Director – Junaid ‘Jay’ Syed, Screenplay – Tom Jolliffe, Ritesh Rai & Junaid ‘Jay’ Syed, Based on the Novel The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, Producers – Jatinder Bhardwaj & Hayley Medwall, Photography – Neil Oseman, Music – Filipe Goulart & Milton Nunez, Visual Effects – Blam Pictures (Supervisor – Junaid ‘Jay’ Syed), Production Design – May Davies. Production Company – JK Film Production/RV Motion Pictures Ltd.
Cast
Sam Gittins (Herbert Wells), Lana Lemon (Hannah Jones), Alhaji Fafona (Ogilvy Montague), Leo Staar (Ben Baxter – The Artillery Man), Vincent Regan (Curate), Kathi DeCouto (Dr Stint), Frances Mather (Elle Wells), Stefan Boehm (Captain Matthews), Fredi Nwaka (Police Sergeant)
Plot
After news of a meteorite coming down on Horsell Common in Woking, three teenage astronomy buffs Herbert Wells, Ogilvy Montague and Hannah Jones cycle out to see what is happening. They discover a vast artificially made cylinder has come down. They are then witness as a towering tripod machine emerges from inside and wipes out all in the vicinity with a heat ray. As more cylinders come down everywhere and Martian war machines emerge, the military prove ineffective against them. The three flee through the chaos as Herbert attempts to reunite with his mother.
H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) created the idea of the Alien Invasion. Wells was making a parable for the fragility of the British Empire against an overwhelming power but the idea caught on and an entire genre was born. There have been a considerable number of film adaptations of Wells’s book. The first of these was George Pal’s classic The War of the Worlds (1953) and more recently there was Steven Spielberg’s big-budget War of the Worlds (2005), along with assorted other remakes, sequels and modernisations. (See below for a full listing of these).
War of the Worlds: The Attack is essentially The War of the Worlds rewritten as a Young Adult film. When I first read the description, it made me cringe. On the other hand, as the film went on it started to work on me. Most of the film versions of the story have updated the book’s Victorian setting in one way of another – George Pal, Steven Spielberg and The Asylum updated it to the present-day. The BBC series retained the Victorian period but gave the story modern sensibilities with a female lead. So the idea of the story written for a Young Adult focus is not entirely an awful one – there was after all the great tv series The Tripods (1984-6), which was essentially a Young Adult version of The War of the Worlds if the Earth had been successfully subjugated by the tripods. Moreover, the film is faithful enough to the book to go and shoot the Martian landing scenes on the real Horsell Common (although not some of the other areas mentioned by Wells).
The Martian tripods attack
Wells’s unnamed narrator is replaced by three teenage kids who are astronomy buffs, which also serves to wind in the character of the astronomer Ogilvy. They spend much of the film travelling through the destruction on their bicycles. There is an artilleryman (is that something that exists as an occupation in the British military anymore?) who actually become much more of a heroic and helpful figure to the young heroes. When encountered again later he does have a very brief line postulating about relocating underground, although is not the idle dreamer that Wells depicted him as being.
The worst of the character rewrites is the curate. In the book, the curate is someone who’s minds snaps and retreats into religious babbling. The narrator must make a choice to kill the curate so as not to give them away as they huddle in a cellar, whereupon his body is dragged away by the Martians. In the film, the curate is much more venal and self-serving, including creepily wanting to keep Lana Lemon for rebreeding purposes. There is no tough moral choice where the protagonist(s) must kill him and all that happens is that he is dragged away as the arm of a Martian probe smashes through the window. Eliminated also is any mention of the Martians taking humans prisoner to drink their blood.
There is also the changing of the ending to reflect a more environmentalist message with lines like “What they didn’t count on was that the world we inhabit is also home to the smallest organisms. These microbes became the ultimate protector of humanity against these alien invaders. … we may have lost the battle on our own but the earth won for now.”
(from back to front) The Artilleryman (Leo Staar), Herbert Wells (Sam Gittins), Hannah (Lana Lemon) and Ogilvy (Alhaji Fafona) on their bicycles
The film works the best when Junaid ‘Jay’ Syed gets the opportunity to do what he does best and focus on the effects. He gives us a stunning set-piece with the Martian war machine rising up out of the cylinder, towering over the common and then blasting the heat ray down in a swathe to obliterate onlookers. There is also an excellent scene later the film, all shot in shakycam with the characters running across a battlefield as the war machines take on modern tanks. The main issue though is the almost complete lack of depiction of the mass destruction. We get a few economical scenes of cities burning in the background but the film has clearly trimmed all the other scenes that the live-action films delight in of the Martians eviscerating humanity.
Other versions of the books include:- George Pal’s production of The War of the Worlds (1953); and the tv series War of the Worlds (1988-90), which posed as a sequel to the Pal film; Steven Steven Spielberg’s contemporary reimagining War of the Worlds (2005) starring Tom Cruise; The Asylum’s low-budget contemporary-set mockbuster War of the Worlds (2005) starring C. Thomas Howell, which spawned a sequel War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008); the low-budget The War of the Worlds (2005) from Timothy Hines, which was set during the Victorian era; The War of the Worlds (2019), a three-part BBC tv mini-series set during the Victorian period; War of the Worlds (2019-), a tv series that relocates action to the contemporary European Union; and The Asylum’s modernised Alien Conquest (2021). Also of interest is War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012), an animated film set in an alternate history 1914 with Steampunk mecha taking on a second Martian invasion, and The Great Martian War: 1913-1917 (2017), which rewrites the story as an alternate history retelling of World War I incorporating digitally created war machines into actual WWI footage.
