WarS of The Worlds

Earlier this year, or perhaps it was late last year, I started watching the TV series of “War Of The Worlds”. With a degree of serendipity, I also recently listened to a podcast episode on the 2005 Steven Spielberg movie “War Of The Worlds”, which inspired me to read the original novel for the first time, and also to rewatch the movie. Last week I finally completed watching the third, and final, season of “War Of The Worlds”, so this post will be an amalgamation of thoughts on all of these.

“War Of The Worlds” was only the second book by HG Wells that I’ve read – “The World Set Free” being the first. Of course I had some awareness of the contents thanks to the movie, but there was much, it turned out, that I didn’t know about the book’s story, or, indeed, how many nods to its contents the 2005 movie has.

For some reason, I wasn’t really aware that the original book was set in the UK. Not only that, it’s set in places that I am familiar with. I have been to Horsell Common – where the first alien (Martian in the book’s case) lands – and my grandparents used to live in Cobham, which also gets mentioned, and I have been to places such as Leatherhead, Woking, and Epping that also get mentioned.

I really enjoyed Wells’ pithy insights about humanity. Such as,

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level.

and

we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

and

What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men!

and

I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.

But there were times when some of the observations showed their age, such as

Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal.

The future wars (at the time of writing), to some degree Wells himself foretold in “The World Set Free”, with the use of atomic bombs, for example, were perhaps equal to the what the Martians do in “War Of The Worlds”.

By chance I was listening to the Audiobook of the complete collection of Mark Twain on the same days as I was reading “War Of The Worlds”. Usually I have no problem following more than two books at the same time – but this time there were some issues. Part of this stemmed from overlaps in the some rather archaic use of the English language (e.g. in “War Of The Worlds”, sentences such as ‘His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating’ would probably be phrased differently these days). But, I had also no idea that Mark Twain had written science fiction and so some of the content, although the storylines were very different, had overlaps in terms of observations at times due to Twain and Wells seemingly having equally dismissive views on religion and humanity at times.

One observation of Wells really resonated in terms of the way the world appears to be going with AI, but this may also stem from my influence of watching movies such as RoboCop,

I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called PUNCH. He pointed out – writing in a foolish, facetious tone – that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, “ teacher and agent of the brain.” While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.

Of course, in the end, the Martians are defeated by not having built up natural resistance to bacteria that exists around us on Earth. Humans, on the other hand, have. The following words feel quite chilling after the recent COVID-19 pandemic,

by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many – those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance – our living frames are altogether immune.

But as chilling as that may sound, nothing is more significant in “War Of The Worlds” than the following sentence,

we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

Overall, I found “War Of The Worlds” and really good read. It’s great that it’s available for free as an eBook, but I think I will get a printed copy one day so that I can go through it more carefully again. I still prefer printed copies over eBooks when I want to fully engage with a text. I just wish that I had read this book when I was much younger as I think I could have benefitted from its insights over the years. I would also like to learn more about HG Wells and hope that The Rest Is History podcast one day features him.

Let’s turn now to the 2005 Steven Spielberg movie.

I enjoyed the movie when it came out and, personally, think that its current average on IMDb of 6.5 is far too low. I had originally given it an 8. But after re-watching it after listening to an episode of Ramblin; An Amblin Podcast on it and reading the book, I have taken my rating up to a 9, so it makes my list of Top Movies and TV Shows.

The Ramblin Amblin episode was not only enjoyable, but also picked up on most of the good things about the movie and the couple of things that could have been done better. There are a few things that I would like to add to what was discussed, however.

First, I’d never appreciated how the tendrils (which can be seen on the cover of the DVD box above) were actually a call back to something that was in the original book. The movie perhaps doesn’t really exploit what they are as much as it could have done, but I do like that the fact that it was included since it was in the book.

Second, as noted in the podcast episode, the way in which people turn to dust in the movie is really graphic and terrifying. Of course the use of dust was probably a nod to the dust that followed the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, and “War Of The Worlds” was not the only movie of the 2000s that had this “dustification” – it even comes in a scene of the 2008 Japanese movie “Climber’s High” (directed by Masato Harada) as reporters approach the JL123 crash site. On that note, while I have studied disaster movies, such as “Climber’s High”, for example see Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?, “War Of The Worlds” has not been part of my studies due to its science fiction content.

One thing that I think the podcast episode didn’t mention was the sound that the aliens (who are not Martians, of course, in this version) make. This is one of the things that I really like about the movie. It reminds me a bit like a fog horn on a large sea vessel. It’s terrifying, haunting, but also, to some degree, mournful at times. Here’s one clip on YouTube as an example,

Overall, I think the 2005 version of “War Of The Worlds” is underappreciated for the way it’s been relatively faithful to the original book while also bringing up-to-date the parts that needed to be brought into the 21st Century.

Let’s turn now to the TV series of “War Of The Worlds” (directed by Gilles Coulier and Richard Clark, 2019-2022)

I only came across the series by chance when I was on Disney+ and decided to give it a try. The first thing to say about it is that it’s an British-French collaboration and the series is set in UK and France (and often when the French characters are speaking they use French).

In the first season the French parts start in the Alps, providing some wonderful scenery. We then follow some characters as they move north (seemingly too easily and quickly at times – and without using bikes, which would have been an obvious way to travel when cars didn’t work) to get to the UK.

The UK parts are predominantly in London. Except they aren’t. Most of it, at least in the first two seasons, are actually filmed in Cardiff. Since I live in the city and work at Cardiff University, it was fun to see parts of the city, especially one road which is right next to my work place, being used. Of course, I have seen Cardiff and the university come up in other TV programmes – most notably Dr Who – but this was more unexpected. But Cardiff was also used for at least one of the French scenes too. As the first season was filmed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the programme made use of the empty Toys’R’Us building (or “jabs’r’us” as we came to know it as it was one of the mass vaccination sites during COVID-19) in Cardiff Bay for a scene that was supposed to be at a shop in Grenoble.

Given my interest in Contents Tourism (see, for example, about my chapter ‘Contents Tourism in Plane Sight‘), it was interesting to see Cardiff appear in “War Of The Worlds”, but I think it was what could be called ‘reverse contents tourism’. For, rather than wanting to go to visit these places due to seeing them in a programme, I felt a connection with the programme and wanted to continue watching it due to having already been to the places in the programme.

There are now going to be some spoilers, so if you’re thinking of watching and don’t want to know some key aspects of the story, I suggest you stop reading now and return to this post at a later date.

The TV series’ storyline is significantly different to the original “War Of The Worlds” novel or its 2005 movie version. In fact, it is so different, I wondered why it felt that it needed to use the title “War Of The Worlds” (just as I raised questions about the British adaptation of “Six Four”, based on the novel by Hideo Yokoyama, who also wrote the aforementioned “Climber’s High”). Perhaps those behind the TV series thought that using the title would draw people in more easily than if it they had used a completely new title – if that is the case, I’m not sure how successful it was given the relatively low number of reviews (around 18,000 at present) on IMDb.

The main thing that is the same between the original versions and the TV series is that Earth is attacked almost without warning.

And that’s about it.

Gone are the huge iconic tripods. They are replaced by small mechanical dog-like creatures. Frightening in their own way as they are so much more mobile, but naturally their destructive power is much more limited (at times more personal) than the massive weapons of the book/movie.

But it turns out that these creatures don’t act alone. They are working alongside other aliens.

Or so it seems.

For these aliens are actually other humans from another dimension, but seemingly from that dimension’s Earth.

So it’s not “War of the Worlds” per se, but “War of the World”.

The first season is quite slow in some respects – but I liked this. I liked the extra time that was taken to allow us to get to know the characters and the details it paid attention to.

Central to the first two seasons is Emily (pictured on the right hand side of the above promotional picture). A key thing about Emily, who was brilliantly played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, is that she is blind. It was great to have a key character have a disability and for it to feel as though it wasn’t merely done as a tick-box exercise to ensure that the programme had a cross-representation of society. I have written elsewhere about the importance of books and programmes to do this (see for example, Discussing Disabilities – The Responsibility of Authors and Academics and Barrier Free – Blindness (Photo in “Japan: The Basics” (2nd Edition)). However, just as the deaf child in the Japanese disaster movie “252 Seizonsha Ari” is suddenly cured of her deafness, so Emily’s blindness is seemingly cured (initially temporarily) by the pulses sent out by the alien machines. However, in a plot twist, it turns out that Emily is actually one of those from the other dimension and is effectively mother to their whole population. This leads the humans needing to get rid of her. This storyline and the fact that Emily hardly appears in the third and final season was one of the weaker parts of that season, in my view. Having made Emily such a central figure, it just wasn’t the same without her.

I had enjoyed the first two seasons (the first more than the second), but, while I wanted to know what would happen in the third, I found that it lacked the punch of the first two. And the first two, in particular, do have punch. This series is not merely about not-alien-aliens attacking Earth. As well as getting the audience to think about disabilities, the series deals with issues such as drug addition, mental health issues, strained family relations, affairs, rape and incest.

I found it very difficult to rate the series on IMDb. I really enjoyed the first season and the level of detail that it went in to. But as time went on, it seemed to get dragged more and more to a more standard science fiction, time, or parallel dimension type story. As noted in my recent review of “Meet Me On The Bridge“, I have been reading or watching quite a few books or programmes with these sorts of storylines, including the Japanese TV programme “Extremely Inappropriate” and, most unexpectedly, as noted above, Mark Twain, recently. I am also used to such stories from Star Trek and novels such as the excellent “Impossible” by Sarah Lotz. The third season of “War Of The Worlds” just didn’t bring anything particularly new, interesting, or memorable to the table. Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Maybe it was just that I had expected more after enjoying the first two seasons so much. Overall, I ended up giving it an 8, but wish that IMDb allowed different ratings for seasons (rather than for the whole thing or individual episodes) as I may have given the first season a 9 or 10.

There you have it, three versions of “War Of The Worlds”. I’m still to see the 1953 movie (directed by Byron Haskin), listen to all of the 1978 musical version, or watch any of the other many versions that seem to have already been made or keep coming out, but I dare say I’ll get to some of these one day too.

Finally, here is a sketch that I did in my daily sketchbook that I did on the day that I finished reading “War Of The Worlds” – albeit the image is more inspired by one of my favourite scenes in the 2005 movie.