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Or, The Martians Crave Our Delicious Hamburger Sandwiches
I’ve already talked in spades about the influential figures in my life when it comes to comic books, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore etc., but let’s spend a paragraph or two talking about some non-graphic novelists who I enjoyed in my youth. Way back in the day, when the Syfy Channel was still Sci-Fi and internet pornography was an as-yet inexact science I was an avid reader of books (physical copies of ebooks printed onto sheets of paper, for you younger readers out there), and when it wasn’t Harry Potter or Animorphs, it was classical literature. Dumas, Cervantes, Verne, Doyle, from the Elizabethan to the Victorian I took my fill of the best that the written word had to offer. I couldn’t say for sure what it was that inspired such a consuming interest, whether it was the act of a (so-called) intelligent child searching for reading material beyond the level of his peers or a fascination with the ill-fated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film and the far, far better comic original, but if it was old it was interesting to me. Which helps to explain my choice in movies as well.
Of all the old-timey wordsmiths in history however, the one that stuck with me the most was undoubtedly H.G. Wells. Jules Verne was pretty good, especially if you were a fan of people traveling to various places in exotic vehicles, but it was Wells, oft-regarded as one of the earliest ‘science fiction’ writers, that really dug its claws into the imaginative portion of my mind. There’s just something about that turn-of-the-century fiction that I’ve always loved, when science was still a work-in-progress and there was a sense of wonder and discovery in the air, or at least that’s how it reads after the fact when folks aren’t dying of tuberculosis. “The Time Machine”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, ‘The Invisible Man”, stories that have managed to survive the test of time to be endlessly repackaged by studio executives looking to profit from a dead man’s work. No wonder poor people turn into lemurs in the future.
Out of all the stories by Mr. Wells, there is one that affected me as much as it affected pop culture at large: The War of the Worlds. The premier alien invasion story, a concept that has been repeated endlessly throughout the 20th and 21st century, which itself has been revisited numerous times over the years. There was the infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in the 30s, which caused far less mass hysteria than we like to pretend it did, likely because no one in New Jersey would’ve been able to tell the difference. There was a subpar film by the great Steven Spielberg in 2005, starring a Tom Cruise not yet ostracized from society and a Dakota Fanning not quite old enough to be forgotten, which you might (not) remember being parodied in one of those shitty Scary Movie sequels. There was a TV series that ran 2 seasons in 1988, which was a continuation of our subject today. There was a D-list movie released the same year as the Spielberg film, which spawned an equally D-list sequel three years later. There was even a War of the Worlds musical produced for the stage that played throughout London, which despite being about murderous alien death machine probably had a smaller body count than that Spider-Man show on Broadway (#topicalreference). We won’t be talking about those things today though, obviously since I’ve already listed in an off-handed and casual manner. Instead, we’ll take a look at what is probably the second most famous take on The War of the Worlds, the 1953 film adaptation directed by Byron Haskin and released through Paramount. Whether these aliens are a thinly-veiled metaphor of the Communist menace or not is up to you to decide.
The plot of The War of the Worlds is literally over a century old at this point, so you’ll have to forgive me if I spoil some things plotwise. Basically, it turns out that there is life on other planets (specifically Mars), and the lifeforms on that planet are jealous of the temperate climate and the fine-ass hoes that we have here on Earth. So in typical human fashion they decide to invade our planet, first appearing in a small town but quickly spreading throughout the rest of the world. Aforementioned militaries of the world attempt to curtail the extra-terrestrial attacks to no avail, and just when it seems that humanity is destined to be a footnote in the pages of history, the Martians are killed by what is essentially a deus ex machina. Apparently Martians were smart enough to master space travel and enormous war machines but just forget to get their booster shots before making the trip. I mean Great Britain didn’t even figure out typhoid wasn’t caused by farts until a decade or so prior, but the highly advanced alien race couldn’t put two and two together? But of course internet critics didn’t exist back then, so these sorts of things get a pass.
For now…
The 53’ Paramount adaptation, as you might expect from a film adaptation, keeps the basic framework of the original idea but makes a substantial amount of changes. The setting is changed, taking place in Smalltown California, USA in the early 1950s rather than Tinyton Glen, Great Britain in the late 1900s. The iconic ‘tripods’ in the original story are replaced with sleek silver flying machines (which have become iconic in their own right), and the black smoke and red weed of the tripods are replaced with generic laser beams and force fields. Most substantial of all perhaps is the addition of a protagonist and leading lady, for that romantic subplot that all films are required to have and such, rather than the ‘lone survivor’ angle that the story went for. Ann Robinson plays Sylvia van Buren, who is supposedly very intelligent but does nothing but look attractive and scream, as is the nature of female characters in sci-fi, and Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester (absolutely mind-blowing to a MST3K fan like me), the the consistently unflappable scientist at Pacific Tech who just so happens to be near ground zero at the start of the whole deal. Retro TV fans will know Gene Barry for his role as the pimp of the Old West, Bat Masterson, from the show of the same name. Give Clayton a derby and a cane and there wouldn’t be any difference, which is either a knock against Mr. Barry’s dramatic range or a testament to his Colt .45 levels of badassery.
I’m finding it a bit difficult to rip into The War of the Worlds, because at the end of the day it is a sci-fi movie made in the 50s, and so was limited as all genre films generally were during that time. But I can certainly list a few issues. As much as I love Gene Barry, Clayton Forrester isn’t so much a protagonist as he is a guy the camera focuses on a lot of the time, and even then he occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. Sylvia is a women in the 50s, and so isn’t allowed to do anything or develop a real personality, thus making the romance between her and Forrester feel as hollow as most 1950’s marriages. The Martians just look stupid as hell, limitations of costuming in that era be damned, and I feel like the film would have benefited from showing as little of their physical form as possible. Nothing that comes about due to their appearance is really vital to the plot in my opinion, beyond acting as a cheap scare after an already suspenseful scene, and it could just as easily have been excised or altered with no dip in quality. There’s nothing scarier than what spawns our own imagination, after all. Also, not quite sure what the God deal is going on with this movie, as if Bruce Almighty ‘saved’ mankind because bacteria killed the Martians. Pretty sure if a Human-loving deity of a Christian persuasion really existed or cared, he probably wouldn’t have let a priest get flash-fried in the first half of the movie. Or let a enormous amount of Earth’s population die, have their homes and property destroyed and descend into mass hysteria. Or at least let those deadly bacteria that he created kill off the Martians before they almost destroyed the planet. As I said at the beginning though, this is a sci-fi flick from the 50’s, and science fiction in film was a much slower beast in terms of experimentation and philosophical exploration as it was in literature. Rubber suits and screaming girls were what sold the tickets back then, and that’s what we got.
Plot problems, characterization problems and thematic problems aside, there is one area where The War of the Worlds excels: special effects. Much like fellow sci-fi classic The Blob, which also involves an alien creature falling to Earth in Smalltown USA by the way, WotW is practically bursting with bright lights and color, and you persistent readers know how much I love generous helpings of color in movies. Every scene that features the alien ships fucking up the landscape, blasting everything to hell with their multi-colored death beams, engenders a visceral, childlike joy in destruction that you only ever get when a Godzilla movie is doing things right. While I generally tend to prefer the tripod designs for the Martian war machines, I have to admit that that flying machines used here; sleek, near featureless silver aircrafts with their tri-colored electronic eyes slowly drifting over the ruins of civilization, have their own appeal, and I think they’ve got the potential to become one of my favorite spacecraft designs.They quickly and firmly establish the inhumanity of the alien threat right from the outset, cold, inscrutable, much more so than the actual Martians do. It looks like either the T-1000 eating the head of ED-209 or a Yes album cover, in a good way.
If you’re interested in getting into old school sci-fi, The War of the Worlds should be right up on the top of your list, along with The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, and The Thing From Another World. They can be cheesy and the stories can be a bit spotty (which isn’t really restricted to sci-fi films of that era, is it Mr. Emmerich?) but it accomplishes exactly what good science fiction is meant to do: It inspires the imagination, gives light to new ideas and new ways of looking at things, that you might create something as strange and exciting in the future. Maybe it doesn’t succeed as well as H.G. Wells did in 1897, but as far as film adaptations go it’s manages to stand on its own two feet, which is more than you can say for I Am Legend. Worth a watch.
RESULT: RECOMMENDED
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