Closer to Independence Day than HG Well's vision

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2005)

OK I was persuaded to go and see this movie, even though I'm not much of a Spielberg fan (I always find him a bit juvenile, ever seen a young kid die in one of his films??). I also studied Wells at University and know the original text pretty well, as well as the climate under which it was written.
Now, my first obvious gripe was, like a lot of Hollywood movies, something English is misappropriated and transplanted to America. It is also updated to the present day. Having said that, if you throw god knows how many millions of dollars at something maybe you have the right to do whatever you like...
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing that sucks too much about this movie, what I didn't like was the bastardization of Wellsian ideas. Tim Robbin's character is a mish-mash of The Artilleryman, The Curate (wearing a wedding ring around his neck rather than a cross though!!!) yet is called Ogilvy, who is the astronomer at the beginning of the story.
The War Of The Worlds is in amazing novella written in the 1890's (very short - so no excuses) that predicts the massive destruction and urban desolation of the First World War, the fall of the British Empire, biological warfare, extraterrestrial life and space travel, the decline of orthodox religion, light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (laser to you and me) etc etc (I could go on) and of course, most notably, taps into the new Darwinist ideas of the time concerning evolution (martians described as evolved humans, just heads and hands). Women and children die horribly, it's dark, scary, adult; all the things which ultimately this movie were not.
Yet I gave it a chance, treating it as a modern and very loose rendering of the story - the machines didn't quite look right but the height of them was spot-on and the heat-ray fairly accurate. Then the martians themselves appeared, and any suspense that had been generated up to that point disappeared. In a lot of ways Wells' vision is a satire, the martians (as evolved humans) are disgusting loathsome blobs with flailing tentacles who are sluggish under the Earth's atmosphere (somehow Wells worked out that the Martian atmosphere is considerably lighter than that of Earth), relying on their machines (Wells anticipating couch potatoes of today?).
What does Spielberg come up with? Something too humanoid, too lithe, too small, malevolent e.t.'s perhaps but a million miles away from what Wells was saying - they are just as agile on this planet and just not repugant enough, not terrifying at all.
So I left the theatre predictably disappointed that the name of Herbert George Wells had been attached to something significantly less than the sum of its parts, whereas the original novella is so much more. Do yourself a favour - instead of paying a few quid or dollars to go and see this film, buy the book.