War of the Worlds: Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Ever since a very young age I’ve been obsessed with War of the Worlds. I was aware of and enjoyed the campy 50’s analogy of nuclear war but it wasn’t until I watched a school performance of Jeff Wayne’s seminal adaption (complete with Tripod paintings attached to wheeled netball nets and Martians emerging from silver sprayed wheelie bins with tinfoil) that it really piqued my adolescent imagination. It was an ambitious production for a state secondary school to attempt but I remember vividly going home with my head spinning. The thought of an Anglo-centric invasion, in Edwardian England, both filled me with excitement and tantalising terror.

It was with great excitement then that I followed the production of War of the Worlds, a joint Canadian and British production, that has just been broadcast. Unfortunately however it failed to live to expectations.

Now I am aware that a production of something that you love (particularly a book, which is my favourite iteration of the tale) is rarely going to cut the mustard. By its very nature you have planned in your head a very specific set of parameters based on your own personal preferences that you doggedly believe a production company must adhere to and somehow must be clairvoyantly be aware of, but even after one episode and promising myself I wasn’t going to be one of “those fans” I found my objectivity getting the better of my blind optimism.

They came so, so close.

First of all however the positive. The setting (Edwardian England) was excellent, sleepy villages and bombastic imperial London juxtaposed and dwarfed by the might and coldness of Mars was fantastically done. Sound and special effects were also top notch and all performances by the cast were either good or excellent, no mean feat given the leaps of faith the cast no doubt had to make given the effects heavy tale it is. Direction was pacey and coupled with the excellent performances gave some truly pathos laden moments and as ever British drama demonstrates its superiority when it comes to costume drama in general.

But, and this is a big but, although it was set within the same world, time and events as the book the deviation from the original text was too much. The War of the Worlds is over 120 years old, it has remained in the public consciousness for all that time for a very simple reason. It’s excellent. The book for those who have no read it, is a tale of Imperial England getting a taste of its own medicine, decimated by forces they do not understand and unable and incapable of battling, pushed to the point of extinction and then farmed by cold calculating being with little regard or sympathy for our humanity. The empire being faced with itself. Secondly it is a very grounded piece of work, no doubt if Wells was born today it would be a gritty tale of survival and domesticity torn asunder, similar in style to the Yann Demange film ‘71 which drops a lone British soldier in the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland with no back up and support, desperately trying to survive and drag himself back to safety.

The book is often just one man, wandering across the British country side, witnessing and barely surviving events he has no control of and that have no interest in him. A man, by the end of the book, that is driven to eating potato’s raw out of the ground and ultimately insanity.

The three part drama however delved too deeply into the matters of the domestic. Although very well done, in and of themselves, it did little to summon the same feeling of desperate terror and uselessness that book brings to the fore. Also the slightly jarring manner in which the narrative would swing from the Edwardian setting and its near future, in a post apocalyptic Britain following the Martians fall was entirely unnecessary and felt very much like a writer thinking “now how can I chuck in something new and relatable to this?”. This wasn’t needed at all.

The War of the Worlds has retained its cultural currency for all these years purely because it is an excellent story, first and foremost. It taps into the primeval fear of man, that when our ingenuity and minds are outstripped what do we become, which most terrifyingly of all for an English Gentlemen of the late 19th Century turns out to be an animal. All our decorum goes, class is revoked and we’re given the horrific realisation that we are no better or worse than any other ape that is blundering around our rock. It plays to the fear that Britannia finds most terrifying, that we aren’t special and that nothing is predetermined by an all powerful protestant God. That we may be held accountable for doing the things the Martians were doing to us, which we in turn did to other people.

Other elements were more of an issue of personal preference, the strange floating balls the Martians arrived in weren’t to my liking, nor were the organic rock looking tripods, but all in all it boils down to one issue with me. If this were a Jane Austen novel or another “worthy” piece of work, would it have been altered or tampered with as much as it has? I suspect it wouldn’t. In the end it I find myself wondering why after over a hundred years of great works Sci-fi still is regarded as something that needs to be altered, played with and not respected as a piece of our literary history?

Perhaps it’ll be something that “nobody would have believed” in a hundred years to come. Personally I hope it won’t take that long.

For the definitive version of War of the Worlds (in my opinion) visit https://www.sherwoodsoundstudios.com/the-war-of-the-worlds/ for an astounding adaption that lives up to the stories legend.

-Fenric