IMDb meta-data runtime 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 7.0 by 35 cinemtizens.
Genre: fictional docudrama. (You read it here first.)
Verdict: Unique but unavailable.
As Europe teetered on the brink of a great war, a large flaming object struck a forest in Bohemia. Investigators disappear. More are sent in. More disappear. The attack began. In no time Germany disappeared into the rubble. Then the giant and impregnable Martian war machines turn west. The Great Martian War was on!
The film uses archival footage (some of which was staged for propaganda films at the time) from World War I and integrates strategies and events from the Great War and its aftermath into this story of a Martian invasion that united humankind (except for Faux News viewers). It includes retrospective interviews with survivors and historians chewing it over in the 1970s and later in French, English, and German. There are also re-enactments contrived to look like original film from World War I. It is parsed like a typical documentary but with the fictional elements blended it nicely.
Just when things seemed hopeless, the remnant of the German army using the Schlieffen Plan with Kaiser Bill in the lead reinforces the French line in the North. While President Woodrow Wilson counted the votes, former president Teddy Roosevelt raised a volunteer force to pitch in. Wilson kept counting as long as no Martians landed on his voters.
There is no effort at communication by either Martians or us. Nor is there any praying.
European High Command’s efforts to fight the Martians were counterproductive. The frontal attacks, the massed artillery barrages, the tank support, these all exhausted and depleted humanity while feeding the Martian’s war machines, most of which were made on Earth out of the ordinance fired at them. Irony is inter-planetary.
There is a sting in this tail right at the end, but no spoiler on that here, but it winds its way back to the beginning.
Watch the sky! Indeed.
It borrows from H. G. Wells’s oft recycled ‘War of the Worlds’ in large and small ways, but offers a fresh and distinctive take on it. Chapeaux! It can also be viewed as satire on the stupidity of World War I and all others.
The History Channel (Europe and Canada) produced it. The You Tube version is hard to watch because it has reversed images, helium voices, and uses only one-third of the screen. This sort of thing is done to avoid copyright claims. The irony here is that the film is NOT available on DVD, Amazon Prime, iTunes, or any other provider within my ken. I did track down a better version on the internet.
Predictably the pygmies attack it for being — wait for it — unrealistic. Perhaps that is why it is called fiction.
A subsequent television series, one presumes, gave it the Hollywood treatment: trivial, inconsistent, derivative, puerile, hysterical, and inaccurate. Wait, that could be ABC news, too.
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