Much mayhem and running can't match the first film

Rating: 5/10 (19 August 2017)

This rendition of "War of the Worlds" comes more than 50 years after the classic 1953 movie. As with so many other Hollywood remakes, this film isn't nearly as good as the first one. That's mostly because of the plot, as well as adaptations to the story. This adaptation in some ways is closer to the H.G. Wells 1898 novel of the same title, and in other ways not so. Both the original film and this one change the locale from England to the United States.
The tripod machines in this film very closely resemble those of Wells' book. Likewise, the tentacles that protrude from them. The original film adaptation didn't have tripods, but used hovering spacecraft with appendages and extensions that do the work of the tentacles in the novel and this film. The 1953 film had the invasion coming from Mars, and this one has it coming from another galaxy. Within a few years of the 1953 film, scientists had concluded that life could not exist on Mars.
But even with science fiction, when things don't have to make sense due to man's limited knowledge at a particular time, a movie should be wary of things that defy common sense. And that's where the adaptations in this 2005 film go awry. We learn that the tripod machines were buried deep within the earth millions of years earlier. Then we see that the pilots of the tripods are transferred to them through the lightning strikes from hovering spacecraft that we can't see because they are enveloped in some sort of cloud or smoke cover. So, the pilots from this super highly advanced civilization millions of years ago, must have returned to whatever ship brought them to the earth, and gone back in it to their home planet.
We have no idea why it would be millions of years later that they would invade the earth to annihilate it. And, if they were so advanced, one would think their science would have known something about microbiology, which they surely had on their planet. So, why wouldn't they have taken precautions? And, would their earlier pilots not have had exposure to the microbes on earth then, that they could have studied. In making this alien race so much more advanced than man (and so much more so than in the novel), this film stretches the sci-fi to the realm of absurd, rather than that of "what if." Why would the aliens destroy so many humans when the human blood seems to be their food? Especially, since the humans could do them no harm. And, were there similar animals to humans whose blood was their food in their original world?
In the book, Wells has some of the tripods being destroyed by the military. But they are too many and too strong to be stopped, and soon overrun the military. Only the microbes cause their demise. The original (1953) movie sticks to Mars as the source of the aliens, so life on their planet would have been similar to that on earth. They would have had microbes and more easily have thought that our biological spheres were similar.
While Wells uses tripod machines, the adaptation for the 1953 movie instead had hovering spacecraft. Again, common sense would say that a highly advanced race would have the most sophisticated types of transport and weapons, which would not be cumbersome walking machines.
These common sense aspects aside, the current film is one very long chase, with fright and terror. It's one very, very long movie about running, fleeing, interspersed with encounters with the tripods and their mechanical probing eyes. The 1953 film, on the other hand, had a plot with scientists trying to study the aliens, and a larger number of characters in the running and chase aspects.
The acting is very good in this film, and the camera work and special effects are tops. But this movie is one long picture of mayhem with giant machines wielding destruction, and very little plot otherwise. It fits that genre of "Transformers" of 2007 and so many other films of sci-fi mechanical monsters gone mad. It loses the human and real life elements too quickly.
There is a 23-foot metal sculpture of a Martian tripod in the home town of H.G. Wells. It's located at Chobham Road (Crown Passage) on Church Street East in Woking, England. That's two blocks east of Jubilee Square and Christchurch.