| H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds | |
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| Directed by | David Michael Latt |
| Produced by | David Rimawi |
| Written by | David Michael Latt, Carlos De Los Rios |
| Based on | The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells |
| Starring | C. Thomas Howell Rhett Giles Tinarie Van Wyk-Loots Andy Lauer Peter Greene Jake Busey |
| Music by | Ralph Rieckermann |
| Editing by | David Michael Latt |
| Distributed by | The Asylum |
| Release date(s) | June 28, 2005 |
| Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds (also known as Invasion and H. G. Wells' The Worlds in War internationally, or simply as War of the Worlds) is a science fiction horror mockbuster by The Asylum. It is one of three 2005 film adaptations of H. G. Wells' 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds.
Much like Steven Spielberg's film version, War of the Worlds is a modernized adaptation, but was released by independent production company The Asylum, whose budget may be more on par with the Pendragon film version. No theatrical release date had been planned; instead the film was a direct-to-DVD release. All three were released in June of the same year.
The story tells the experience of an astronomer, George Herbert (C. Thomas Howell), who is separated from his wife and son when a Martian army invades the planet, driving massive "walkers". He tries to make his way to Washington, D.C. to reunite with them as the human race faces extinction.
Unlike other adaptations, The Asylum intended to make this War of the Worlds film more of a horror film. It was rated R in the United States and 15 in the United Kingdom for strong violence and gore, language and some nudity. Director David Michael Latt describes the film as The Pianist with aliens instead of Nazis, comparing the tale of one man's story of survival.
The DVD was released on June 28, one day before Spielberg's film, and has a few notable stars including C. Thomas Howell, Peter Greene, and Jake Busey. The alternate title of Invasion is likely for the film's overseas distribution since Paramount claim to own exclusive film rights to the War of the Worlds title in the European Union. The film is one of The Asylum's most successful, having sold over 100,000 copies from Blockbuster upon its release. The original poster has a striking resemblance to the Independence Day poster.
The film was followed with a sequel in 2008, War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, directed by C. Thomas Howell.
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The film starts (without the book's intro/prologue quote) with shots of the surface of Mars through the Mars Rover. Its vision is impaired by the casting of a huge light on the planet's surface. The perspective then shifts to the Herbert household in Queensborough. George is an astronomer, and his wife Felicity and himself are awaiting their 10th wedding anniversary. George and his son Alex watch through their telescope in search of the planet Mars. Instead, they see a meteor-like object. George is called up by his boss, who wants him to investigate the object. Felicity decides to take Alex to Washington, D.C. without George, who promises to see them when he's finished his work.
Later, George is driving to work when his radio makes strange sounds. His car then breaks down, before he sees a large, flaming object crashing to the hills ahead of him. He goes to the crash site, where a massive crater houses a large meteor. He finds that all the cars and cellphones have somehow shut down at the same time. A young woman, Audrey, races to George, scared because her boyfriend Max (Edward DeRuiter), has fallen into the pit.
Max is seen struggling out of the pit only to fall back in. George attempts to encourage him into climbing out, but the young man is distracted by activity coming from the object. A clawed, metallic tentacle reaches out and pulls Max back in and emerges again to grab other humans before a large, crab-like Martian walker emerges and fires at the humans with a Heat-Ray. George manages to escape and makes his way home, where all electrical equipment is deactivated. He decides to walk to Washington and hopes to meet his family at the Lincoln Memorial. He then packs his bag with a small amount of food and sets off to meet his brother, Matt, a ranger, at Hopewell.
The next day, George finds a bridge, on which refugees are held back by soldiers. A mother who thinks the Martians are terrorists tells George that Washington, along with New York City and Los Angeles, was invaded first. Suddenly, another meteor crashes, and a walker emerges to fight the soldiers. George is lucky enough to escape sight of the aliens.
George meets a soldier named Kerry Williams, whose whole squad was killed in battle. He agrees to travel with George to Hopewell. Soon, they meet Lt. Samuelson, a soldier outraged at the aliens for killing his family, interested in recruiting George as a scientist. He tells George that Washington was completely wiped out and there are no survivors, not even the President. He considers George and Kerry as cowards, so he refuses to let them in his army. George and Kerry reach Hopewell, but very shortly the town is invaded by walkers. George and Kerry find Matt, George's brother, underneath the wreckage of a building, fatally wounded. Matt and George exchange their feelings before Matt dies. George and Kerry are separated in the panic, and George manages to escape in a canoe.
After spending a day drifting downstream, George catches a terrible fever and spends the next two days in an abandoned car. He is found by an Australian Pastor named Victor. They find an untouched neighborhood, and enter the house of a veterinary doctor where they find food and clothes. George and the Pastor hide upstairs from the aliens' poisonous gas, where they find rabies vaccines. A sudden crash causes the house to collapse. George wakes hours later to find that a meteor has destroyed the neighborhood. George observes what the aliens are doing in the crater; draining the blood from living humans.
Later, George understands that human weapons have failed to stop the invaders, and plans to use a rabies vaccine against them. When a Martian enters the room, George injects it with the rabies vaccine, and it quickly leaves. The alien soon returns and sprays Victor with the acid, killing him in seconds. George hides silently in the ruins of the house until the aliens abandon the crater days later. He later runs back into Kerry, the soldier George met earlier. He tells George that Washington is lost and his family is surely dead. Samuelson also appears, who has promoted himself to General. Kerry insists that George cannot fight with them, but the enraged Samuelson insists that wars have been won by the efforts of scientists. He then shoots Kerry in the head. George grabs a rock and slams it into Samuelson's skull, killing him instantly.
George finally reaches Washington, where the whole city lies in ruin. George doesn't find his family at the steps and spots a single Martian, and it seems to be looking back at him. George walks to it and offers his life to it, having lost everything to the invaders. The alien stands paralyzed for a few moments and then drops dead. Out of nowhere, a group of human survivors appear and offer George water. They say that the aliens have been dying for several days due to an airborne virus. Alex and Felicity appear among the survivors and they are tearfully reunited.
The Martians have been killed by bacteria, and with most of humanity wiped out, the survivors are left to rebuild. The film ends with a shot over the devastated city, with the war-torn ruins of the Capitol Building and the reassuring image of overturned walkers.
Director/editor/executive producer/co-writer David Michael Latt (who admits to never seeing the Byron Haskin/George Pal version or the 1988 television series, but has been a fan of the H.G. Wells novel since childhood) has made it clear that his film has changed certain aspects from the source material outside of the shift of time and location. Most notable is that the tripods have been changed to six-legged crab-like machines called "walkers" (a conception that mainly stems from allowing the effects team creative freedom).
The aliens are indeed Martians (though the film never states this, but this is confirmed by Latt complete with an opening credit sequence over shots of the Red Planet's landscape), but bear little visual resemblance to their novel's counterparts. Whereas Wells described his invaders as bear-sized tentacle creatures, the film's Martians are insect-like in their appearance with a torso like a green disc and four tentacle-like legs. These aliens also have the ability to spit acid from mouths on their feet, which melts entirely anyone who is unfortunate enough to be attacked. Inside the Martian mouth, three tongues can be seen which closely resemble the Martian fingers from Byron Haskin's 1953 film version of The War of the Worlds and the 1988 television series version. They also have an appetite for humans as in the novel. In the sequel War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, it is made clear that the aliens need human blood to survive.
In terms of their military action: the war machines are not tripods, but are crab-like "walkers" with six legs. A Heat Ray is built into the machine's "head", and is fired from a single eye. By all accounts, their fighting machines do not appear to have much heavy protection against modern human artillery (avoiding the "invisible shields" seen in the 1953 film version and Steven Spielberg's 2005 film), leaving their ability to effectively crush resistance unexplained. The aliens do have a substance vaguely similar to the black smoke, which they distribute in shells, but is more of a green-colored toxic gas with a notable inability to rise above ground level due to a similar density, allowing the characters to escape by getting to high places.
The protagonist of the film is named George Herbert, a reference to H. G. Wells. Rather than being a writer, as in the novel, he is an astronomer, perhaps in reference to the character of Ogilvy – in a related deviation, the film does not attempt the voice-over narration that accompanies other versions of the story. The film also leaves the eve of the war storyline and its characters almost completely absent. He also has a son, who is portrayed by Dashiell Howell, who is actually the son of George's actor C. Thomas Howell.
Despite these differences, George nevertheless goes through much of what befalls the novel's protagonist, even up to preparing to sacrifice himself to the Martians, only for them to drop dead of infection before he has to do so. He is also separated from his wife and son with whom he tries to reunite once the invasion begins, and, like the novel, she and their son are alive in the conclusion. George's brother, a Ranger, is less fortunate; he is seen only briefly, after being fatally wounded in the trail of destruction left by the invaders. In the book, the narrator's brother has a much bigger involvement in the story, as the perspective is shifted from the narrator to that of his brother in Book One: The Coming of the Martians.
A major deviation from the text is that the protagonist actually tries to produce a means of stopping the Martians, but the film does not elaborate on whether their eventual downfall is due to these efforts, or whether their deaths simply coincided with his efforts.
The role played by the novel's Artilleryman is here divided into two characters, rather than being a single developing personality. The first time he is seen (as the character of Kerry Williams), he exhibits the initial, defeated status of his novelistic counterpart. He accompanies George as they move to unaffected areas, meeting soldiers oblivious to the danger they will soon face, until they become separated when George takes refuge underwater to elude the Martians. After his ordeal in the ruined house, George encounters Williams again, but the latter remains very much as he was before. Instead, the Artilleryman as he is portrayed in the novel's later stages is signified by another soldier, Samuelson (portrayed by Jake Busey), who both George and Williams encountered earlier.
Though in a similar vein to the novel there is talk of recapturing the world, the plan to achieve this is by regrouping with military units in the mountains instead of rebuilding civilisation underground. In the pursuit of this plan, George is quickly realized as being more valuable to humanity than either Williams or Samuelson, as the efforts of scientists have won many wars before.
The unnamed Curate from the novel is portrayed in the film by a pastor (portrayed by Rhett Giles) named Victor. While the two characters are very similar (the pastor mentions his church was rebuilt three years prior to the Martians), the pastor is depicted as being fairly calm and is sure that the invasion is the Rapture. However, his faith is deeply shaken when he meets a congregate whose loss at the hands of the invaders has her screaming against God, causing the Pastor to question events and why he himself has yet to be taken.
Unlike the Curate, the Pastor manages to keep his composure when he's trapped in the ruined house with George as he wrestles quietly with his thoughts. Whereas the Curate caused the narrator to subdue him and then taken away by the Martians unconscious, the Pastor regains his faith just before he is killed directly by the Martians.
Some of the chapters on the DVD are given the same name to chapters in the novel, a similar idea used in the Dreamworks version.
David Michael Latt often expresses his fascination for H.G. Wells' novel in the DVD's Audio Commentary and Behind the scenes features. He had written a script for War of the Worlds a year before production of the film, and upon learning that Dreamworks were making their own War of the Worlds film, The Asylum soon began production.
David Michael Latt based the themes of the film (internationally titled Invasion) on the 2002 film The Pianist, which tells the true story of a Polish Jew who struggles to survive the battle between the Wehrmacht and the a Jewish resistance in the Second World War. Latt used the similar themes of a man's survival as civilization around him reduces to ruin, stating:
"I tell my friends [War of the Worlds] is like The Pianist, but instead of Nazis you have aliens."
Like the protagonist of The Pianist, the main character of War of the Worlds is not shown to have any kind of resistance or plans to fight back, only a persistance to keep alive. The film is considered by some to be the darkest retelling of Wells' novel, and described by actor Andy Lauer as a "sci-fi noir".
The casting for Andy Lauer was almost sudden, himself having an interest of working with The Asylum. Latt had concerns about Tyranie Van Wyk Loots' casting, assuming she may object to her naked sequence at the beginning of the film. However, Tyranie had no objections and was more than happy in starring in War of the Worlds, being a fan of science fiction (admitting to have seen "every episode of Star Trek ever made"). The casting of C. Thomas Howell seemed to be more complicated, as he was currently starring in an American TV show. David Michael Latt and Andy Lauer were confident in getting Howell in the film, and Howell was happy to read the script and accepted (in fact, he was so happy with the film that he would eventually direct the sequel). Howell offered his son Dashiell as a role to play Alex Herbert, when he found that Latt was looking for an eight-year-old to fill in the role. Jake Busey's audition was successful, having won the role on the first day of auditions. His scenes were all filmed in one day. He tells that one of his favorite films as a child was the 1953 War of the Worlds.
The development of Invasion's plot and characters was a challenge. Adapting the characters and plot faithfully from the novel was tricky to retell for a modern audience, so there are some significant changes. For example, readers will notice that the "eve of the war" arch is almost absent from the film, skipping the novel's earlier characters and details of the "safe and tranquil" world before the invasion begins. This is, however, easy to understand because of the film's length. The film also ignores the sub-plot of Book One: The Coming of the Martians, in which the book's perspective shifts to the narrator's brother, who accompanies two women to safety and witnesses the battle between the aliens and the HMS Thunderchild. A sub-plot would violate the nature of the film, and also increase its length.
On April 1, 2008, a sequel, War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, was released. C. Thomas Howell directed the film and reprised the role of George Herbert, and his son Dash Howell reprised the role of Alex. The film also starred Christopher Reid.
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