War of the Worlds (2019+)
IMDb is 24 episodes of 49 minutes, rated 6.4 by 15,000 cinematizens and counting.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Yuk.
H. G. Welles is at it again. This time it is played as a disaster movie with scattered survivors trying to keep alive, and over the very long and slow story arc they come together for better and for worse. There are no Hollywood super heroes here. Nor is either Tom Midget or Tom Everywhere in it. That much is good.
It starts off in the French alps near Grenoble and cross cuts to Lille and London. It is scenic and there is much outdoor travelogue. I liked those scenes in the woodlands on the slopes of the Alps. The dialogue is bilingual and the acting is superb. The UHD is crisp even in the motion shots with depth of focus. In short, a first class international production.
That is the molasses, now the vinegar. The narrative is attenuated and repetitive, the latter being a function of the former over these episodes which amount to about 18 hours of screen time. Every character goes through the same experience of fear, dislocation, primacy of family, and confusion. The child is brought along only to be killed. Gratuitous. In the opening episode we get that played out six times. If you watch the war news from the Ukraine every night, by the end of the week it no longer registers, does it. Same here.
Yes, the characters are varied, but their situations and reactions are not. And in the crisis, too few of them are focussed on the crisis, and more on the last argument a wife had with a husband, or long standing grievances that seem as important as the end of the world. The crisis managers did not do their jobs. Hobbes’s state of nature became instantly the state of me and mine period. Yet when disaster struck the Ukraine many people stuck together and stayed on the job. Go figure.
Although I did rather like the unintended irony in that after the invaders killed 90% of the population, the remainder set about killing each other in suspicion and fear. That was Hobbes and the insanity of it seemed about right. The invaders were counting on not finding intelligent life on Earth and they were right.
The dog, birds, cats survived. As I only made it to episode 4 that may or may not be significant.
There is far too much blood and guts as a substitute for a story, character development, or even a sense of place. We are spared nothing – mutilation, rape, infanticide, incest, score settling, cannibalism, and worse along with countless exploding heads (but not one of the elite troops in the Alps musses his hair do with a helmet). And speaking of those troops at least they (mostly) stay on the job.
I quit after four bloodbaths. If I wanted to watch senseless slaughter I could watch the evening news on television.
Of course the invaders intel before the invasion was none too great either, as readers of Wells’s novella will remember. Maybe they should have watched the news.
Although it cannot compete with the production or the acting, I prefer The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013), but it is hard to find. It is inventive. Or even the 1953 Cold War version when the common cold saved the world when rockets couldn’t.
