Saturday, October 21, 2017

H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (The Asylum, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “Mars Movie Screening” in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of two films more or less based on H. G. Wells’ classic and much-adapted science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, which as you probably know deals with an invasion of Earth by Martians with high-tech killing machines and heat rays. The Martians, who are far more advanced technologically than we are, turn Earth into a gutted, smoking ruin and then start importing their own plant life to make our environment resemble theirs — only it turns out that they’re laid low not by any of the puny, ineffective attempts of Earth people to fight back, but by being infected and killed off en masse by Earth germs to which Martian immune systems offered no resistance. The most famous adaptations of The War of the Worlds are the Orson Welles radio broadcast from 1938 (in which, by staging the show as a “news” broadcast as if the invasion were actually happening, he inadvertently caused a panic among people who tuned in and thought the invasion was actually happening), the 1953 Paramount film directed by Byron Haskin and starring Gene Barry as Wells’ original scientist protagonist, and the big-budget 2005 remake directed by Steven Spielberg and starting Tom Cruise, though Spielberg and his writers, Josh Friedman and David Koepp, demoted his character from a scientist to an ordinary working stiff looking for his estranged wife and their daughter among the ruins of a Mars-conquered and –occupied Earth. 

Enter The Asylum, a production company that has made it a specialty of ripping off a story — either one based on a public-domain property like The War of the Worlds or an easily “appropriated” plot gimmick, like humans fighting ghosts or doing street races in fast cars — that a major studio is about to release a big movie about and rushing their own version into production, hopefully beating the major-studio version into theatres or at least onto DVD’s. We’d encountered The Asylum at a previous Mars film screening via A Princess of Mars, the adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars stories they rushed out just ahead of the big Disney version, John Carter, which flopped big-time (though the Disney John Carter, albeit flawed, is a quite entertaining sci-fi action film in the modern manner and considerably superior to its Asylum would-be clone). This time, surprise, the comparison was closer, though the Asylum War of the Worlds — actually released as H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds to distinguish it, more or less, from the Spielberg/Cruise version — still isn’t a very good movie. (Neither was the Spielberg, for that matter: though it incorporated a few elements from the Wells novel previous filmmakers hadn’t used, it was unnecessarily gross and had some risible moments as well as bits of the Spielberg sentimentality that has a way of creeping into even his most “serious” projects.) The Asylum War of the Worlds was the brainchild of one David Michael Latt, who produced and directed it as well as co-writing the script with Carlos De Los Rios. To their credit, Latt and De Los Rios stuck a lot closer to what H. G. Wells wrote than Josh Friedman and David Koepp did: they kept not only the basic premise of a Martian high-tech invasion of Earth and such details as Wells’ description of the Martian war machines as half-mechanical and half-organic, blurring the distinction between life form and machine (the Spielberg version did that as well but none of the previous adapters, at least the ones I know about, did), they also kept the central character a scientist and gave him long, tendentious debates with a military officer and a minister just as H. G. Wells had. They even named the central character “George Herbert” — a tribute to Wells since the H. G. in his name stood for “Herbert George” — and they cast C. Thomas Howell, a considerably less annoying actor than Tom Cruise, to play him. 

That’s the good news; the bad news is they had a surprisingly low special-effects budget to play with, which vouchsafed us very few glimpses of the Martian war machines in action. (They also designed the Martian electro-organic devices with six legs instead of the three that Wells specified and the Haskin and Spielberg versions went with.) Most of Katt’s War of the Worlds is just three people — Howell as George Herbert, Andy Lauer as Sgt. Kerry Williams and Rhett Giles as Victor, the minister — hiding out in closets, rooms and in one case what looks like an outhouse, and talking, talking, talking to each other in didactic ways that would have made H. G. Wells proud (Wells never seems to have set pen to paper without having some didactic purpose in mind) but, especially delivered by the caliber (or lack thereof) of actors The Asylum could afford, just seemed dull: My Dinner with André while Mars Invades the Earth. The most interesting character in the film is Lieutenant Samuelson (William Busey), a heavy-set military commander with orange hair who takes advantage of the Martian invasion to set himself up as a petty fascist dictator (or try to) on the ground that only harsh martial law will enable humanity to marshal its forces to defeat the Martian invaders — given that the U.S. President is currently a would-be fascist dictator with orange hair this plot element seems more au courant than it would have if I’d seen this film in 2005, but even without the Trump parallels the character seems like the most interesting figure in the dramatis personae. (Then again, often in these sorts of stories the villains are far more interesting than the heroes.)  

H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is disappointing in a singular way: in a sense it’s both a Good Bad Movie and a Bad Good Movie — at once a film that treads on camp without quite falling into it and making itself unwittingly entertaining, and a film that goes for High Seriousness and falls embarrassingly short of its goal. About the one interesting change Latt and De Los Rios made in the story is that, instead of merely encountering Earth’s germs and dying from them by happenstance, the Martian invaders are deliberately injected with a rabies serum by George Herbert (how on earth did he get it? He’s an astronomer, not a medical researcher!), infecting one Martian who spreads it to their fellows and thereby stops the invasion. (Do the Martians regularly bite each other? Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought you had to be bitten by a rabid animal — either that or eat one — to get rabies.) It ends predictably sappily, with George Herbert reunited with the wife, Felicity (Tinarie van Wyck Loots), and son, Alex (Dashiell Howell), he’d sent on to Washington, D.C. for a vacation, intending to meet them the next day. They’d promised to meet on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and indeed they do — even though there’s no explanation for how they ultimately found each other and the U.S. capital is a smoldering ruin and the Lincoln Memorial had been so totally blown to pieces that there was only one of its steps remaining. As one of the other attendees at the screening said, this is the sort of movie that seems twice as long as it actually is, and the most entertaining part of the film for most of the people there — at least all the straight guys in the audience, which was everybody except one young woman and me, thought so — was the brief glimpse of a bare-breasted woman early on in the action.