21st Century New Jersey suburb in which a deadbeat dad finds himself swept along on a tide of panic when alien invaders erupt from the earth to attack humankind.

Those familiar with Wells’ novel will recall that his story deals with a shock invasion by Martians that land, secreted in giant metal cylinders, in the quiet Surrey countryside. Within days they are laying waste to Victorian England, destroying anything that moves with a malevolent heat-ray or their dreaded black smoke.

This story of one-sided interplanetary conflict is told by an ordinary man. Over three anxious weeks he relates how the Martians – great, lumbering brains with tentacles for limbs – take over the south of England like an army of occupation. They effortlessly defeat the pitiful ranks of artillery laid out before them, pick up men and smash them against trees, scything through rivers, houses and forests in three-legged fighting machines 100ft high.

And in the ultimate horror, they feed by draining humans of their blood and injecting it into their own alien veins.

It is, then, a classic of the genre – perhaps the greatest single piece of science-fiction ever written. And in the hands of Spielberg and Cruise, it has been transformed into a piece of post 9/11 paranoia that takes only nuances from the original story and tells another tale in bland, fragmented fashion.

Wells’ novel is urgent, bleak, grim and pitiless in its depiction of wholesale extinction. Yet over the course of the book he unravels a narrative of such memorable terror that it is impossible to remain unaffected by his warnings that empire-building and imperialism will eventually backfire.

The Spielberg/Cruise version is merely a pale shadow of what their film should have been. It begins strongly, with an ordinary day transformed into madness, mayhem and murder as the first tripod drags itself from the ground and begins massacring watching Americans.

Soon, with little preamble and precious little connection to Wells’ work, Cruise, as divorced dockworker Ray Ferrier, is fleeing the city with kids Robbie and Rachel (Justin Chatwin and current child phenomenon Dakota Fanning).

En-route they witness the results of the tripods’ destruction, face mob violence, see the annihilation of US armed forces and eventually hole up in the cellar of an unhinged survivor, Ogilvy (Tim Robbins, performing in a harsh tenor note of hysteria), actually an amalgam of at least three separate characters from the book.

Yet what should be a majestic, panoramic tableau is reduced to a portrait in miniature. Just like M. Night Shyamalan’s intimate sci-fi drama Signs, War of the Worlds emerges as a lazy, anorexic update of George Pal’s 1953 movie – a fragmented, underwritten damp squib that leaves too many questions unanswered.

It opens and closes with the narration of Morgan Freeman, utilising Wells’ words from the start and end of his book. As an attempt at gravitas it fails completely – no-one can speak those words like the late Richard Burton, and thus it is that the definitive telling of this wondrous, imaginative and sinister adventure rests not with films, television or radio, but with Jeff Wayne’s timeless musical from 1975.

Wayne had the sense not to meddle. Spielberg didn’t.