Gerry Anderson’s UFO isn’t quite so bad, IIRC it was only their ships that disintegrated in an oxygen atmosphere.
I’m rather disappointed that they didn’t keep the setting the same as the novel.
I think it would have worked on the basis that London is one of the few cities that hasn’t seen a giant monster attack or UFO invasion in the past 50 years. Why would the aliens go after New York? They’d have to compete with King Kong’s clone/distant relative, CHUD’s, evil leprechauns, etc. The place is tapped out.
They should have kept it nineteenth-century London like in the book. Frankly, the scene with the British battleships exchanging blows with the walkers was my favorite part of the book.
How quickly you forget Gorgo! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054938/
Not to mention the destruction wrought in Quatermass and the Pit (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/).
Or the regular pasting it seems to receive from The Daleks 
God, Quicktime is such a horrible format. Why doesn’t it just go away?
Actually, I could buy the premise in Alien Nation, since they were supposed to be a genetically engineered slave race. They weren’t supposed to be a naturally-occurring biiological species. What better control mechanism than making saline deadly to them? Where the hell would they escape to? (They’ve just been damned lucky on Earth). Woulda been a bitch to engineer, though. Saline is too common an too useful.
[quote]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Incubus
I’m rather disappointed that they didn’t keep the setting the same as the novel.
I think it would have worked on the basis that London is one of the few cities that hasn’t seen a giant monster attack or UFO invasion in the past 50 years.
How quickly you forget Gorgo! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054938/
Not to mention the destruction wrought in Quatermass and the Pit (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/).[/quote
Not to mention
The Giant Behemoth
The Quatermass Xperiment (AKA The Crawling Unknown) with its giant bubbling whatsis in Westminster Abbey.
Not to mention the Mars Attacks! cards, which featured “Chaos in Parliament!” (I don’t recall if that was in the Tim Burton film.)
I think a WotW film set in 1890 London would be a snoozefest.
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have… oh, shit!”
Bunch of people running around, dying, unable to fight back, until the machines die mysteriously.
Boring!
Not true! Artillery batteries, and as I said, battleships, were both able to fight back. The main problem the British had, IMO was that the invasion caused so much confusion and widespread panic they weren’t really able to mount an effective counterattack. Plus the Martians had some pretty bitchin’ WMD’s (Black Smoke, anyone?)
Yeah, the second series of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was such a drag
:rolleyes:
Ray Harryhausen wanted to do TWOTW as a period piece, and even made some test footage of it. It looks pretty good. If he’d done the tripods in his dimensional animation, they’d have looked like the AT-AT walkers from The Empire Strikes Back, and gthe natural “strobing” would’ve worked perfectly to convey a sense of mechanical malice. I think a period WOTW could be wonderful.
Have you read the book? It’s not just “waiting till the Martians die” – there’s some superb suspense in that period.
Sure, but then we’d have to sit through Tom Cruise doing a bad British accent for two hours…
Because then we’d be stuck with Windows Media, which is far worse. 
Yes, but it still would make for a boring movie, especially for modern audiences who are sitting there thinking “why didn’t they make this in modern times where, even though I know how this ends, at least I could try to believe that there will be some means of effective resistance by the humans?”
And I have read the book and I agree that there are some suspenseful sequences, but the fact remains that modern audiences are not going to suspend belief to the point where they accept a species with interplanetary flight but with the sort of “advanced” armaments that Wells gave the Martians (except, perhaps, the Black Smoke.)
Adding to the list of exceptions: Reign of Fire, which had London as the center of the dragon, um, invasion, or whatever it was.
Yes, I had dinner with Mr. Hines five or six years ago. This project was definitely a gleam in his eye; he was asking me about stunt people in the area. He’s a good guy, with good intentions, but I got the definite impression he was, metaphorically speaking, trying to build a skyscraper out of popsicle sticks.
The 1898 martians landing in modern day wouldn’t be fun to watch at all. Once the Government(as in, anything NATO class) figured out what was happened, those martians would be less a threat and more like big moving targets that bleed green. The martians in the book were using the same kind of Tactics the Germans pioneered in the 1930’s. What would happen to a WW2 style military againest a modern military?
Granted, it would be interesting have the martians land in 3rd world countries only where the miltaries may not have have the same tech and organization, but even then I suspect a tripod wouldn’t fare well againest Cold-war era RPG-7’s.
There was effective resistance by the humans in the original novel, it’s just that the Martians were so much more powerful. The artillery guns, the Thunder Child… these are far more interesting and gripping scenes than the usual nonsense about firing a nuke at the invaders and discovering they are immune to everything (a concept Tim Burton spoofed justly and admirably in Mars Attacks).
Well, you have a 19th century Earth invaded, razed, and subjugated by beings who look like black, glistening, leathery, tentacled bulks, yet you are worried about suspending [dis]belief because their weapons are not what you would expect today? Surely the “heat ray” is not that inflexible a concept, seeing as how it remains a staple in science fiction (the laser gun, beam weapons and blasters, etc.). And it’s within any film maker’s licence to include modern updates such as bombs and missiles, if necessary. In fact, resistance in the face of such overwhelming odds would be even more noteworthy. This is War of the Worlds we are talking about, not Independence Day.
That reminds me of something that I’d really like to see: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, faithfully adapted and set in the 1940s/early 1950s.
Such great suspense as the aliens dispense with that whole “Britannia rule the waves” bit (and the Americans, and the Canadians, and the Russians, off-screen) without ever being clearly seen – and then the shock and awe when they start making spectacular beachheads and terrorising holiday resorts.
Everybody knows War of the Worlds inside out and backwards already (although I’m enough of a nerd to plunk down my cash for both new versions, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.)
Kraken Wakes needs to be up on the screen, and soon. It’s so wonderfully paranoiac.
“Worried” wouldn’t exactly be the word to use as it indicates a level of concern far beyond what I’m experiencing here. 
However, we have an idea as to the level of technology a civilization needs to cross interplanetary distances and if the aliens came out blasting with top-notch 1930s tech the audience would just laugh.
I’m not saying it didn’t “work” in 1890, just that the same idea, applied the exact same way, wouldn’t work for modern audiences. We just know too much.
Forgot this quote:
Not if you’re making a movie that’s supposed to be just like the book you can’t!
But no such movie has ever been made, from any book. In addition to facing the challenge of visualizing the printed word, a director always makes choices regarding what to cut, what to include, and what to modify for the screen version of any narrative. Changing the setting of WotW to the 21st century is a substantial alteration to the very essence and character of Well’s novel. So is abandoning the suspenseful first person point of view of the narrator, which leaves us with little more than the regular alien invasion film and a showcase of earthly and alien weaponry matched against each other (i.e., Independence Day).
Updating the weaponry of the Martians who invade a 19th century Earth is hardly spitting in Wells’s eye, it is simply a fairly minor revision to make Wells’s tale more commestible for a modern audience. And, as I mentioned, the heat ray could be made to work relatively easily even by today’s standards. The heat ray is no more ridiculous than the laser gun or beam weapon, which have been staples of science fiction for longer than you or I have been alive. Adding missiles or rotating blades on the alien Machines hardly seems that big a deal.
Yes, but the major complaint I’m hearing in re: to the new film (not just here, but other places) is “Why don’t they ever do a version like the book, set in 1890’s London?” Adding/updating the aliens weaponry is not what the complainants desire - they want a version just like the book.
And to make myself clear: my point isn’t about the aliens weaponry, it’s about what mankind had in its arsenal in 1890. To the modern audience there will be no means of seemingly effective resistance on mankinds part - no tanks, no gas weapons, no nukes, no aircraft, no missles, just Maxim guns and dreadnaughts with 12-inch shells.
What you’ll end up with is a scenario just like Turtledoves WorldWar series of books, where interplanetary traveling aliens invade in the middle of WW2. Turtledove solution was to handicap his aliens so badly that the books really became a farce (though a great, albeit cheesy, read.) Essentially he had these interstellar travelling aliens invade with an arsenal suspiciously akin to 1990’s US weaponry and civilian tech, complete with CD-ROMS, Abrams tanks, integrated circuits and the like.
Upon re-reading, that last post was a bit incoherent. I’ll try again when I’m not at work.