Slashdot Mirror
War of the Worlds Remake
subtropolis writes "The Guardian has an article about a remake of the classic. Spielberg directing, T. Cruise acting. The guy who did Jurassic Park I & II did the screenplay. Anyone else think Bruce Sterling would've been a good choice for that? Quoth the article: 'While HG Wells was an enthusiastic supporter of many of the film adaptations of his work, the likely attitude that Orson Welles might have had to another director taking one of the works with which he became most closely associated, can only be a matter of conjecture.'"
While I think Spielberg has done some fine films, I also think he's done some utter rubbish. Cruise, I have little respect for in any role other than martian invader for this film. I expect nothing less than an insipid action picture filled with orange fireball explosions and Cruise trying to look heroic and utterly out of place with the subject.
Can you can't tell this is one of my favorite books? The 1953 movie was utterly camp, despite assertions of playing off cold war fears, but expect it to look good in comparison. I'm rather bummed and would prefer some artsy director and a cast of unknowns and trying to stay true to the underlying message of Well's original tale, rather than focusing on the vehicle (martians invading earth, killing people, etc.)
The difference between Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the movie 'adaptation' will probably be the same in this instance.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There were people running around in the streets with guns last time this happened.
This time the people are a little dumber, more dependant on tv, and the special effects are a lot better...
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Seems like Speilberg is riding the Mars wave. This could be really cool if they stick to the old martian invader thing. I always enjoy some intentional campiness.
Is this the same movie?: IMDB link. Or did Steven buy these guys out?
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
It appears this is going to be set in 1898, which is about the right time, but will the Aliens land in Woking in Surrey? If so, where will they film it? Woking today doesn't look a lot like it did 100 years ago. (Although there's a nice statue of an alien war machine in near the shopping centre).
The other question is will it follow the plot of the book reasonably closely, or will it diverge after a few pages, like Minority Report did?
Alan Moore's take on The War of the Worlds (in the League of Extraordinary Gentleman comic volume 2) was sooo cool-- in many ways much more interesting than the original novel.
Of course, the first League movie was pretty crappy, so the prospects are prolly unlikely...
the last 2 years' best pictures were both movies that had been done before (Chicago, and LOTR - animated... I'm considering the ROTK award to have been an award for the whole series and not solely ROTK).
Though the original movie based on WotW scared the crap out of me as a kid, I think they could have done better.
If Spielberg can follow the BOOK. Like make it a period piece set back in the late 1800 early 1900s would be nice. Otherwise we'll just have another "Fourth of July" on our hands.
Go with the book I say. Adapt a screenplay based on that. NOT set in 2004, NOT based on the radio play, NOT based on the George Pal movie.
Spielberg is good, he's made crap in the past, but not everyone can be a Kubrick. His good movies far outweigh his Hooks and Jurrasic Park 2's.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'm all in favor of a new movie remake; not so sure Tom Cruise should be in it. Oh, well.
You might think it odd, until you hear it, but I really enjoy listening to Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds
Richard Burton did the first person narration and members of the Moody Blues performed a lot of the music. Very good.
I've seen TV ads (yeah I caught about 20 minutes of TV this weekend, first time I watched all month) and saw two -recent- films coming out as remakes. One was probably 'Dawn of the Dead', the other I don't remember at the moment.
Some of this is bound to happen. It seems the plethora of cinema megaplexes has really spurred a glut of films and not all of them can be gems. So take an old idea, put a *STAR* in it and strip out anything the audience has to remember for more than 20 seconds and slap it in a can.
Actually pretty cool how Passion of Christ has kicked some serious boxoffice butt. Are moguls looking at this and thinking, "Hey, we could remake The Ten Commandemnts!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd love for someone to do an accurate film of the Time Machine. After reading the original book again, I see that there is a far more importnt message in the story than just a machine to travel in time. It appears that Wells was trying to warn of the excesses of technology and the eventual class separation that could result. It appears that his message has gone unheeded for far too long. The middle class is disappearing...
Un-news
Of course, I'd like Spielberg too, if he worshipped me as a God.
Orson Welles did the voiceover for the trailer for Jaws - which he thought was great (I can't find the quote. Anyone?)
Spielberg often does really lousy movies - however - given his (avowed) great respect for the material, I think that he will, at least, make an effort to do a good movie. Certainly no studio exec can make him do anything he doesn't want to with this movie.
Of course, I liked Minority Report (except for the stupid spiders,) so I'm inclined to give imitative movies by Spielberg+Cruise a chance.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I think it would be a cool movie to make if it were set in the late 19th Century, like the original story itself.
It's not that stories of the past can't be brought into the present day to good effect, the way some theatre companies and filmmakers opt to do up-to-date versions of Shakespeare's works, but once in a while I'd really like to see a work of hundred-year-old science fiction done as if it were taking place in the author's time rather than our own.
This upcoming "Sky Captain" movie is, I'm hoping, going to be along the lines of what I'm talking about. But I think Sky Captain isn't based on an actual book from the late 1930s, which is, as Stuart Smalley would say, "okay."
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Speilberg took Kubrick's notes and unfinished script and finished AI and filmed it. And it was very much in the vein of a Kubrick film, it was to be the flipside of 2001 and Kubrick's final statement on AI. Speilberg should have ended the film underwater at the Blue Fairy, what he filmed after that felt tacked on. But Speilberg was the only director with the clout and the guts to pull that off.
Minority Report, for all of Cruise's non-acting (he always looks like he is going to puke whenever he is supposed to emote), the story was very good. Although, I would have preferred the darker ending, which is that the child molester was real, and Cruise does choose to kill him.
WoW is about xenophobia, and I think Speilberg will understand that. How he chooses to the do the science and the FX will be interesting, I think you want to stay far away from any sense of campiness, and make it truly scary. Have the Martians knock down a skyscraper, like the Sears Tower or the Transamerica building. I think the audience will "get it". We'll see.
Point is, I think Speilberg has a good record with Sci-Fci.
By the way, one of the penultimate films regarding xenophobia and consumer culture was Romero's Dawn of the Dead. It was a horror movie that had a LOT of social commentary. My guess is the remake coming out this weekend is stripped of all of it, and just concentrates on quick cut scream-inducing "pounce" shots and gory makeup. I digress.
Spielberg will change a lot, probably. Like the ships, which were not flying vehicles per se but rather were launched like bullets from a big cannon on Mars, will probably be updated. But I hope he changes the ending or it will be Independence Day all over again. (Remember discovering that Macs are compatible with alien technology? And that alien computer systems are easy to code viruses for?)
You already hit on the fact that remaking a movie doesn't require too much imagination. I'm a bit dismayed at the actual movie they chose to remake. War of the Worlds is really a simplistic "bad guys vs. good guys" story. I mean the lines between good and evil are as clearly deliniated as they are in a typical Fox News story. It was probably pretty interesting decades ago but I'd like to think that our species is getting a bit wiser. What I'd really love to see is a war film where the lines between good and evil aren't really that clear.
I fully admit that it would be quite a feat to accomplish this in a film about one species versus another. It's pretty hard to see the other guy's point of view when their goal is to annhiliate your entire race. But I think that it could be done. The Borg from Star Trek started to hint at this just a little. Picard as Locutus asks the Enterprise crew why they are resisting. After all, he claims, we're only trying to raise your quality of life by making you part of us. In a later episode, Hugh (the young borg male treated for injuries) also expresses confusion why everyone hates the borg so much. You get the feeling that the borg aren't purely evil, they've just got some pretty warped ideas on how people should live their lives. And, of course, they don't take the desires of other species into account. Of course, this small amount of moral ambiguity was completely erased by the film Star Trek: First Contact which reduced the borg to a hive of malevolent insects.
I'd really like to see a film where the alien invaders are not pure evil. Maybe they feel morally justified in attacking us because we're "wasting the planet". Maybe they feel like their acting in self-defense. I realize that Enterprise is trying to do this with the Xindi but they're not doing a very good job of it, IMHO. Perhaps a War of the Worlds where the aliens are clearly taking pains to avoid civilian casulties. Perhaps they even tell humanity that they are willing to pay for relocation costs to settle us on another planet if we decide not to fight.
I dunno, maybe I'm just ranting here. I'm just disappointed to see a remake of Black Hats vs. White Hats in the 21st century. Rarely is war a clear-cut matter of good vs. evil. And I'd love to see a Sci-Fi film that tries to do this in a clever way.
GMD
watch this
The 1930s radio program was a novelty act that would be forgotten today if it hadn't caused panic, and if Orson Wells hadn't gone on to do much greater things. As for the 1950s movie, it really shouldn't have been called War of the Worlds because it had practically nothing to do with the novel.
But the book. . . Ah, the book is a true classic! Even today it's still a good read. I think War of the Worlds occupies a place in SF literature much like The Hobbit does in fantasy. They are both relatively short novels, they are both adventure stories with a sympathetic "everyman" protagonist, they are both written in an engaging and accessible way, and both played a crucial role in shaping their genres: science fiction and high fantasy, respectively.
If War of the Worlds had any weakness, it was that the protagonist was maybe too passive -- he's a walking camera perspective, blundering through the war and reporting what he sees, never taking a hand in events. In that way he represented the helplessness of the human race in the face of cosmic forces, but I'm not sure how that will play in a movie.
And yes, both War of the Worlds and The Hobbit introduced themes that have since been done to death.
The original Night of the Living Dead was truly a great movie.
It is one of the most depressing, dehumanizing movies ever made.
The zombies are not an invading force or something that can be conquered. They are not evil. They are nothing but the result of contamination from a crashed object from space.
They are unstoppable, uncaring, unflinching, endless.
Every main character is killed matter of factly, without intention or remorse.
And until there point there is no moment in movie history more important than the closing scene.
Just when you think that the hero has survived, that somehow mankind has triumphed, he is shot dead unknowingly, matter of factly, without vengeance, his deeds never to be known.
It is complete defeat and the lack of all meaning. Our efforts are in the end meaningless. We are discarded to rot in the ground.
When I first read the original story, I wasn't very impressed - it seemed to me the Narrator spent the whole story just mooning around about how awful it was that this was happening, how awful it was his girl wasn't there, etc. I chalked it up to a cultural difference - as an American I would have been fighting or at least preparing to fight, so perhaps this was an English thing.
I later read a point that brought the whole story into sharp focus. The book was allegory, and a warning. The invading Martians were attacking England (note that in the story you don't hear about what is happening elsewhere in the world). This is karma served piping hot - the English attacked the primitives of other lands, taking their resources and using advanced technologies to win (rifles and cannons are advanced when all you have is pointed sticks. And banannas.). Then the aliens come, with their advanced technology, treating the Brits as primitives to be exploited. And the Brits are not saved by "Stiff upper lip, good ole college try, pip pip!" They are saved, by accident of fate, by something completely uninterested in saving them.
Now, *IF* Speilberg can stay true to that concept, then updating/relocating the story should not matter - indeed it may make it even MORE powerful to have the aliens attacking the US.
www.eFax.com are spammers
But for the sake of argument (unless you can explain to me otherwise) let's assume that the novel is in the public domain at this point.
In 1951 Wells's kids signed a contract with Paramount which included the following: Now, that bothers me... how can a company retain exclusive and perpetual rights to produce something based on a work that's in the public domain? The New York County Supreme Court upheld Paramount's rights in a court case a couple of years ago when the Wells family wanted to sell rights to a TV mini-series to Hallmark.
So contract law trumps copyright law??? I find that pretty disturbing.
This sig intentionally left justified.
I have confidence in telling you I should know the difference between real and fake.
On 9/11, I took the bus (damn car), which for lack of a walk-thing put me out of media contact until I entered the shop where we have a TV. I unlock the door, look up, and the first thing I see was the first tower collapsing. I asked my coworkers what was going on, and I did NOT believe them for a good 30 seconds.
So next time you think you can tell mediated reality from fiction (TV, radio, print, film) FORGET IT. Just because you haven't been fooled, doesn't mean you can't be fooled.
I enjoyed the first couple of HP books, though I'm not sure there's enough story there to sustain the books that have already been published, never mind two more.
I'm not a rabid fan, but I was disappointed by the first movie's failure to capture the feeling of the book. (No chance I'll go to any of the sequels.) My favorite scene in the first book is where Harry is all uptight about having to learn to ride a broom. All the other kids have been doing it all their lives, and he's never even touched a flyable broom. What if he makes an ass of himself? Then he goes to class and he already knows how. It's a magical (in a non-literal sense) moment that movie utterly fails to capture.
And then there's those moving staircases. In the books, people keep getting lost because all the rooms and corridors at Hogwarts are mysteriously enchanted. Cool! (And crucial to the plot in the latest book.) But in the movie, they explain the same thing by showing the staircases moving back and forth for no obvious reason. Lame.
Let me tell you why I first picked up a Harry Potter book. I heard this commentator on NPR talking about how he read the books to his elementary school class. The kids would not let him show them the illustrations, because they were too into the internal fantasies they'd formed about what Harry's life at Hogwarts must be like. Does Hollywood provoke that kind of imagining? It does not. Hollywood has to show everything, because it doesn't trust its audience.
Sometimes an adaptation promotes the original. Sometimes it destroys it. I've always been grateful that Bill Watterson never allowed any adaptations of Calvin and Hobbes. But now Rowling is a billionaire, so I guess that makes it all right.
Something struck me a few months ago, when I was reading up on Wells for some reason or other (probably because I'd just seen "Time After Time" again). I'd been a fan since I was a kid, but I hadn't realized that:
The Time Machine (1895)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
The Invisible Man (1897)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
came out, in that order with nothing in between, in the short space of just four years. The whole foundation of modern science fiction! It blew my mind.
Of course, these aren't Wells' only great works; but has there ever been anything like those four years, for any author?
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Spoiler! Yeah right - who dares read
it, will become another vehicle for T. Cruise.
That's likely to be the biggest problem for me. The emphasis in the original book seemed to be on mankind's helplessness. It was only and only the alien's weakness that saved us all. We could do nothing. It's hard to see Hollywood and Tom Cruise playing this up. No doubt he'll discover their weakness and sneeze on the alien commander in a climactic battle on the mothership.
The colour movie I saw also distorted Welles' original message, if not the facts, by putting them all in a church at the end, praying to God for deliverance. Suddenly the aliens start dying and the clear implication is that God did it really. *wink wink*
Bleh! I dread this!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.