You have to admire someone who tries this hard.
Back in 2005, with Steven Spielberg hard at work on his version of the classic H.G. Wells Novel, Timothy Hines made his own three-hour adaptation of the book which was (supposedly) the most accurate version ever made and which contained nearly every scene in the book.
It was also rather…flat and uninspiring. I’d have a hard time saying exactly what was wrong, but it definitely lacked the sense of panic and fear such a film needed, and the main characters were too leisurely, relaxed and calm when talking about death, destruction and the loss of family members.
Timothy Hines then edited it into a new version which was a bit more than two hours long (which I suspect was the version I saw) and then, finally, into an even shorter version but without much success.
I watched it at the time because some of the early reviewers gushed about how accurate it was. I was willing to accept the remarkably poor digital effects, but ended up feeling severely disappointed.
So I found it rather intriguing when I learned that Hines had made another War of the Worlds film, this one in a documentary format. When it eventually came my way I decided to watch it as much out of curiosity as anything else, with, I’ll admit, somewhat low expectations.
It starts out with the last living survivor of the War of The Worlds, Bertie Wells, giving us his account of the events, with a recreation of the events based on surviving military footage, other period footage and some recreations.
And eventually, some of those “recreations” start looking very familiar.
Let’s face it: this is one of those very strange efforts which is almost impossible to file in any neat boxes. Yes, it is a mocumentary, but it is also a remix of his older film version, something which became far more obvious as it went along.
But it might also be described as a found footage film, or perhaps a collage film, as it uses a lot of footage from a bewildering number of unexpected places. This became very obvious to me when I recognized one long sequence involving fleeing people as the legendary Odessa steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (with far more Russian peasant blouses in view than you’d find in your typical British town). A great many other sequences look very familiar, even if I can’t identify them offhand. I know one with a bridge collapsing under a train came from Buster Keaton’s The General, and while I know that there’s a lot of genuine war and disaster footage in the mix, I suspect that there must be clips from dozens of Hollywood movies.
Why, Shirley Temple even makes a brief appearance.
One major improvement over the original film, however, are the digital effects, which are reasonably good here, at least when seen streaming on a laptop screen. They still look a bit fake, but are miles better, perhaps because in most of the footage they are rendered in black and white, with enough faux film damage that they blend in with the older footage better.
One of the worst sequences in the original was the battle between the Thunder Child and three Martian war machines. The digital ship was rather obviously unmanned, with the historically inaccurate weapons shooting themselves without gun crews.
Here we get what is obviously genuine footage of warships, and of naval combat. The end result is actually quite good, and vastly better than the original.
Although, of course, it only works because this is a “documentary” and we expect it to be pieced together from bits of old film.
But where this one falls down is in a basic narrative weakness which it inherited from the original film (and, I believe, the book as well), as we end up with Bertie telling a long story about his brother’s experiences during the war. Now, to me, it seems that they would have been better off with two survivors telling the story, or perhaps an audio tape of his brother telling his own tale, or Bertie reading aloud from his brother’s diary. Any of these would have worked better. I can understand their desire to reuse this sequence, as it does give us that naval battle, but it just doesn’t work dramatically.
Nor does it help that they used rather more of his original footage!
The final result is a bit static — as a genuine documentary would have been — and relies too much on the narration. It is a nice touch that Bertie starts out quoting the opening lines of Wells’ story, but it weighs the film down that they use so much of the book in his narration. It sounds too florid and unemotional. It’s really a question of the differences between the two mediums — and how language was used back then — but it would have helped if we got rather less of it.
However, there was one curious survival from the original film: it had a music hall scene, with a young woman who sings a very long song and is later eaten by the aliens. It felt badly out of place in the original, particularly as (other then a quick Leitmotif-style snatch of the song she sings earlier), we’re never really told that it is supposed to be the same girl. It felt like the scene got in the film because she was the producer’s girlfriend. It certainly did nothing to advance the plot.
It hasn’t gone away in the new film.
To be fair it’s a much shorter scene. This time we don’t wait around for the song to end. In fact, we only get a snatch of the song before the film moves on.
But it does drag the rest of the film down for me because I know where it came from.
Oh, well.
I do need to note one nice little detail Timothy Hines has worked into many of his battle scenes: before the first Martian war machine emerges from the pit, we see soldiers setting up motion picture cameras to capture whatever happens. We see cameramen hard at work in many of the battles, and on one occasion, we see a soldier grab the camera and run.
Now we know where they got the film footage of the battle.
Now don’t get me wrong. This is an interesting little film despite its flaws. It blows away the other versions of the film that Timothy Hines made, and comes the closest of any of them of giving us a more accurate version of the novel.
And it proved entertaining enough that my nephews watched the second half of the film with me after they came in late. They enjoyed every minute of it and would probably have loved the whole film.
If you know what to expect, and accept it for what it is, you probably will enjoy this one.
But, hopefully, Timothy will forget about his old footage next time and start over.
However unlikely that might be…
rivets on the poster 