War of the Worlds

Plot synopsis:
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
=== The Coming of the Martians ===
The narrative opens in an astronomical observatory at Ottershaw where explosions are seen on the surface of planet Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Later a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the unnamed narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is an artificial cylinder that opens, disgorging Martians who are "big" and "greyish" with "oily brown skin", "the size, perhaps, of a bear", each with "two large dark-coloured eyes", and lipless "V-shaped mouths" which drip saliva and are surrounded by two "Gorgon groups of tentacles". The narrator finds them "at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous". They briefly emerge, have difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere, and rapidly retreat into their cylinder. A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) approaches the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them and others nearby with a heat-ray before beginning to assemble their machinery. Military forces arrive that night to surround the common, including Maxim guns. The population of Woking and the surrounding villages are reassured by the presence of the military. A tense day begins, with much anticipation of military action by the narrator.
After heavy firing from the common and damage to the town from the heat-ray which suddenly erupts in the late afternoon, the narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead, where his cousin lives, using a rented, two-wheeled horse cart; he then returns to Woking to return the cart when in the early morning hours, a violent thunderstorm erupts. On the road during the height of the storm, he has his first terrifying sight of a fast-moving Martian fighting-machine; in panic he crashes the horse cart, barely escaping detection. He discovers the Martians have assembled towering three-legged "fighting-machines" (tripods), each armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". These tripods have wiped out the army units positioned around the cylinder and attacked and destroyed most of Woking. Sheltering in his house, the narrator sees a fleeing artilleryman moving through his garden, who later tells the narrator of his experiences and mentions that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting off the narrator from his wife. The two try to escape via Byfleet just after dawn, but are separated at the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry during a Martian afternoon attack on Shepperton. One of the Martian fighting-machines is brought down in the River Thames by artillery as the narrator and countless others try to cross the river into Middlesex, as the Martians retreat back to their original crater. This gives the authorities precious hours to form a defence-line covering London. After the Martians' temporary repulse, the narrator is able to float down the Thames in a boat toward London, stopping at Walton, where he first encounters the curate, his companion for the coming weeks.
Towards dusk, the Martians renew their offensive, breaking through the defence-line of siege guns and field artillery centred on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill by a widespread bombardment of the black smoke; an exodus of the population of London begins. This includes the narrator's younger brother, a medical student, also unnamed, who flees to the Essex coast after the sudden, panicked, predawn order to evacuate London is given by the authorities, a terrifying and harrowing journey of three days, amongst thousands of similar refugees streaming from London. The brother encounters Mrs. Elphinstone and her younger sister-in-law, just in time to help them fend off three men who are trying to rob them. Since Mrs. Elphinstone's husband is missing, the three continue on together. After a terrifying struggle to cross a streaming mass of refugees on the road at Barnet, they head eastward. Two days later, at Chelmsford, their pony is confiscated for food by the local Committee of Public Supply. They press on to Tillingham and the sea. There they manage to buy passage to the Continent on a small paddle steamer, part of a vast throng of shipping gathered off the Essex coast to evacuate refugees. The torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child destroys two attacking tripods before being destroyed by the Martians, though this allows the evacuation fleet to escape, including the ship carrying the narrator's brother and his two travelling companions. Shortly thereafter, all organised resistance has ceased, and the Martians roam the shattered landscape unhindered.
=== The Earth under the Martians ===
At the beginning of Book Two the narrator and the curate are plundering houses in search of food. During this excursion the men witness a Martian fighting-machine enter Kew, seizing any person it finds and tossing them into a "great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder", and the narrator realises that the Martian invaders may have "a purpose other than destruction" for their victims. At a house in Sheen "a blinding glare of green light" and a loud concussion attend the arrival of the fifth Martian cylinder, and both men are trapped beneath the ruins for two weeks. The narrator's relations with the curate deteriorate over time, and he eventually is forced to knock him unconscious to silence his now loud ranting; but the curate is overheard outside by a Martian, who finally removes his unconscious body with one of its handling machine tentacles. The reader is then led to believe the Martians will perform a fatal transfusion of the curate's blood to nourish themselves, as they have done with other captured victims viewed by the narrator through a small slot in the house's ruins. The narrator just barely escapes detection from the returned foraging tentacle by hiding in the adjacent coal-cellar.
The Martians eventually abandon the cylinder's crater, and the narrator emerges from the collapsed house where he had observed the Martians up close during his ordeal; he then approaches West London. En route, he finds the Martian red weed everywhere, a prickly vegetation spreading wherever there is abundant water. On Putney Heath, he once again encounters the artilleryman, who briefly persuades him of a grandiose plan to rebuild civilization by living underground; but, after a few hours, the narrator perceives the laziness of his companion and abandons him. Now in a deserted and silent London, he begins to slowly go mad from his accumulated trauma, finally attempting to end it all by openly approaching a stationary fighting-machine. To his surprise, he quickly discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly microbial infections, to which they had no immunity: "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth." The narrator continues on, finally suffering a brief but complete nervous breakdown, which affects him for days; he is finally nursed back to health by a kind family. Eventually, he is able to return by train to Woking via a patchwork of newly repaired tracks. At his home, he discovers that his beloved wife has miraculously survived. The last chapter reflects on the significance of the Martian invasion and the "abiding sense of doubt and insecurity" it has left in the narrator's mind.

Tags: satire

Review:
"War of the Worlds: The Series" continues the storyline from the original movie while giving it a new twist, with the Martians, or the "alien invaders" as they are called now, taking over people's bodies to prevent them from succumbing to the bacteria that "killed" them in the original movie.
Also seen were their war machines with the heat rays, and Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson), the heroine of the original who fell in love with Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry's character).
Set in modern times, this series employed so many disturbing images and stories, it genuinely gave me creeps at night.
The first series of WAR OF THE WORLDS is great television and great TV SF-- rivetting, exciting, thought-provoking, well-acted, and well-written.
The off-hand killing of two main characters, the addition of an unneeded extra male lead, and a drastic switch in the series format from covert action to urban guerilla warfare.....
What was unfair was the fact that many things that were building towards the second season NEVER took place, thanks to the fatal change in direction.
The first episode of the second season should have been the last episode period, unless the producers could find a way to bring more reinforcements from the original aliens homeworld.
That would have been a REAL 'War of the Worlds', as the humans could have faced both sets of warring aliens in a battle to save Earth.
I'd like to believe that the series could be revived, since one of the early episodes dealt with a list of 10,000 aliens held somewhere that disappeared.
The first season was very much like a game of chess between the Blackwood Project and the aliens- led the triumvirate Advocacy (featuring the underrated actress, Ilse Von Glatz- who was chilling as an Advocate).
Towards the end of the season, there was a mythology carefully being built with the introductions of new characters such as the renegade alien/human hybrid- Quinn and the Qar'To Synth, Katara.
The best thing about this series was that, in the first half of the first season, you never knew who was going to win the battles.
War of the Worlds season one was my favorite television series.
Rather than being cliched and boring, War of the Worlds managed to be trendy and dark, attempting to deal with mature themes and violence in an intelligent fashion all too rare today.Perhaps the best season was the second, when the war becomes a drawn-out war of attrition, culminating in one of the most thought-provoking finales I have seen this side of Babylon 5.
The idea of bringing back the aliens from War of the Worlds is simply great, especially for those who wonder "what if the aliens had attacked us with our technology today, instead of back in the '50s?"   The answer is clear; they would STILL kick ass!
The heat rays they used are just as unbeatable in the 80s as they were in the 50s, and the idea of the aliens going into hibernation to survive rather than just dying was a great plot device to bring them into the present.
You had strong plots, good acting, and a good overall storyline.Then the second season started.What the hell was Frank Mancuso Jr. thinking when he made this series?
For one thing, it's never explained how much time has passed between the first and second seasons, and there's also the matter of where the woman who owned the house where lived in the manor went?
She just disappeared.3) The main characters now live in an underground pipe.4) Even when the main character (Harrison) said he never used a gun, he just broke his own moral code and shot some guys in the second season premiere.5) The plots just sucked.
Now, 21 years later, I still have nightmares.The reason may be the complete lack of human emotions within the aliens.
The aliens are portrayed as total different from us - not "almost human/American" like in other sci-fi shows.
Since Mars is a dead planet and presumably any presence of an indigenous civilization would be noticed from earth, it made sense to change the origin of the aliens to a faraway solar system.It was a shame that the series did not capitalize on the episode, "Angel of Death".
The unexpected, ironic, and somewhat twisted humorous ending would have made for a much more interesting second season had the original plot line been followed.
As it was, some viewers, including myself, disliked the second season's post-apocalyptic setting and stopped watching the series.I present here my own speculative analysis of the aliens from Mortax, for anyone curious enough to read on.Most likely the inhabitants of Mortax originated from a tightly controlled, rigid, caste-driven society.
Of course one of the biggest logical flaws is that the US government admits to three scientists that they do believe the world is being threatened by invasion from a superior alien threat, but that the only resources they can spare to help stop it are in the form of one annoying Army colonel!
Of course this is absurd, but due to the small scale of the series they were acting more as investigators.In my opinion, the best things about this series were the eccentric Dr Blackwood, the interesting dialog, and the alien threat.
It worked more like a sci-fi version of Vichy/ Maquis France in World War 2.Not a great series, in many ways, but a worthwhile and entertaining effort..
I first started to watch the series when i was in Pakistan in 1989/90, i was like..13 years old I was so inspired by the plot the secrecy the commando actions the science and the character of Dr. Blackwood and Lt. Col Paul iron-horse that i took up Physics in university in London six years later, and also decided to join the army..
At almost the same time the original "Star Trek" series was being done at Paramount..
This series, especially upon it's second season (Adrian Paul came aboard here), was incredibly ahead of it's time on several fronts.
A great alien premise ( cloning, infiltration, etc.), cinematography ( lighting, atmosphere, creating "other" localities), and characters ( almost NO cliches, enough said), marked this show as awesomely full of potential.
I do think it would have been a bit more interesting if the aliens had to pay a price for taking over human bodies...
A year or so later, the Morthrai arrive, dismiss the incompetent Mor-tax for their bungling of the Mars project, and proceed with conquest of Earth, which does, they come to realize, seem like the only viable option.Now, that's just my way of rationalizing what we saw in 1953 and in 1988 and 1989.There was a Star Trek link in the series: in one episode, a boy is playing with STTNG action figures while his now-alien parents drive the car, and he makes a sign to appeal to a pair of nuns speeding by ("Nearer My God to Thee!")..
Since our society seldom sees any kind of sci-fi as "cool" I'm really amazed that this ever came out on DVD.Yes the picture quality is lacking and I do wish the animated alien had grabbing the Earth segment was intact but overall I'm very pleased.AS far as sound quality is concerned I was very pleased.
OK, some effects are a bit dated and some aren't up to par but they it was the late 80's and it's television what are you going to do.I like two of the different into themes which I think are solid because both have their own tone which reflects the season's and personally it's something I which most TV shows would do often change their theme in each season.I really like both plots for the show which are the basic covert silent invasion plots which to me I like more and I think are a lot more thrilling because you see the aliens initiate intelligence more than just their weapons and tech all the time, which to me I find even more dangerous.
Yeah it's does sort of takes it's cues from John Carpenter's "The Thing" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with the idea of aliens taking on human identities to look and act like us.
From just the sense of paranoia, dark atmosphere, and feeling of dread as the plans of the invaders escalates and the human team isn't getting steps closer to stopping them.But what really makes this show stand out is that it's really dark because the good guys don't always win which was rare at the time for most shows even alien invasion stories.
Which all the more made this group feel human and made you want to win, hopping they'll score a victory or do even better next time; which is a feeling I don't get much and I like that.The only problem I have is the series really feels uneven.
I'll admit this move indeed alienates even polarizes fans, depending on which season you like more.
I'd love to see a revival of this, may'be make the new series take place after the current Speilburg film "War of the Worlds".
I see no reason for this to happen, just a thought.Overall, it's a solid sci-fi series, this is one hidden alien tripod that is worth a ride.Rating: 3 stars.
I am impressed with some of the reviews on the series, "War of the Worlds The Second Invasion" was a great and modest series based on the HG Wells novel and the movie in 1950's.
Its sad to see that its taken about sixteen years or so for people to catch on to the fact that this was a great series, but in retrospect, it shows how of our culture is of here unable to appreciate a good thing until it's good.The series ran for 42 episodes, and it premiered with a 2 hr movie, which gained some success and it gained popularity as the series went out.
The series had some interesting plot lines and twist.For instance, episode six which I saw again called "An Eye for an Eye" uses the clever story tbat the fake broadcast by Orson Welles on Martian Invasion was NOT a fake but FACT and the government covered it up in 1938.
We then in several shots see the full alien body, more than the original movie in the 50s.
In fact the aliens use this to their advantage like in episode 7 "Second Seal" where theyuses as hosts the bodies of Army personel to attack a base and gather weapons.
Jared Martin as Dr. Harrison Blackwood, who is one of the first to discover the alien invasion is great.
The first season is great though we do see a lot of "recycled footage" to essence save money on episodes, but oh well, its still a great series to watch, and for all you Highlander fans, will appreciate the appearance of Adrian Paul in the second and final half of the season.The series has not been released officially on DVD, although people have been selling DVR copies converted from VHS, however, a word to the wise, sometimes these transfers are of low quality and I wouldn't fork over the 50 or 80 dollars some people ask..
For a television series, it was quite a cinematic experience- Full of sex and violence (when the sci-fi channel re-ran it years later, those bunch of hippies cut out all the gore and such.) The first season was action packed and exiting, great fun for any sci-fi or horror fan.
Unfortunately, with the advent of the second "wave", the creators of the show killed off the two most likeable characters, changed the entire WORLD into this weird techno-post-apocalypse-war zone, and eliminated an entire species of aliens in favor of a much more clean cut, less violent, and generally less interesting breed.
Aliens could take over the bodies of real humans, leading to all sorts of depressing plot lines mostly involving otherwise nice people being turned into aliens.Then if the series wasn't bad enough, they decided to make it worse in Season 2 by turning it into a depressing Cyber-Punk future where a new group of aliens pops in.Thankfully, it was put out of its misery after two seasons..
Let Sleeping Aliens Lie. I vaguely remembered hearing about American TV doing a series based on the events after the Martians tried to invade Earth in the 1950s classic movie WAR OF THE WORLDS and thinking to myself this might be a bad idea .
It`s not actually a continuity error - it`s bad planning on the part of the producers because nearly every episode of the first season uses the film version legacy around the plots including a cameo by Ann Robinson playing the same character she did in the movie .
There`s also a severe lack of on screen chemistry by the lead roles ( especially Jared Martin  - I`ve seen forests that are less wooden ) but I guess I shouldn`t be too hard on Richard Chaves as Col Ironhorse , after all it must be very difficult for any actor to play a narrow minded military officer battling against aliens week in week out The second season of WOTW is actually a completely different show format wise .
And when this series came out on TV I was excited and loved it, I knew that the acting left a lot to be desired, but I liked the story and the fact that it was a continuation of the film from the 50's.
As the series came along (I can't believe I watched the WHOLE THING!) the dialogue and effects started to get better.
I can not believe that the censors would allow it to be aired.As the show evolved so did the Alien dialogue - toward the end it really sounded like a language rather than a bunch of made up words.Well, that about sums it up, I can't fault the producers for using, what today is, 'bad' science, but, one must remember the show is set in the 80's, you know curly blown hair you know the ultimate holding gel that a hurricane could not muster and womens dresses with shoulder pads out, way out!
I was stunned at the 2nd year changes and thought the first episode would have been a fantastic season 1 finale.
Oh, if you like this look for First wave and Friday the thirteenth the series, two other GREAT shows.
War of The Worlds the series: What went wrong?.
And overall it was a great concept.Then came season 2.I don't mind the idea that the aliens turned the tables and now our hero's had to fight an uphill battle that much.
Cause the first episode has not even been restored to it's original airing cut that included Dr. Blackthorn as a child watching the war machines fall.Avoid this DVD set at all costs.
The series showed a great deal of creativity with the premiere episode, but unfortunately the quality degraded over the course of the first season; many of the stories were lackluster, and the acting was not of great quality except by the principal actors (especially Richard Chaves as Lt. Col.
The second season, though, brought a new life to the concept and was very engaging and well-done throughout, which is something that does not happen often with syndicated TV series.
The leads in the first season are all likeable, the stories were ahead of their time in terms of television science fiction and it's later obsession with paranoia, as perfected by 'The X Files'.
It's creepy aliens and their catchphrase "To Life Immortal", and the somewhat grisly scenes in which they murder humans or die and break down into a strange acidic goo are certainly not family viewing material, but they are a precursor *to* shows like "The X Files" which occasionally relied on the new-found ability to provide grisly shocks without falling foul of the censors.However, the second season was an utter mess.
Two of the leads were killed in the first episode, the original aliens also bit the dust, and some ridiculous lower-budget "Mad Max" look took over as new aliens with the ability to clone people, and that strange fellow Adrian Paul of "Highlander: The Series" fame appeared on the scene.
I gave up before the show finished its late-night runs, no longer interested in the show which once showed great promise.The first season was, and still remains a classic slice of American television, and if you can get hold of any episodes, its worth a look..
The 1953 "War of the Worlds" is one of my all time favorite movies, and the TV series that's inspired from it is one of my favorite shows of all times, too bad it was cut short for it had great potential.
In my comment I will cover Season 1 & 2 separately and the DVD set.Season 1: The series begins about 35 years after the movie where the aliens are resurrected by nuclear waste and set out to conquer the world.
By adding the viewpoint of the aliens it made for a more unique and interesting storytelling (some episodes are influenced by other movies like "Alien" "The Thing", and "It's Alive!") that were also well-written, though at times it did lag.
Like many fans I wished the 2nd Season continued on this pace, however...Season 2: ***Spoiler begins*** Killing off Drake and Ironhorse was a huge mistake ***Spoiler ends*** Season 1 is practically discarded, with character's personalities altered, a new apocalyptic-"Blade Runner" setting, and even a drastically different alien invaders.
The aliens are giving more familiarity, the new dark world setting is interesting, and the story lines deal with some touchy issues like religion, ecological & urban decay, and the influence of music and movies on the brain.
It's just great to see it out on DVD."War of the Worlds" the series was a fantastic short-lived show that may have helped paved way for others like "X-files".