A few years ago (I think after the most recent BBC adaptation) someone said ‘how do people keep wanting to make War of the Worlds and then making something that isn’t War of the Worlds’? And it’s a fair question. All adaptations seem to wander off the source material at some point…
The original novel (technically a ‘romance’ according to Wells) to be fair, is structured weirdly for adaptation. The first half is very cinematic but the second half is almost that of a different story. It’s kind of like Dune in that respect (and same reason adaptations struggle)…
…and the climax of the first half (‘The Thunder Child’) is a weird-by-current-standards separate episode with a completely different POV to the rest of the book. It also happens to be the best bit, but for obvious reasons the most often left out when adapted
The changes Jeff Wayne made (essentially folding up two characters into one) are probably the best solution. Even there it peters out. Independence Day also solves the pacing and perspective issues by a) not worrying about being a bit daft and b) disguising itself as an entirely different story.
It is in many ways a better adaptation than most, although I find the American exceptionalism too nauseating to stomach - it ditches the point of the book which is essentially about humility and replaces it with
Oh for sure! Thinking about it, the real problem with the original is the lack of human agency in the resolution. That's both narratively unfulfilling and also a bit of a cop out if it's fully intended as allegory. Colonised peoples should just... wait for the British to die?
In the original draft the aliens just took over the Colonial Office and nobody outside the UK noticed the difference 🫡
Now I think about it some more, it would work narratively if you balanced it against the main character’s actions in some way. So, it’s the Martians’ hubris that makes them vulnerable to tiny microbes where the main character realises their humility before nature can save them, or something
These days you could make it an environmental theme. Protect the biome and it will protect us against the Martians (If I could be bothered I would make up a ‘he attac/he protec’ meme with a microbe)
Idk I think it’s more about recognising that we are all bugs, not the masters of the universe ruling over bugs. But yeah, it’s problematic both moralistically and in terms of conventional narrative. On the latter, I don’t have a problem with it, though I am a story-structure sceptic/hater
I peg the triumphalist tinge to the fact outside of the ACW the US never experienced the horrors of transitioning from war to peace. If you read the Spielberg ending critically, this is not good: the infrastructure is shot, millions dead (among whom are the people who could fix it), food is scarce.
Now *that* would have been an interesting thing to see on screen
Humility and Summer VFX Action Blockbuster are kinda antithetical, to be fair.
I’ll just be over in the corner, feeling a bit dense. 😅
My dad made a radio controlled version of Thunder Child based on Japanese torpedo rams from the Russo Japanese War. Bridge is a spam can.
Awesome! I am fascinated by the Thunder Child (and will chew anyone’s ear off about how it’s not HMS Polyphemus - the Japanese angle is intriguing, I’m going to go look that up)
It's not a class copy but picture this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabus...
looks a lot like they saw Turbinia & deciced "we're putting torpedoes on that"
Very much so!
There is enough in the original novel to make a film adaptation to do it justice. I wonder if the decline in Britain's power status makes a US based version more obvious for modern audiences. The BBC version was a dog's breakfast. I preferred the 1950s take over it. A Bonfire night staple way back.
The good old George Pal version is probably still the best
That with a run of Day of the Triffids or the Time Machine...perfect Guy Fawkes fodder on the BBC after we'd used all the fireworks when I was a kid.
Absolutely. That era was great for Wells and Wydham adaptations
Nobody ever adapts the Shepperton scene where the British Army's artillery manages to knock down a tripod either. That and Thunderchild were the most vivid parts of the book when I read it at 12.
Yes, that’s true. Most adaptations seem to make them indestructible rather than just very powerful. I suppose you could say that the scene near the end of the Spielberg version where the US military takes out an already ailing tripod with MANPADs is influenced by it
The Spielberg one does at least have a bit with a boat. But it’s trying by turns to be super faithful to Wells and at others to do Spielberg’s usual broken-but-remade-family thing, and then to be a commentary on the post 9-11 US, and ends up doing none of them well
Radio and the musical did it well enough. I expect serialised telly could too. Video games definitely could. It's film that's the limited medium here.
This is very true, but the BBC managed to balls it up a few years ago too
I somehow wasn't even aware of that one!
But yeah, obviously you also need a competent creative team. The fact that Steven Spielberg couldn't make a good film of it though suggests maybe it's not really doable.
I wonder if Spielberg hadn’t been making it at that exact moment, it might have been better. On the one hand, the timing meant that the initial invasion was handled with more grit and gravity than would otherwise have been the case, the whole thing fell apart under the 9-11/Iraq allegories
I suspect if not for 9/11 that particular adaptation wouldn't have happened at all. The opportunity for thinly veiled allegory was the point.
True. If nothing else it’s fascinating to watch it next to Independence Day and see how the tone has changed
It changed a lot of things on telly too. The West Wing changed focus suddenly mid run, so did other shows. Imagine how different the endings of Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 would have been if they were made just a few years later. Especially DS9 - Kira was a terrorist and one of the primary heroes.
I think it’s hard to translate the original novels core metaphor. The Edwardian era’s fear of Kaiserism threatening British naval supremacy
You can think of it as an invasion novel rather than SF, which is the genre landscape within which it is written. Maybe someone should have a go at The Battle of Dorking instead. At least nobody much would complain about faithfulness to the original since nobody's read it for a century and a bit.
Not sure I agree with that. Yes, there was the invasion fear context too but WotW was one of what Wells called his ‘scientific romances’ and the Martians based on his essay ‘Man In The Year Million’ attempting to take a scientific view of the long term evolution of humans, physically and morally
Why waste money on Martians when you can have the French instead?
There's a Pendragon adaptation, 2015 & visibly low budget, but it does try to keep the correct time period from the book
Would love an American remake to be 100% faithful, and then having to spend large amounts of time explaining things like towns called "Basingstoke" and "Leatherhead"
2020s US audiences discovering there's a place called "Woking" (where Wells was from, IDK if it gets namedropped in the books)
It very much does, and Woking loves it www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-m...
I can only remember Basingstoke and Leatherhead, but it's 30 years since I read the book. My teenaged brain also made a note of a passage where someone runs from her house semi-naked and her husband follows "ejaculating" and I don't know if that meant shouting or... something else
lol, I tried reading it once, but was already familiar with the Jeff Wayne summary, so it didn't really work