IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 24 minutes rated 7.2 by 28542 raters.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Classic
In the hills of California far from Grovers Mill a large, flaming meteor lands with a mighty wallop. It starts a forest fire and the locals turn out to quell the fire, and marvel at the object. It’s big; it’s hot. Nearby reading the script is Top Scientist (perhaps on his way from ‘Atomic City’ [1952] and counting down to ‘The Twenty-Seventh Day’ [1957 ], both reviewed elsewhere on the blog).
Top puts on his professorial glasses. The yokels gasp in awe. Top figures out the meteor came from Mars. Probably he read the luggage tags on it.
Then the meteor hatches the first Martian weapons tripod. The three stooges approach it in peace with a white flag as they do in the westerns and are cindered from their trouble. A sky pilot muttering the Lord’s Prayer is likewise toast. More meteors arrive. More tripod war machines appear and lay waste to everything, houses, roads, baseball card collections, churches, tanks, firetrucks, cannons, vending machines…. Nothing is spared, not even World Series tickets!
These tripods did not come in peace. They are landing all over the world, Dubuque, Indianola, and elsewhere.
In desperation the ever reliable Lee Tremayne nukes them. Kaboom. Yet the tripods, now shined by the radiation, keep coming with their red heat rays.
There follows a flight, and a reunion, and the Martians die. Seems they were anti-vaxxers and had no shots before travelling to Earth.
There are some marvellous scenes, as when the first Martian is glimpsed through the window of a wrecked house, and then the tendril that reaches out later. There is an effort at science as Top and his colleagues at the Pacific Smarty Pants Institute examine the evidence.
There is satire of the media. When the Martians start to appear, the journalist wants to know what colour their socks are. As always getting right to the point is the press. The trivial and childish initial responses of the media are realistic.
None of the formidable weapons the Yankees can bring to bear even dent the Martians tripods. Not even Little Boy. They are powerless against this invader.
The panic is likewise realistic. The mob destroys the very science that might save them. Has a contemporary ring to it, doesn’t it.
Thanks to the science at Pacific Smarty Pants we know the Martians are unvaccinated puny little stick figures in latex. Hence when exposed to the pollution, FM radio, smog, haze, advertising, pollutants of California, they croak. The end.
What every one remembers who saw the original on the wide screen is the tripods, the periscopes, and the creatures, all and always in threes. Three eyes, three tendrils, three tripods, tripods. Made the fraternity brothers wonder what else they had three of.
The special effects were indeed special. They remain gripping even in the iTunes version I watched. The wire work was great, though over the years transfer from the original film stock to other media has revealed the wires at work in some versions. This has given a new generation of nitpickers no end of sanctimonious fun.
Producer George Pal included but did not himself understand the irony and satire in the original, e.g., the priest, the bacteria, the media frenzy, the rigidity of officialdom when faced with something new, and the irrationality of the anti-science response. He repeated the jokes without understanding the humour. He then overlaid these with a superficial, stiflingly, and sappy veneer of Christianity. When the local priest walks into the heat ray it is sheer stupidly in the original story, in the film is a noble sacrifice, pointless though it is. And so on.
Pal’s Sy FY curriculum vita is rich and varied, starting with ‘Destination Moon’ (1950). He is described as a happy soul who was also naive in the extreme. In his hands this satire became a warning of a Communist invasion that can only be stopped by praying and singing hymns. It also keeps the tigers away.
By the way the love interest for Top was included at the insistence of the studio executives, and so Pal complied. That late and forced inclusion may explain why she has so little to do.
That wizened H. G. Wells combined with the wunderkind Orson Welles made an enduring franchise out of ‘The War of the Worlds.’ Typing the title ‘War of the Worlds’ into the search box on IMDb will produce a confusing list of hits. Captain Nerd, that is, Thomas Miller, in ‘Mars in the Movies’ (2016) has counted more than a dozen direct replications of ‘War of the Worlds,’ and notes other more tangential derivations.
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