by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
In 2008, three years after their own War of the Worlds as well as the release of the Spielberg version
(which did O.K. at the box office but was not the huge blockbuster hit
Spielberg and the studio backing him, Paramount, were hoping for), The Asylum
trotted out the property again for a sequel called War of the Worlds
2: The Next Wave. This takes place two
years after its predecessor, though the only characters who cross over are
George Herbert (C. Thomas Howell, who also directed this time, from a script by
the first film’s auteur, David
Michael Latt, with Eric Forsberg from a story by Sam Bevilacqua) and his son
Alex (Dashiell Howell — gee, I wonder how he got the part!). We’re told that George’s wife/Alex’s
mother Felicity died somewhere between the two films, though we aren’t told how
(she obviously made it through the Martian invasion since she was in the final
scenes of the first film); I joked that the actress who played her in film one
must have wanted too much money for the sequel, and someone else in our
audience said, “Or she had too much self-respect to do it again.” Though imdb.com
claims War of the Worlds 2 had
only half the budget of its predecessor ($500,000 as opposed to $1 million), it
actually looked like a more elaborate production: though the Martian
machines/life forms are down to their original three legs from the six they had
in Asylum’s first go-round with this premise, there are quite a few more of
them on screen, as well as whole fleets of Martian spaceships that pour our of
a wormhole conveniently located between Mars and Earth. This is offered mainly
as an explanation for how the Martians (unlike their counterparts in H. G.
Wells’ original novel and the other adaptations of it) were able to arrive on
Earth suddenly, without warning, and without Earth’s astronomers noting that
they were on their way. It also allows the people on Earth, organized as a
so-called “Free Earth” force, to retrofit existing U.S. Air Force fighter
planes to travel through space and take out the Martian mothership — yes, as in
the movie Independence Day
(itself spotted by critics when it came out as a War of the Worlds knockoff), the aliens are directing their invasion
from a large spacecraft that in turn sends smaller ones on the missions needed
to do the invasion.
One plot gimmick this time is that the Martians prepare for
a second invasion in part by kidnapping Earth children so they can draw their
blood and figure out how to develop their own antibodies to the common Earth
germs that killed them the first time around, and wouldn’t you know it, George
Herbert’s son Alex (ya remember Alex?)
is one of the ones they grab. There are also two long and infuriatingly gross
scenes of George and various other Earthlings inside the Martian machines, where they’re constantly under
the threat of Martian stomach acids spurting out and attempting to digest them.
This particular bit of grossness was actually the contribution of Josh Friedman
and David Koepp, writers on the Steven Spielberg version, who not only had their principals (or some of them) spend time inside a
Martian stomach but figure out how to get excreted from it while still intact.
It doesn’t help that through the wormhole George Herbert and an annoying Black
sidekick, Pete (Christopher Reid), have been transported into a town that looks
like Earth but is actually a replica created by Martians on the surface of
their planet for reasons Latt and Forsberg really don’t explain (aside from the
possibility that one of them read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian
Chronicles and decided to rip off yet
another legendary sci-fi master), or that there are two women in the dramatis
personae. One is Victoria Reed (Kim Little,
who according to one of the people at last night’s screening got the job
because she’s the wife of one of the producers — apparently her lack of acting
ability wasn’t enough of an attribute for the role), a scientist with the Free
Earth Force who figures out how to get ordinary terrestrial aircraft to go
through space. The other is Sissy (Danna Brady), fellow inmate of George’s and
Pete’s inside a Martian digestive system, who warns them as they walk through
the Martian intestines, “Don’t touch the walls!” (as if the “floor” wouldn’t be
made of the same toxic stuff as the walls?), and who figures out that the
wormhole between Mars and Earth has a sort-of analogue, represented by a
glowing multicolored ball-like blob inside the Martians’ stomach, that allows
anyone who’s been swallowed by a Martian to escape easily and beam back down to
the surface of Mars. In case you were wondering or hoping that one of them
might serve as an alternative romantic interest for George Herbert now that
he’s become a widower, no such luck.
The big problem with War of the
Worlds 2 is that the author of its original
story, Steve Bevilacqua, is no match for H. G. Wells as a story
constructionist, let alone as an author of imagination, and he and the people
who adapted his “original” outline (heavily, shall we say, “influenced” by
Roland Emmerich’s script for Independence Day), David Michael Latt and Eric Forsberg, did some
awfully jarring cuts between the four main locations (Earth’s surface, Mars’
surface, the innards of the Martian bio-robot and the F-14 that transports the
Earth characters to Mars and back). Yes, this is one of those movies that makes
such wrenching cuts from one plot thread to another you worry about getting
whiplash and sometimes find yourselves asking, “Where are we? When are we?” In some ways War of the Worlds 2 is better than the previous film in the sequence —
there’s more action and less claustrophobia — but it makes far less sense as a
story. It’s also handicapped by C. Thomas Howell’s direction: like a lot of
better known actor-directors (like Stroheim, Welles, Redford and Eastwood) he
gets reasonably subtle and understated performances from his cast members
(aside from Christopher Reid’s updated version of the Stepin Fetchit schtick and Kim Little’s “what’s acting?” impassivity), but
he lacks the flair for suspense and horror Latt showed in his direction of the
earlier film and War of the Worlds 2
pretty much just lurches to a close. When I looked it up on imdb.com the user
review that popped up was from someone who watched it thinking it was a sequel
to the Spielberg War of the Worlds
and was sorely disappointed: “Two seconds into the movie i realized
that...well...that it wasn’t a Spielberg sequel. So all you people expecting to
see a good movie, be warned you’re going to regret watching it. It’s 85 minutes
of your life you are never getting back.” It’s not quite that bad, but, even more than the first version, it’s
perched on an uncomfortable place on the continuum between good movies and bad
ones: not inept enough to be enjoyable as camp, but not good enough to be taken
seriously as genuine entertainment either.
