text: Hines and Goforth, the perpetrators of this crime, begin on the wrong foot first step, by assuming that Wells wrote Gothic horror and that all of his lines are meant to be taken seriously. That simply isn't true. Wells was very much an inheritor of the Enlightenment, and his main concern was that Victorian self-satisfaction might leave the British unprepared for the world the new technology could produce - both the good and the bad.<br /><br />Two terrible consequences follow - the protagonist is portrayed as a wimpy screamer (I was reminded of Fay Wray in the original King Kong), rather than a man struggling to live out the ironies of an unbelievable catastrophe; and the dialog reeks of 'Victorianisms' uttered seriously that Welles clearly meant to be taken tongue in cheek.<br /><br />All of this looks suspiciously like Ed Wood with an enormous budget to waste on CGI effects - which by the way are so poorly accomplished, the Warner Bros. cartoon factory of the 1940s could have done a better job. (Gobs of spattered blood looked like red balloons, I expected them to float away any minute.) Think The Yellow Submarine as done by the old EC Comics.<br /><br />Worse yet is the loss of theme, which robs the film of any reason to exist. Although the makers of this film return the story to its Victorian era, they utterly miss the uncanny way Wells' story predicted many of the horrors of the First World War - a fact not unnoticed by Wells himself, who, after the war, reworked the theme in The Shape of Things to Come.<br /><br />Without any theme, all we have here are a lot of people running around getting blasted into cartoon balloons, when they're not trying out for a high school production of a drunken student's rewrite of Macbeth.<br /><br />Really, this is the worst, most senseless piece of drivel I have suffered through since a friend talked me into seeing the Eastern European cartoon "Fantastic Planet" thirty years ago. That film was so pretentiously dull, my friend and I and two total strangers gave up ridiculing it about half-way through, and sat near the screen playing cards, using the movie as light by which to see the cards - its only usefulness, as far as any of us could tell.<br /><br />But I already have electric lighting in my apartment, so I didn't need this put-down of Wells for anything.<br /><br />Do not avoid this film - steal every copy you can (don't pay a cent) and burn each and every one of them. God in his wisdom created us just for this purpose.