Friday, February 20, 2015

That More Recent War of the Worlds

Yes, that wild, inaccurate update to the original, from the halcyon year of 1953!



When I first became aware of this movie years ago, I was disappointed at the lack of tripods. The tripods are, after all, the iconic machines of the original novels; you can't just leave that out!

Watching it for the first time recently (thanks, Kroger's, for your weird and eclectic selection of not-very-current DVDs), I discovered something that delighted me:


These "flying machines" are actually nothing of the gosh-darned sort-they're actually tripods on invisible legs of electromagnetic force!

That is fantastic.

(My sister was really weirded out by the religious presentation of the ending, but after having watched the film adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident and that awful sci-fi movie from the same general era that a bunch of people like, I wasn't surprised. Now, I was a bit bothered by just how darned invincible they were, since the original story involved multiple Martian war machines being destroyed... Even if the early shield flicker was sort of neat.)

-Signing off.

No comments: