The War of the Worlds (1953): Produced by George Pal; directed by Byron Haskin; based on the novel by H.G. Wells; [Cast and Crew]: For all its flaws, this adaptation of H.G. Wells' seminal novel of alien invasion is far superior to the Spielberg/Cruise film of a few years back.
Producer George Pal was a great devotee of science fiction and fantasy, from the earlier Destination: Moon (1950) through The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) all the way to his final production, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975).
Visual effects technology circa 1953 pretty much ensured that the Martian ships would fly rather than walk as tripods, though they do have (mostly) invisible electromagnetic 'legs' that can be seen in a couple of scenes. The focus of action moved from turn-of-the-century England to the Western United States, with the invasion going on world-wide just as in the original.
The movie does an impressive job of ratcheting up the fear as the Martians shrug off all attempts to stop them and stomp all over humanity, and specifically the American war machine. The cast is solid. We even have Gene Barry as a scientist-hero and his love interest has an advanced degree in mathematics. Compare this to Tom Cruise as a lunkhead, deadbeat Dad and one weeps for humanity.
Scenes of a rioting Los Angeles, followed by a burning, depopulated LA, still work really well, as do most of the shots of those pesky Martians incinerating soldiers and weapons and even a trio of ordinary Americans waving a flag of peace. Burn, puny humans, burn!
The design of the aliens themselves is also superior to that in the Spielberg movie, though not faithful to Wells' octopus-like blancmanges. As in Spielberg's movie, the Martians' vampirism has been eliminated (yes, I know the Martians use people for fertilizer in the Cruise movie, but that's still not vampirism). This is a shame. Wells' novel was also an allegory of colonialism, with vampirism as a pretty transparent metaphor for what Europe was doing to all the non-European people of the Earth. Recommended.
The War of the Worlds (2005): adapted by David Koepp and Josh Friedman from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier), Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier), Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier), Tim Robbins (Harlan Ogilvy), and Miranda Otto (Mary Ann):
Spielberg and company's so-so, 9/11-inflected update of H.G. Wells' seminal tale of alien invasion has some nice moments between about the 20- and 80-minute mark. Unfortunately, the movie features two of the most annoying offspring in film history for Tom Cruise to bond with during an alien invasion because alien invasions just aren't interesting unless they involve Steven Spielberg's go-to trope, The Absent Father.
It's important for Spielberg, as Old Hollywood's last air-bending Avatar, to remind us that even when billions of humans are literally getting dusted, as in 'turned to dust,' FAMILY IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.
And what a family! They're so great that the kids' grandparents live on the only street in Boston that doesn't get destroyed by marauding alien tripods who thirst for human blood to... fertilize their plants? I think Wells really nailed the concept of 'Keep it simple, stupid' by having the Martians suck human blood out of people for their own dining pleasure, and not to feed their high-fructose corn crop.
The tripods look nice. The redesign of the tentacled creatures of Wells' novel sucks, though. They look like teddy-bear versions of the aliens from Independence Day. Tim Robbins is wasted playing a guy who's somehow found safe haven in the basement of a house located about three feet from a major battle between aliens and the U.S. military.
Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise. He's supposed to be an unlikeable cad who LEARNS BETTER, but he mainly seems justified in his animosity towards his annoying children. He also turns out to be the most competent man in the world, single-handedly taking down an invulnerable tripod with a hand grenade, among other things. Yet he doesn't know his ten-year-old daughter is allergic to peanuts! Ha ha! Absent Dad, you are such a card.
With about 30 minutes to go, the film-makers seem to lose interest in their story, sticking us in that basement with Tim Robbins for an eternity before rushing through the last 15 minutes of the film like holiday travelers with a plane to catch. Oh, well. The ferry scene is pretty swell, as are the early city scenes with the tripods rising out of the ground. Lightly recommended.
Last Action Hero: written by Shane Black, David Arnott, Zak Penn, and Adam Leff; directed by John McTiernan; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Jack Slater/ Arnold Schwarzenegger), Austin O'Brien (Danny Madigan), F. Murray Abraham (John Practice), Art Carney (Favourite Second Cousin Frank), Charles Dance (Benedict), Tom Noonan (Ripper/ Tom Noonan), Robert Prosky (Nick the Projectionist), Anthony Quinn (Tony Vivaldi), Mercedes Ruehl (Irene Madigan), Ian McKellan (Death), and Bridgette Wilson (Whitney Slater/Meredith Caprice) (1993):
Much-maligned action-satire when it came out, hilarious Hollywood satire now (and then). Last Action Hero's main problem was that it bit the hand that fed it. If nothing else, it seems to show that action-movie fans are too sensitive to fully support a movie that savages action movies and their fans, albeit with a certain amount of affection.
Last Action Hero may be uneven and even ragged at times (some of that seems to come from rewrites and reshoots ordered by a nervous studio), but it's really funny when it's on. And its Mad-magazine approach to crowded humour in foreground and background rewards careful viewing and careful listening. Some of the physical gags are great slapstick or maybe techno-slapstick, as so many of them involve the destruction of cars in hilarious ways, sometimes as throwaway background gags.
The cast is thick with cameos, but much of the heavy lifting is done by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Dance as the villain, and Austin O'Brien as the kid who loves action movies. They're all great, though O'Brien takes awhile to grow on one. That some of the movie's more developed gags involve Hamlet (a parody that seems to be poking Mel Gibson's 'action-Hamlet' of a couple years earlier) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal may be one indicator of why it bombed. The world inside the movie universe ends up being as complicated and metafictional as Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and almost as fun at times. Whiskers, where the Hell were you? Recommended.
A Most Wanted Man: adapted from the John LeCarre novel by Andrew Bovell and Stephen Cornwell; directed by Anton Corbijn; starring Grigoriy Dobrygin (Issa Karpov), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Gunther Bachmann), Rachel McAdams (Annabel Richter), Willem Dafoe (Tommy Brue), and Robin Wright (Martha Sullivan) (2014): Mournful spy procedural follows a covert German anti-terrorist agency led by Philip Seymour Hoffman in his second-last screen role.
Hoffman's small group is after a seemingly charitable Muslim leader in present-day Hamburg, Germany who may have as-yet-unproved ties to Al Qaeda. The movie looks great -- worn and lived in -- and the acting is all high-end, though Rachel McAdams struggles a bit with her on-again, off-again German accent. As this is based on a John LeCarre novel, you can expect betrayal and ruthless competition among the various intelligence organizations involved. Hoffman is superb as a man who's seen too much but nonetheless goes on because he genuinely wants to protect people. But whether or not they need to be protected from terrorists or from the anti-terrorist governmental agencies or from both -- well, there's the problem. Recommended.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles: written by H.G. Wells and Lajos Biro; directed by Lothar Mendes and Alexander Korda; starring Roland Young (Fotheringay), Ralph Richardson (Colonel Winstanley), Ernest Thesiger (Maydig), Joan Gardner (Ada), Sophie Stewart (Maggie), and George Zucco (The Butler) (1937): Whimsical, comedic fantasy turns into a socialist polemic at the end. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
An argument about humanity's potential among three gods (or perhaps angels) leads one of them (The Giver of Power, who likes humanity) to give an English store clerk the power to do pretty much anything except control human minds. What follows is a deceptively light-hearted story of escalating stakes, as the clerk initially uses his powers for minor tricks before seeking out others for advice on what do -- and then finally deciding to make his own decisions. I suppose it's the thinking person's Bruce Almighty.
H.G. Wells adapts his own short story. The performances are all fine, especially those of Roland Young as newly super-powered Fotheringay and Ralph Richardson in heavy make-up as a blustery, upper-class twit of a Colonel. Fotheringay's epiphanic speech toward the end anticipates the concluding speech of Chaplin in The Great Dictator, among others. The visual effects are extremely well done for the time, especially a great bit involving the miraculous destruction of a mansion and subsequent erection of a much larger palace. Recommended.
The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches: edited by Kevin J. Anderson (1996), comprising the following stories:
The Roosevelt Dispatches by Mike Resnick; Canals in the Sand by Kevin J. Anderson; Foreign Devils by Walter Jon Williams; Blue Period by Daniel Marcus; The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James by Robert Silverberg; The True Tale of the Final Battle of Umslopogaas the Zulu by Janet Berliner; Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop; Determinism and the Martian War, with Relativistic Corrections by Doug Beason; Soldier of the Queen by Barbara Hambly; Mars: The Home Front by George Alec Effinger; A Letter from St. Louis by Allen Steele; Resurrection by Mark W. Tiedemann; Paris Conquers All by Gregory Benford and David Brin; To Mars and Providence by Don Webb; Roughing It During the Martian Invasion by Daniel Keys Moran and Jodi Moran; To See the World End by M. Shayne Bell; After a Lean Winter by Dave Wolverton; The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective by Connie Willis.
About as enjoyable an homage-anthology as I can remember. The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches gives us the adventures of a wide variety of historical figures during the great Martian invasion chronicled in the novel by H.G. Wells. We visit the invasion on many fronts and on many continents and in many countries, with a side-trip to Mars itself so that Edgar Rice Burroughs can report on what John Carter did to halt the invasion from the Martian end.
The shifts in tone and subject matter from story to story can be a bit jarring, as the stories run the gamut from meditative tragedy to a loopy satire of academia from Connie Willis. But that range is part of the volume's charm: you really don't know what's coming next. Maybe it's Tolstoy and Stalin teaming up to create a refugee camp in late-Tsar-era Russia. Maybe it's a bunch of rootin', tootin', shootin' Texas folk taking on the Martians. Maybe it's an H.P. Lovecraft pastiche pitting Boy Lovecraft against the Martian invaders of Providence like some moody, glum, but plucky Hardy Boy.
The writers tend to gravitate towards writers as protagonists, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and H.G. Wells himself. Highly recommended, and I'd really like to see a full-length novel version of John Carter vs. The Martians by George Alec Effinger.
The Mysterious West by Brad Williams and Choral Pepper (1967): Fun and surprisingly fact-based assortment of weird stories of the American (and, in a cameo, Canadian) West. The essays examine everything from Romans and Phoenicians in places where one wouldn't expect to find them to the odd adventures of various outlaws, miners, ghosts, and lost expeditions. A good time-filler, especially if one follows up on some of the stories to check their truthiness. Recommended.
Time After Time: adapted by Nicholas Meyer from the story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes; directed by Nicholas Meyer; starring Malcolm McDowell (H.G. Wells), Mary Steenburgen (Amy), and David Warner (Stevenson) (1979): It's 1893. After a 5-year absence, Jack the Ripper has returned. And only H.G. Wells can stop him!
In this charming, clever time-travel story, writer H.G. Wells is a scientist as well as a writer. And he's built a time machine. And Jack the Ripper steals the time machine to escape the police. Once the machine returns to Wells' basement on automatic pilot, Wells follows Jack the Ripper to the future. So it's now 1979. And we're in San Francisco.
Malcolm McDowell makes the most of one of his rare heroic roles, playing Holmes as alternately bewildered by the future and fascinated by it -- though with that fascination comes a mounting level of disgust at the violent world of 1979. Admittedly, in the real world, Victorian London was far more violent than 1970's San Francisco. But we'll leave that alone. In the real world, Wells didn't build a time machine, either.
Mary Steenburgen is charming in only her second major screen role, playing a bank employee who falls for Wells, as he does for her. David Warner completes the trio of actors who take up most of the screen time. He's Jack the Ripper, who in his 'normal' life was a physician and chess-playing friend of H.G. Wells.
Nicholas Meyer adapts and directs the movie. He's most famous for writing and directing Star Treks II and VI, and sharing screen-writing duties on Trek IV. Some of his interests, including Sherlock Holmes (he also wrote two well-regarded Holmes novels), show up in this film. As well, a paradoxical bit involving eye-glasses shows up both here and in Trek IV.
Time After Time is a fun, fairly tight movie with a nice mix of comedy and suspense. Warner makes a good antagonist, especially as he towers over Wells (McDowell and Steenburgen are both 5'8", Warner 6'2"). The 'fish out of water' bits that involve Holmes are hardy comedy perennials, especially a trip to McDonald's and a climactic bit of business that forces Wells to drive a car. Thank heaven it's an automatic. Recommended.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2002-2003; collected 2003): The second volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins a few days before the first volume ended, on Mars, as an army of fictional Martians and emigre humans (most notably John Carter and his Martian allies from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian books and one of the Martian races from C.S. Lewis' John Ransom trilogy) push the blood-sucking, heat-beam-wielding 'Martians' of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds off Mars forever. Conditionally, they succeed -- but the 'Martians', who are not originally from Mars, launch their escape vessels towards Earth.
This second volume has a structure imposed upon it by Moore's choice of The War of the Worlds -- the Martian invasion of Great Britain proceeds pretty much as described in the Wells novel, though now we observe much of it from a new perspective, that of the League and the government trying to stop the invaders. Captain Nemo's revamped Nautilus submarine turns out to be a potent weapon against the Martians at first, but soon things become quite dire, as they do in the original novel.
Can Mina Harker and Alan Quatermain track down a mysterious scientist who perhaps has the only weapon that can defeat the invaders? Will one of the members of the League betray them? Will the Invisible Man discover that Mr. Hyde's bestial super-senses allow the beast-man to see the Invisible Man? Will Alan and Mina finally consummate their relationship? Will we get to see why Mina has hidden her neck within a scarf for nearly two whole volumes? Will Mr. Hyde get to dance while singing a jaunty tune?
Along with these pressing questions and some crackerjack cartooning from Mr. O'Neill -- Martian tripods have never looked so weirdly alien and baroque, nor Mr. Hyde so terrible and necessary -- comes a nearly 50-page prose piece on the historical geography of the world the League inhabits.
We learn more about previous Leagues (especially the ones led by Prospero and by Lemuel Gulliver), have our first meeting with soon-to-be major player Orlando (from Virginia Woolf), and visit the fictionally derived landscape of the League's world, in which the locations and characters and creatures of Herman Melville, Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Swift, Daniel DeFoe, Mary Shelley, and hosts of others all share the same world. Lots of fun, lots of rewardingly heavy lifting. Highly recommended.
The Time Machine: adapted by David Duncan from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by George Pal; starring Rod Taylor (H. George Wells) and Yvette Mimeux (Weena) (1960): H.G. Wells didn't name the Time Traveller in his 1895 novel The Time Machine after himself -- that's a liberty this 1960 film adaptation takes, among many, with Wells' original story. Still, this is an enjoyable science-fiction movie, earnest and a bit dull at times but with some intellectual and emotional heft.
As in the novel, much of the story is told in flashback (which, as the traveller moves forward in time, is really a flashforward) to a group of men sitting around the traveller's house eating and drinking. The traveller tells them of his forward plunge through time, punctuated by stops at later points in the 20th century (the movie is set in January 1900) prior to a mad rush to the year 802, 701 A.D. where the main action of the film takes place.
Producer/director Pal keeps the bones of Wells' original story intact. The traveller meets the Eloi and the Morlocks, two vastly different permutations of evolved humanity. Wells' Eloi and Morlocks were parables of how he saw class division going: the Eloi are a child-like, waifish race of pleasure-seekers who lack knowledge, drive, and basic survival skills. They frolic in the sun while below, with the machines, the Morlocks keep things running, feed and clothe the Eloi -- and harvest them for food.
The film makes the Eloi more recognizably human, primarily so that the traveller can fall in love with one of them (Weena, a name derived from the book). The Morlocks are made more horrible. Perhaps most significantly, the film removes Wells' bleak ending, in which the traveller moves far enough into the future to see only a lone, giant crab scuttling across a beach lit by Earth's dying red sun.
The Time Machine works as an action-adventure movie, though Pal has stripped it of Wells' bleaker view of humanity as just another species within a gigantic, mechanical structure of evolution and entropy. Some of the stop-motion and optical effect are still quite impressive, though others look, well, a bit goofy. The acting is serviceable, though I've never understood the appeal of Rod Taylor, who is the most stolid and blocky of blockhead actors. Recommended.
Things to Come; written by H.G. Wells; directed by William Cameron Menzies; starring Raymond Massey (John Cabal/Oswald Cabal), Edward Chapman (Passworthy/Passworthy) and Ralph Richardson (The Boss) (1936): Things to Come gives us 100 years of extrapolated human history in about 100 minutes. That doesn't leave a lot of room for characterization, but characterization isn't on Wells's mind anyway -- or at least not the characterization of individuals, as humanity is the evolving character in the bildungsroman presented here.
We follow humanity's rocky road by watching the history of Everytown (pretty obviously London, England), beginning on the eve of a world war in 1936 and ending with humanity's first baby steps into outer space in 2036. In between, we get vignettes of diasaster and rebuilding, and one long middle section setting the hyper-civilized, transnational Airmen against the tribal warriors of bombed-out Everytown, led by Ralph Richardson's engaging barbarian Boss, the only character in the movie I could imagine not punching in the face as soon as I met him. And he's the bad guy!
The visual effects are occasionally stunning -- moreso given the technology of the time. One's reactions to Wells's utopia, built by scientists and engineers who love lengthy declamatory speeches and airplanes with giant wings, will vary depending on one's own opinions about 'human nature', the perfectability of man, and the wisdom of wearing togas and capes all the time. Why did seemingly everyone in the 1920's and 1930's think the citizens of future utopias would wear capes and dress all in white? Recommended.
