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Different Wars, Different Worlds

Posted November 23rd, 2005 at 12:45pm

When I heard that the Spielberg was going to remake the War of the Worlds, and heard some early commentators claim (mistakenly, in retrospect) that he was going to remain faithful to the original spirit of the book by H. G. Wells, I was excited. After all, this is the main who put such care and effort into recreating a different time (both physically and psychologically) for Schindler’s List, and Wells’ allegory of humanity’s Empire-building aspirations is as powerful a lesson today as it was over a century ago. Rather than consider Schindler’s List (in which Spielberg had an emotional investment) as a reference, however, perhaps I should have remembered Hook.

Herbert George Wells was like the Shakespeare of science fiction. Not the first, but the earliest person of influence, one whose works have blazed the path for the genre to come. Besides The War of the Worlds, we have The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, The First Men on the Moon, The Days of the Comet, and several other major works of fiction that still stand up today as powerful commentaries on how technology can affect our lives. In The War of the Worlds, he tackled the imperial attitude of British colonialism and expansion, usually to the detriment of native civilisations, and the chilling effects of a “higher” culture’s inherent ignorance of other races and creeds. (And, after all, isn’t this somewhat parallel to events happening in Iraq today?)

This issue is central to the book: the English, secure in their sense of superiority and complacent in their providence, cannot believe that the slow and sluggish Martians pose any threat to them. Think about how British invaders might have looked to natives of Africa and India… scrawny, pale, overdressed soldiers marching slowly shoulder-to-shoulder with bright red coats, a line of walking targets. But, oh, when the fire-power and organistion was brought to bare, things changed. And so the Martians destroyed the infinite complacency of the Londoners who thought themselves invulnerable, who were astonished by the coordinated attack of the three-legged machines with their deadly devices.

Instead of pursuing this allegory, Speilberg instead focuses on Joe Everyman (played by Tom Cruise), an ineffective father surprised by the emergence from beneath the street of alien machines, and whose struggle throughout the movie is to get his children to Boston where their mother now lives. This sets up the special effects extravaganza that is the only reason to watch the film. Humanity succumbs, but not in a moral lesson, but rather to a long series of computer-generated explosions, death rays, disintegrating bodies, and metal tentacles.

Spielberg can do adventure, and do it with aplomb. But this roller-coaster carries none of the wit or keen observations of films like E.T. or the Indiana Jones series. I was actually bored by stretches of this film because I just couldn’t learn to care for the characters.

For better versions, I’d certainly recommend the 1938 Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater broadcast that supposedly caused panic across the nation (which was truer to the original premise of the book, albeit with a complete change in format), and the 1952 film version, which at least was a lot more fun, despite the primitive special effects as compared to today. However, the book still holds up well today. A nice version with Edward Gorey drawings can be found at Amazon, and you can always download the book at Project Gutenberg if you don’t mind reading it on a computer or printing it out.

See War-of-the-Worlds.org for an overview of the many versions of this story, and The History of Mr Wells at the Fortean Times for a great article about his life and influence.