War Of The Worlds gives a quietly compelling makeover to the iconic invasion story
TV Reviews Pre-Air
There’s never an inopportune moment to revisit The War Of The Worlds, the seminal H.G. Wells novel that’s been stoking fears of intergalactic interlopers since 1938, when it was turned into a radio play that created a minor panic among its listeners. But surely there’s something unique about this particular moment for it to give rise to not one, but two series imaginings of material that hasn’t had a high-profile adaptation since Tom Cruise dodged death rays in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the dueling dramas—one from BBC, the other from StudioCanal and Fox—premiered overseas at nearly the exact same time. The more likely explanation is that the current geopolitical landscape has many writers thinking about what extreme circumstances could lead humanity to put aside its petty squabbles, and thrumming metal killing machines have a way of forcing perspective.
Luckily, the title and source material are the only things the two productions have in common, though that’s been enough to create market confusion. Whereas the BBC production is a focused period piece—think Pride And Prejudice And Tripods—the French version, which has found a U.S. home on Epix, takes a broader, ensemble view of a hostile alien attack in modern-day England and France. It also takes far more liberties than the BBC interpretation, eschewing massive action set pieces in favor of a quiet, more deliberate story about a disparate ensemble of characters with little more in common than their desire to outlast the murderous space tourists. While it might initially disappoint anyone expecting a more propulsive sci-fi tale, Worlds settles into a compelling if derivative dystopian survival series.
The saga begins, as such genre pieces often do, with a mild-mannered scientist killing time at a remote outpost when a troublesome signal reveals itself to be more than a doodad on the fritz. Here it’s astronomer Catherine Durand (Léa Drucker) who circles the wagons after taking notice of a distant transmission too sophisticated to be a cosmic mistake. As government officials figure out how to communicate with the visitors or at least determine their intent, their plans are upended when a swarm of small spacecraft burrows into major population centers across England and France. The focus shifts to neuroscientist-turned-high school teacher Bill Ward (Gabriel Byrne), who figures out the catastrophic purpose of the craft, which is to level a passive but devastating attack on humanity that, within days, leaves the streets strewn with bodies and a fortunate few struggling to adapt to their horrifying new circumstances.
While that synopsis might sound like the stuff of rollicking genre fare, Worlds is remarkably talky, especially in the first two hours. Bill is instrumental in discovering the aliens’ deadly schemes, but he’s equally invested in patching things up with his estranged wife Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), who he essentially kidnaps to save her from the initial wave of casualties. Elsewhere, Natasha Little plays an ordinary mom fighting to protect her teenage son and daughter (Ty Tennant and Daisy Edgar-Jones, respectively), the latter of whom has a disability that plays an intriguing role as the show creeps along in its own time. In fact, the series is so deliberate, the creatures that patrol the streets to eliminate straggling humans don’t show themselves until the end of the second hour, and even then only in glimpses.
Between the laconic pace and the intense focus on characters, Worlds is an alien invasion story that doesn’t spend much time fretting about its aliens beyond the characters whose jobs involve fretting about things. It’s much more interested in how people bond and persevere through shared trauma and survival instinct, not unlike The Walking Dead or TNT’s defunct Falling Skies. The show’s visuals bear more than a passing resemblance to Black Mirror, and fans of Charlie Brooker’s anthology will either cheer or cry foul upon seeing how much the aliens’ robot enforcers look like the mechanical pit bulls from season four’s “Metalhead.” Worlds shares Black Mirror’s relentless cynicism, and while the show was created and written by Howard Overman, it lacks the irreverent tang he brought to Misfits and Crazyhead.
But like any slow burn, Worlds reveals its charms over time, once the audience has shed any expectation of Overman following Wells’ blueprint. The performances are uniformly great, with Byrne lending his patrician presence to Bill, a messy, stubborn character who would easily become abrasive in the hands of a lesser actor. Bayo Gbadamosi also stands out as Kariem, an African immigrant who becomes a reluctant hero and finds it easier to fit into the world at the end of its lifecycle.
The series also boasts smart direction from Gilles Coulier, who directs the first four episodes, and Richard Clark, who helms the last four. Coulier’s sure hand is especially helpful early on, when the story flits between the characters’ introductions while spelling out the threat they face. Perhaps the biggest liability the series has is its iconic title, which promises a leaner, more focused, and closed-end narrative. Instead, Canal and Fox have given Overman a second season, which will hopefully benefit from the relentless world and character building that, at least for now, stands in place of the blue explosions and tractor beams.
66 Comments
The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one… But still, they come!
Jeff Wayne for the win
A classic. I gotta give it another listen it’s been a while.
Honestly the only version I really enjoy is the original radio play. I have a copy on vinyl from like the ‘60s and it’s wonderful. The book is kind of dry for the most part and the movies aren’t much better.
I liked the Tom Cruise one, the most recent adaptation on BBC was brutal.
Agreed, it’s got to be better than the recent BBC version.
I couldn’t get past 10 year old Dakota Fanning screaming like a banshee. One of the few movies I walked out of.
if you want to do war of the worlds, you need to update the enemies. the tripod aliens with the weapons described by HG wells would have been terrifying to a military in 1897, but they seem silly in the 2000’s. the 1950’s movie wisely gave them energy weapons and energy shields that made sense in a world with nukes. a british battleship wrecked one of the tripods in the original book and almost any of our modern aircraft outclasses a 1890’s era battleship by a huge factor.
Alan Moore in ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ sagely pointed out that nothing on earth gets about on three legs, and had Mr Hyde show why.
As you said, the tripods as they appear in the book would pose little threat to modern weapon technology. Even the British artillery of the time is able to take them down, if they get lucky.
But there are several levels of panic that keep escalating in the novel, which I think are actually served by the occasional human victory. The authorities, and thus the public, keep thinking that they can contain this threat, because Britain is the most powerful nation on earth. But the invasion keeps expanding from a single tripod in Surrey, to a small squad of them headed toward London, to an army invading Britain, to a full-scale global invasion.
A single tripod goes through a battalion of British infantry like wet tissue paper but it can be stopped by artillery; a group of Fighting Machines can be halted by a defensive line; even an army of Fighting Machines can be held off by delaying action while citizens get to safety. But even if you think to try and flee to somewhere else in the British Empire, there’s nowhere you can hide.
There’s a good Lyndsay Ellis video comparing the relative merits and faults of WotW and Independence Day.
The Tom Cruise version is certainly Spielberg spectacle at its best, but the 9/11 references were just a weeeeeeee bit obvious.
Back when we saw the Spielberg movie, a friend of mine played us a recording of the Welles radio play, which was indeed pretty great. I was most taken by the episode with the Artilleryman — which most other versions have heavily altered or omitted from the original H.G. Wells version. It has a little twist that explains volumes about the human condition.
Gonna go full hipster/nerd here and say one of the best depictions of War of the Worlds was in Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Can’t argue with that.
“Hello, old chap. Hello. Welcome to England.”
This boomer totally agreed with you inner hipster.
The Jeff Wayne LP is still a hell of a lot of fun.
I love the George Pal version, which I watched recently for the first time in decades. The special effects are like nothing else from that era, truly imaginative. And I’d put the sound effects up against almost any other film, from the rattlesnake sound of the emerging Martian ships to the ominous throbbing that precedes the firing of their weapons. Admittedly the acting is rather stiff but nobody watches WOTW for the Earthlings.
I find myself always put out by apocalypse fiction due to the fact that if people get wiped out before they can shut down all the nuclear power plants, a majority of them would go critical and meltdown.
Only “The Leftovers” has dealt with this simple fact so far in popular apocalypse fiction.
There’s never an inopportune moment to revisit The War Of The Worlds, the seminal H.G. Wells novel that’s been stoking fears of intergalactic interlopers since 1938, when it was turned into a radio play that created a minor panic among its listeners.Not sure if this is intended or a mistake, but it’s been doing so before Orson Welles came along, since it was first written in 1898.
I think he’s implying no one ever read the book prior to Orson discovering a moldering and discarded old copy in an attack somewhere.
Spoiler alert: the Martians all die from coronavirus.
Yes, the timing of this series could not be more anticlimactic.
There’s a second season? WTF does that look like? We just going to draw the thing out until the aliens’ inevitable demise from the common cold (sorry for the 120 year old spoiler), or is it going to be survival horror forever?
This basically sounds like the Tom Cruise version. Everyone kind of forgets that the movie was really way more about him trying to bond with his kids being an absentee dad being stuck with them on the worst day ever than the special effects. Yeah, the big difference is it did have TOM CRUISE level special effects, but the story was way more personal that epic.
That movie was more PG-13 horror than anything else.
Besides checking the set-piece boxes from the original novel, the freakiest thing the Spielberg version added was the thing where it was implied that all captured humans were being ground up into plant fertilizer. It was one of the few times a Spielberg movie veered into gore. Jaws, the end of Raiders, and this. Can’t really think of many other moments of Spielberg and gore-horror.
Just out of curiosity, how did this turn into Spielberg as a “gore-horror” producer? Why would someone look to Spielberg for gore horror?
Just an observation. Not an advocation.
A spielberg movie with daddy issues? you don’t say!
I remember getting to the end of the Superhoodie storyline in Misfits and then going… “wait, was that problematic?”
just for the record, the whole ‘radio play inspired mass panic’ thing appears to have been completely invented by the newspapers, who were looking to discredit radio as a news source. since radio could break a story to audiences in near real time and papers only printed once or twice a day, they had a vested interest in making radio broadcasts about news seem unreliable. there’s no evidence outside of a few scattered newspaper stories (originally local, but then picked up nationally) that any panic occurred- no police reports, no calls to authorities, no record of people rushing to the streets to flee.
Absolutely true, also any “panic” had nothing to do with aliens but anxiety over the Munich Crisis where Nazi Germany had absorbed Czechoslovakia barely a month before. Most were concerned that the “invaders” were Germans, especially with the gas attack portrayed in the broadcast and the living memory of the horrors of WWI still in abundance.
also interesting is while Wells was inspired by the tasmanian invasion by england that had gone really poorly for the tasmanians, there was an entire genre of ‘invasion literature’ in england that was all about how germany was going to rise up, cross the channel and conquer the brits. war of the worlds was written almost squarely in the middle of that very specific trend
Well, it was also useful to cover up the arrival of my people.
i really liked your trilateral commission
I’d like to see your SSN, please.
Laugh while we can, monkey-boys…
I worked with a guy who told me he was home with his sister when the radio show was playing. They were both terrified and ran screaming down the street to where his parents were so they could all die together. He would have been in his 40s at the time we worked together.
I owned a taxi company and gave Gabriel Byrne a ride once. He had just finished “A Moon for the Misbegotten” on Broadway for which he had rave reviews. Though he seems sometimes fierce and intense, he’s actually a rather shy and charming man.
The old syndicated War of the Worlds TV show is the only decent film version beyond the original.
To life immortal!
Are we talking both seasons, Season 1, or the radically different season 2?Ah, late 80s syndicated TV…
I really don’t know why the showrunners got rid of Chaves and Akin; I loved the first season and why the new showrunners decided to go another way kind of messed the show up IMHO. But yeah, that was a fun show to watch along with Friday the 13th….
And Werewolf…(ETA: nevermind Werewolf; that was on the fledgling Fox network…)
Yeah, I have to revisit that show. Only an episode or 2 in mid-season so it’s hard to jump in like that.
I honestly remember almost nothing from that show other than that line.
I have a lot of nostalgia for that ridiculous show because I was a kid when it aired and was really impressed with the gross-out effects and the weirdness and eccentricity of Harrison Blackwood as a main character. I went back and watched some of the episodes recently and, whew, that two-hour pilot is rough. It was done during a writers’ strike, so that didn’t help at all. There were actually some decent episodes later on, but without any kind of story arc (since no genre shows were allowed to have those back then) it all seems kind of pointless.
I watched both last year, at the same time. The one from the BBC was crap, so this one won that battle. BTW, they are completely different. Good to know the show continues.
The only version of War Of The Worlds that matters is Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version.
Focusing more on interpersonal drama than the alien threat seems highly French.“Marcel, the Martians are coming. We must run or we will be killed.”“Pff. Since you told me I no longer arouse you, Yvette, I have been dead inside. What more can these Martians do?” *takes fifteen minute long drag on Gitane*
Yvette : But I must have you alive. Alive, as you have already been every evening, for weeks, for months.
Long shot pulls away down a long, long garden pool area until the characters are tiny. Then a jump shot back to the Gitane ashes landing on the dirt, the cigarette exhausted landing next, and then his heel grinding the Gitane down hard. Final zoom into some sparks slowly fading into darkness…..
And there are guard dogs..I hate guard dogs! You do realize if we do this, we will be grounded two maybe even three weeks,
A quiet series about world destruction may seem counter-intuitive but here I sit, placidly in my little apartment, witnessing every day the ongoing death of democracy in America and the rise of a brutal dictatorship. Its a rather quiet process as long as you haven’t personally had a child ripped from your arms and thrown into a concentration camp.
Someone ought to do a modern-day take on this where modern military is used to fight the invasion, but in the end, the invaders are done in by a virus. Only here’s the twist — this time, it’s a computer virus!And the aliens, rather than take over the world, just leave because they aren’t about to pay any punkass Russian hackers $55,000 just to get their HR records decrypted when they can just make everyone fill out new applications and W4s.
Cast Will Smith instead of some Russian hackers and, oh, never mind.
I think the biological virus i a bit more realistic scenario than technologically less sophisticated species creating computer virus that could threaten systems of superior species. I mean they wouldn’t even know what the sort of tech the processors are based, might be even biological. Not to mention that they would actually make something that would a) run in that said environment and b) would actually know how to exploit them c) would exploit them fatally.I’ve often said that especially Hollywood requires some sort of review process on what short of crap they try to pass.
well, the response to that is always going to be “it is not supposed to be strictly logical, it is a movie”. Yeah, for discussion purposes, the thought that late 20th century humans being able to make a computer virus that would take down aliens that are at least 1000 years of us technologically is completely bonkers. But Independence Day is the original sci-fi summer popcorn movie
In what sort of way ID is the original scifi popcorn movie?
Anyho it was quite shitty. Even after few beers it sucked and hard. After quite many beers it wasn’t that much better.
Dunno, perhaps it’s just me, but I kinda like movies that make some sense. Not in a way that everything is explained and underlined, but you know, has some ever so small trinket of believability.
This is the most blatant case of unimaginative re-kindling of old stories I’ve ever seen… Two unoriginal productions, based on the exact same 287 page novel, which has already been done numerous times… it just screams glass half empty for the future of creative writing.The BBC adaptation was horrendous, it pivoted into relationships, love, and fictional irrelevance before it drew the audience in at all.
My favorite version thus far is the 1950s with the added bonus of a YB49 Northrup flying wing bomber dropping a nuclear bomb on the alien fleet. The special effects were excellent for its time, well cast and acted.
The BBC version moved the story from the gay nineties to the Napoleonic Wars period. That’s an interesting choice and I hope to hear more about it.
You watched this and think the character who holds the blind girl hostage and then has some love affair in a safe house with the girl’s mother (including a scene where she defends this random affair by verbally abusing her mother for no reason and the mother responding by fetching her some birth control….my God it’s embarrassing and painful)…. This show has a sliver of promise until we get the stories of this girl and her random assaulter/love affair, leaving her family…. During this intense situation with death all around… “you’ll die out there” “you don’t know that!”Why would they take the time to make this big show and allow such embarrassing story into the main plot?
Regarding the Epix version: Elizabeth McGovern clearly is Britain’s go-to American actress (which is a good thing). She delivers a solid, non-period-piece performance in this series – and frankly, commands one’s attention in all scenes she’s in. I can’t help but notice that the music score is either directly lifted from or greatly influenced by BioWare’s “Mass Effect” video game series.
I just watched the eight episodes, and it is good. I liked that it is set in Europe, it gives it a novel aspect that is appreciated and different. The acting is pretty superb and it is way more character driven than you would expect. If anything, a criticism is they over emphasize the character stuff. (I do not think this is like the walking dead at all, where the acting is bad and the characters paper thin.) The special effects, although surprisingly not as many as this title would have you believe, are very well done. The aliens look very believable and look realistic.The bad? It is VERY grim. People die with regularity and there is almost an old “Battlestar Galactica’ nihilism at its core. It also has that old “Day the Earth Stood Still” thing where people ask are we better than the genocidal aliens (yes, it is pretty obvious since only a tiny minority of us are monsters and the genocides that do happen on Earth are pretty universally condemned.) and ask wouldn’t we “do the same to them?” (in 2020? The answer is such a huge no we wouldn’t that it is actually eye rolling in its cynicism, that it takes seriously.) It starts to wobble at the end ironically when it should be taking off.But the acting and story won out for me. It is not “great” but a solid “B”. If there is a second season, I will watch it.