The War of the Worlds
 

I'll start this thread on Spielberg's remake of H.G. Wells Classic "The War of the Worlds" - originally filmed by George Pal in 1952(sometimes listed as 1953) - by posting a literal Yahoo "translation" of the only major publication pre-release review I could locate. I think there's something worthwhile here even given the tortured "English"...

If any German-speaker would like to give it a better translation, here's the link:

http://www.filmspiegel.de/previews/p...hp?filmid=2638

............................................
OF was the Worlds, The – (29.06.2005)
R: Steven play mountain

(ed: this is the literal translation of Spielberg's name ... heh heh)

D: Tom Cruise, Dakota fanning, Tim crawl in

There is a beautiful scene in George Pal and Byron Haskins more aufwaendiger "war of the worlds" - filming of 1953: after Dr. Forrester could save its Angebetete from an ugly Marsianer, later succeeds separating it a search eye from its spaceship and to also bring in the laboratory. There scientists close the eye to a usual projector on (, the technology is compatible) and permit to mankind by the eye of the enemy to literally look: one can observe oneself from Marsianer view. Since the Marsianer eye offers, green, blue), arises separate pupils for to three additives the basic colours (red a three-fold, colorshifted picture - a further reference to the substantially more differentiated, in addition, more sensitive perception of the extraterrestial ones, after Dr. Forrester could resist already successfully with a simple flashlight the natures. Characteristically the scientists are interested however not far in the condition of the aggressors and left instead the military to speak: Cannons, rockets, tanks, last the inevitable atom bomb are to take up it with the enemy - unsuccessfully, as turns out. Mankind is hopelessly delivered the Marsianern. Until they are dahingerafft abruptly "simply in such a way" and the Epilog explain that they are susceptible to a certain sort of bacteria and their immune system calculated these "insignificant" earth inhabitants prepared are not.

_ Filmdramaturgisch be a such end against each rule and one may strained be, whether steven mountain the courage have will, Herbert G. Wells collecting main of 1898 here faithful remain. With all Effekthascherei concerned it to Wells already at that time more than a episches adventure, practiced it nevertheless on the one hand criticism at the imperialistic policy of Great Britain and antizipierte on the other hand in certain way the escalation military conflicts like it with first and above all the Second World War still during its lifetimes reality became. In addition, Hoehnisch it makes merry with the rescue by the bacteria over the martial desire of mankind, places themselves the serious question whether mankind can be geeint actually only if it is attacked from the outside - in the case of extraterrestial natures -. Also Haskins version takes up this Subkontext, feeds it however rather dearless in the first two minutes off and does not come later any longer particularly engaged on it back. On play mountain more relying could be, announced it nevertheless on the one hand more loyalty to Wells ' original text and already proved on the other hand with films like "Jurassic park "in thisregard that the social component of a threat unimportant at least not completely to it from the outside.

But during its extraterrestial films "E.T."and"uncanny meeting of the third kind"pleasant to helpful natures of another star present, might thereby in" war of the worlds "conclusion be: the past Artwork works rather martialisch and the extraterrestrial hands with the three suction cups reminds of the Haskins filming, what might point on classically slimy-ugly monsters. The characters will be however completely different one, do not only prove a view of the occupation list, but also in a press release were announced: Tom Cruise will play the family father of the small Dakota fanning ("man underfires ") and Miranda petrol (Eowyn from "master of the rings") its wife. Tim crawl in also still plays with: as an astronomy professor with the strange name Ogilvy it will probably represent the scientific authority of the film and will next come thus to the role of Dr. Forrester from the 53er version.

Essentially two things give cause for the concern: on the one hand the family component of occupation strongly thereupon that not only mankind interprets, but equal the basic values are threatened here Americas from the extraterrestial ones, on the other hand the relatively abrupt project start might ensure in August 2004 and the planned publication date at the end of of June 2005 that here again times under extreme high pressure must be worked. Even now in January play mountain and its crew are still strongly busy with the trick, which does not give now all time of the world to the effect effektschmiede ILM to file at computer effects - from play mountain youngest slope to the overproduction to be silent completely.

To be waiting whether from "war of the worlds" in the long run more will than a "respectable" variant of"IndependenceDay " remains, a tasty Blockbuster might always become it in view of play mountain professionalism.

.......................

The original novel and the film from the '50s are American classics - in any genre. Wells asked - and answered - the big questions. I'm more than curious about the remake.

I, for one, am thoroughly stoked about this movie. One of the few I am looking forward to this summer.

I tried to get my daughter to sit through the original. Didn't go too well. I still love it tho!

ART, man, I don't know what to say. Normally, your threads stir up all of us, but this one is just kind of hanging out there.

I honestly couldn't follow the translation at all; it made no sense to me. The only opinion I have about "War of the Worlds" is that the previews have me excited, and I'm the biggest sucker in the Western world for new release movies.

I'll be there when it opens, and I'll let you know what I think after that. I'm not necessarily a big fan of Spielberg or any of the actors involved, but I'm always a fan of the big screen experience.

This and the Hitchhikers Guide are the two biggies for me so far in 2005.

Awesome! I remember when I posted the preview trailer up a while back. It's good to have more info on it! I'm totally stoked!

Asta!!

The trailer looks good. One positive I've heard so far is that the Martians will be using the tripod walker type vehicles of the novel vice the hovering machines of the original film and TV series (which I really miss, BTW). I can't wait to see what they look like.

-Mikey

warrrreagl, I completely understand. I think it must be a gauge of my level of interest in this story and it's history of adaptations that caused me to actually read the whole darn translation. I'd be thrilled if a German speaker would translate it for us - but alas I can only hope.

Hey, how about the old "Classics Comics" version? Anyone know it? To tell you the truth - the illustrations for that have never - ever - left my memory. Some of my archetypal imagery is contained in those pages...

Here's an image of the Classics Comic version from 1955. Hopefully it will jog a memory or two. Even after the great film version from the early '50s, the illustrations in this mag are the way I envision the scene...

I remember hearing a humorous re-do of WWoW on a PBS radio program, probably in the late 70s or early 80s. All I can recall is that it had breaks for fake advertisements in it, which were reflecting "The end of the world is coming! Quick, buy our stuff now!" Probably a half-hour or hour long.

Anyone remember this, and what it was called.

Love the original George Pal version. Don't know what I think about the remake. I kind of wish they were making it period though, rather than modern day. The story itself seems to lend itself better to a period piece, IMO. But, very seldom has Speilberg made a bad flick, so ... I'm sure it'll be good.

I hope he doesn't screw up this movie, because it should be a good and nothing below a great and epic movie just because the author was H.G. Wells. His legacy only be lifted and not at all tainted.

I remember seeing the Justice League crossover with War of the Worlds... yeah... Speilberg is a great story teller, so lets hope he does a good job with this one. AND I CAN'T BELIEVE HE TURNED DOWN REMAKING THE TIME MACHINE!

i hope it is good. i only saw a portion of the original and it was ok. it really reminded me of Mars Attacks

Wow, just got back from seeing it. I must say, I've been pretty desensitized to these movies being all the same over the past few years that you could seem to throw them into a hat and not actually know the name of the one you pick out. But this one stands out for sure.

Spoiler:
Here's a quick rundown as its late and I'm tired.

- Acting was pretty good, a few people I would have recast, but overall, on par or a little above with these disaster movie types

- GCI: Excellent. Didn't notice anything that I would have changed

- Gore factor? Common, blood spraying everywhere? YES! haha

- Story: What can I say? Its War of the Worlds. They kept enough of the original to keep it true to it.

- Random thoughts: Dakota did WAY too much screaming. The brother reminded me of David Gillenhaal(sp?), where was the guy that took them in from? I've seen him before.

Anyways, thats it.

i just got back from seeing it.

i thought it sucked. balls. the ending was so abrupt.

let me just say the end pissed me off because it was incredibly unbelievable (unbelievable in the story).

I thought it was absolutley awful. I've never read the book, buuuut...

Spoiler: Are you telling me a civilization that buried those things millions of years ago aren't aware that we have bacteria? Are you kidding me? Is this in the book too?

There is no way in HELL his son could have survived. That was absolute bullshit.

In the basement with the crazy guy, why did he go into the room unarmed (where did the shotgun go) when the crazy guy has a shovel?

What in the hell was the purpose of spraying our blood everywhere? Anything? Why in the world did those "tripods" shoot some people and eat others? And did I see like, bloody roots growing? Wtf was that? Someone that read the book must know this.

I really wanted the little girl to get dusted. That would have made the movie 1000% better. She was alright in other movies, but man...

The scene where the son should have died was absolutley retarded. "I HAVE TO SEE THIS!!" What in the world? Why? You already know you can't hit them retard.

EDIT: Oh man, the alien heads and the shield CGI was straight out of independence day. What crap.

Save your money, rent it if you must. Ugh.

I enjoyed it. I didn't walk in expecting to see "Citizen Kane" and I enjoyed it for what it was; a summertime, fluffy, adventure ride.

However, for the best possible experience, you should get Grancey's interpretation of all the birds landing on the tripod. If you ever needed cheering up in your life, that would do it...... :lol: :icare: :crazy: :confused:

The ending was too abrupt, but overall, I enjoyed it.

is it similar to Independent day?

Loved it.

I was on edge the whole time. Creepy.

I have read the book, many years ago, so some of this may not be right.

Be aware that the book was written in 1898, so Hollywood tried to modernize a lot of it.
Spoiler:
The aliens did not have the machines buried underground in the book, the shot them over from mars in canister like objects, the had not been to earth before. The sequence of events in the movie doesn't make any sense: They buried machines over here before we existed so that they could come back over here and fight us for the world?!

Yeah, the son should have died, but they wanted the movie to end on a happy note.

Think about why in the hell he was killing the guy in the first place. TO STOP HIM FROM MAKING SO MUCH NOISE! What would a shotgun blast have done?

Supposedly the blood was a fertilizer for the red stuff, the crazy guy said it. They weren't "eating" them, they were collecting them, carrying them to an appropriate spot, removing them from cage, pinning them to the ground and, well, you saw the rest. They vaporized some people because they didn't need everyone for this purpose. As I recall, they did not do this in the book, they just planted the red stuff and let it grow.

The red plant was brought over from mars, it was H.G. Wells' explination for why mars appeared red(1898, no rover expeditions or satelite photos). They were terraforming the earth to be like a more hospitable mars.

Oh, and as to the little girl screaming to much, the world was being destroyed , people were dying, she has no idea what is going on, what do you expect a little girl to do? Should she have started skipping?

Thanks for your post MageB420666, great to see someone with sense speaking about the movie. I read a few rotten reviews at RottenTomatoes.com and was absolutely appalled witht eh stupidity of some of these guys
"I don't understand why the kids couldn't make there own sandwiches"
"The 747 is definately a throwback to 9/11, this is simply a propaganda movie"

I posted this in another forum, too lazy to write a new piece:

So I saw this last night at The Embassy, I wasn't expecting it to be as serious as it was so it came as quite a shock. The film is relentlessly disturbing. This isn't any ID4, this is brutal Human killing Aliens messing up Earth. Spoiler: There's a scene with hundreds of dead bodies floating down a river, my god that was disturbing

It was great to see that there was actually a story and a theme underlying all the mayhem and some fantastic acting to bring it along. Dakota Fanning is scarily good for someone her age, in fact in Hide and Seek she even outdid Robert DeNiro's performance!

It had barely anything to do with the H.G. Wells novel but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, it was so vastly different that it was pretty much just another story set during the same timeframe as the novel.

Definately a DVD I'll be ordering from the States if it doesn't come out at the same time here (fingers crossed for a special edition release).

good to see some ppl liked it. and i'm glad to see it's better than ID4. the book i read was something like: aliens atack, then they die from a virus(cold if i'm corect) and ID4 was the same except they used a computer virus. but noone seemed to see the resemblences.

I thought it was one hell of a roller coaster ride.

I did find the one part mentioned earlier to be really annoying:

Spoiler: The son, along with a huge crowd of people, running towards the huge death dealing alien machines just to see what was going on? Uh, no. You run away from the alien death machines, not towards them. At first I thought the problem was dad, with his weird non-sequitors (So it's Boston now?, said with a hateful sneer) and incompetence, but if I had do deal with that sullen, hostile, idiot with a death wish for very long, I'd be ready to throw a baseball at his head, too).

That aside, I thought it was really well done beginning to end.

I read the review in which the critic chastizes Spielberg for exploiting images from 9/11 , and I don't think he's thinking it through. All of his specific complaints are specious. A wall with pictures of missing people? That predates 9/11. Brushing off dust from people who were vaporized? Dude, that's not 9/11, that's Holocaust imagery.

I saw this movie the other day and I have to say that I thought it was good. Then again I seem to compare movies to Cabin Fever, so any movie seems oscar worthy. However it seems people either liked it or thought it was horrible, haven't gotten too many inbetween opinions from people. Not sure how you guys did the spoiler with the white there so im just not gonna comment on parts of the movie until later.

Put the word spoiler enclosed in brackets before and after whatever you want spoilered, like this (but without the space):

[ spoiler]The butler did it![/spoiler]


Spoiler: The butler did it!

I liked it, I didn't pay much attention to the hype and I'm sure it kept me from expecting too much.....the ending was a bit of a letdown but I can get over it.

However, I think my dislike for Tom Cruise kept me from liking it more.

Tom Cruise sucks,but I will go see war of the worlds because it looks good. I just have to pretend is just someone who looks like Tom Cruise!

Just a simple question but:

Spoiler: during the scene when the family in the van arrived in Athens and they were passing by some couples including a girl with her horse. Why did the horse have a phone number on it?? I tried to figure out what's the point since most forms of electronics were destroyed including communications

No, electronics weren't destroyed. Man, I've had to explain this to 9347982379034649028374653 people, so I'm gonna quote myself:

""I can explain the EMP.

It fucks with circuts. If there's a closed circut with electricity running through it, the whole circut fries.

But if there's a opened circut, a camcorder that is in the off position for example, and the EMP hits, you can close the circut and operate the camera again.

So, the guy with the camcorder probably watched the news, instead of turning it off like those damn ass kids, and knew how the EMP worked. Same thing with the car.

This only works for Direct Current(DC), or batteries.

As for Alternating Current, you pretty much have to have everything on your house turned off to avoid an EMP. Unplug EVERYTHING electrical, and turn off all lights. Even then, there's a risk.

Yeah, and I liked the movie."

Thanks for the explanation but that wasn't my question.

I liked it, it was much better than ID4 as an alien movie, there were a few unbelievable scenes (whoa! what a surprise), and the ending was just suddenly...there....but it was a gripping two hours. I'd recommend it.

Yeah, I kinda glazed over the actual question. I didn't happen to notice the number.

Spoiler: Yeah, they buried the machines then rode lightning bolts underground into them. No mention of where the aliens came from that I remember.

He could have used the shotgun as a blunt weapon, or carried something else in there, but yes, I didnt think of that. Good point.

That makes more sense, but I could have swore that the crazy guy said at one point that they were drinking us. A mention of our blood being fertilizer would have made more sense, but I don't mind this part so much. It really made it seem like they were screwed.

No, she shouldn't have started skipping. But couldn't they have put her into shock for at least a little bit before she got captured? Please?

I picked this up for $20 at Borders yesterday (there are two newer editions also sold, with two other covers different from this one which have the exact same text/pictures/CD tracks as the one I picked up; I grabbed the older one since the inside pictures weren't as grainy).

http://sourcebooks.com/images/covers/WOTW-m.gif

"Here's a nifty pairing: H.G. Wells's classic 1897 SF novel, The War of the Worlds, including the original magazine illustrations, together with Howard Koch's radio play adaptation made famous by Orson Welles in his October 30, 1938, broadcast, which fooled thousands of listeners into thinking the East Coast was under Martian attack. In addition to a foreword by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Ben Bova, Sourcebook editors Holmsten and Lubertozzi supply an absorbing account of the broadcast's impact, which puts the hoax in historical context; an article on Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater; a survey of both imaginary and actual space flights to and from Mars and a succinct profile of H.G. Wells. It is interesting to learn that Wells at first resented the radio broadcast, believing Welles was going to read the novel, not dramatize it. Like other Sourcebook books (We Interrupt This Broadcast; And the Crowd Goes Wild; etc.), the package comes with an audio CD, which is keyed to relevant portions of the text. The CD features not only the original Mercury Theater broadcast but also the press conference Welles gave the next day and the KTSA radio interview of H.G. and Orson from 1940. The many b&w photos are particularly well chosen. (Apr.)Forecast: With a 50,000-copy first printing, this multimedia package should sell well to popular culture fans, not just SF buffs."

Not a bad deal. If you just want a CD of the original broadcast, Borders has one in its audio books section for $5.

Spoiler: Oh, and another thing. How in the world did Boston go untouched? Call me crazy, but I would think these things would go toward big cities first... even Independence Day got this right. What kind of idiot would head toward a major city with lots of people? Gah.

I loved this movie. It was unconventional as far as Spielburg's films usually go, and I think that's why I liked it. It didn't go "A.I." on us at the end, it just ended like it should have. The action was intense, the acting was superb, the film gave me the fucking creeps. That first scene where the aliens just start Spoiler: fucking vaporizing everyone had me scared shitless. Fucking insane. Isn't that what movies are supposed to do? Convey emotion? Entertain? Did both for me!

One guy walked out of the theater mumbling to a group of about 20 people waiting in line that it was "the worst movie out of the last 100 he had seen." Fucking bullshit. I loved the movie. Special effects were incredible.

The movie was straight to the point and I liked that a lot.

Spoiler: When the alien first starting making that particular noise, that's when I started to creep to the edge of my seat

I was supremely disappointed with this movie. I don't think Cruise acted the entire movie, the plot fell apart repeatedly, the ending was so abrupt I actually leaned forward in my seat at the end, and there was a couple making out in the seat next to me and I was getting jealous.

The special effects were good, I'll give you that. But I really felt like that's the only thing this movie had going for it, save a few moments that struggled to redeem, though they failed, the movie as a whole.