Flaw of the Worlds
First of all, it’s a good summer movie. The effects are good, tripods convincingly stomp about and tear the crap out of the scenery, ace. It’s pacey as hell and the “scenes of peril” are about as gripping as a film marketed to the kids and parents crowd can be, in fact I’d suggest it’s a bit too much for any sensitive children. Tom Cruise proves once again that he’s up there with Tom Hanks as an actor who will always deliver a rock-solid leading performance and I managed to forget his Scientology nuttery within the first few minutes. The supporting performances are fine, even the child-acting is good. Finally, Spielberg doesn’t schmaltz it overly, in fact it’s relentlessly grim and morbid (but exciting with it) for the most part. It’s a good film, honest.
So, what’s the flaw?
It’s not good SF any more and the story is fundamentally weakened because of it.
Why? Because they insisted on moving the setting into the modern era. Now there are excellent reasons to do this from an audience identification perspective , but it causes all sorts of problems for the plot. In order to explain what I mean I’m going to have to hit the spoiler alert.
SPOILER WARNING!!!
The original story was set in the Victorian Era. The Martians arrived with a level of mechanical and weapon technology that is hardly god-like — they have the heat-ray, inter-planetary space travel and some advanced mechanical knowledge. They land and actually build the tripods on Earth, protecting themselves with the heat-ray while doing it. They aren’t invulnerable, and in fact the armed forces can take tripods down with cannon, they’re just overwhelmingly superior in the way you’d imagine the modern armed forces would be superior to WWI troops.
The film, in order to make everything work in the modern world, can’t have aliens landing and casually constructing huge machines, because we know that they’d be immediately surrounded by heavily armed troops, and treated to laser-guided missiles flying with pinpoint accuracy into whatever orifices they might have the moment they failed to surrender. So, the tripods have to have super-shields (a la Independence Day) that our weapons can’t penetrate and they have to be sitting there waiting for the arriving aliens to immediately deploy. The tripods are hidden underground, under cities, so presumably they were buried hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Not a problem, you might think, this is all perfectly valid SF stuff. Well, yes, except the ending — that the aliens die because they can’t deal with the local micro-biology — is left intact. This results in a perfectly understandable “WTF?” from people who aren’t aware of the original story. When you then explain that it is the original ending, they then blame poor old H.G.. Now, even the original was a bit of a Deus Ex Machina ending, but it was at least an SF plot that made sense as the technology level and the limited timescale of the planning of the aliens meant that it was at least feasible that they wouldn’t have any idea about bacterial dangers. In the new one they’re super-advanced and have been thinking about this for centuries, it just makes no sense whatsoever that they’d neglect to at least see if they could survive on the planet by getting some samples or maybe visiting themselves, perhaps while they were down burying the tripods before there was anyone around.
So, good film, but bad SF. More unforgivable is that it is the result of making a concious decision to modernise the story and then doing it in a way that manages to be more naive than the 19th century original.
