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.
