H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is a well that so many creatives have drawn from. From the infamous nation-terrifying Orson Welles radio play of 1938, through Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie, via 1996's Independence Day, and now to a brand new movie starring Eva Lonoria and Ice Cube, it’s never not being reimagined. This latest version, from director Rich Lee, approaches the tale of an alien invasion through the lens of...well, through the lens.
The trailer is, let’s say, a touch heavy-handed in its insistence that you understand this is all about our current surveillance state and corporate harvesting of our data. I know this because it says so about fourteen-thousand times in just over two minutes. Yet, despite this concerning lack of nuance, the District 9-ish “grounded footage” style looks properly interesting.
Ever since Orson Welles’ pre-war radio play, people have been fascinated with presenting H.G. Wells’ story via intense realism. That notorious broadcast told the story of a Martian invasion as if it were a real news broadcast, legendarily causing panic among American listeners who were unaware it was fiction. Where there really was widespread fear is pretty much disputed now, but the conceit remains captivating. Multiple attempts have been made to recapture that magic on screen, like 2012's War of the Worlds: The True Story, a mockumentary by Timothy Hines, and the bizarre 2013 outing The Great Martian War 1913—1917.
Obviously you can’t really do this at the movies, given it’s impossible to convince a paying audience that they’ve stumbled into viewing real events, but I really like the look of this compromise. Building a film out of phone footage, surveillance camera feeds, military cameras, news broadcasts, and so on, might not be original, but it’s a damned effective idea for creating the sense of witnessing real events, rather than shiny cinematography. Plus, I’m always a sucker for SFX that are viewed out of the corner of the camera’s eye. People are always far more prone to believe poorly framed amateur-looking footage of a UFO sighting than a slickly produced 4K steady-cam capture.
This film doesn’t exactly boast a lot of high-profile pedigree, and isn’t planning to trouble the box office. It’s coming straight to Amazon Prime at the end of this month.
Ice Cube’s great, but endlessly bellowing into a portrait-view camera doesn’t really let him shine in the trailer, and given it’s claiming Eva Longoria as a lead, she sure doesn’t have much to say here. However, we see a lot more of the fantastic Iman Benson, who was such a compelling lead in Mike Flannagan’s ludicrously terrifying The Midnight Club, so that bodes well. Director Rich Lee is also an unknown factor, given until now he’s primarily directed music videos—that can often lead to wonderfully imaginative movies, even if—in every single case of this—movie critics are apparently hard-wired to say “looks like an extended music video” no matter how the film’s actually made.
Most of all, I’m so pleased to see the Martians (or wherever they will be from here, given people are slightly less willing to believe that these days) depicted so faithfully. I grew up one town over from Woking, a place destroyed in the original novel, and which features the most glorious and enormous statue of a tripod in its main shopping center. They’re so menacing, and more-so when solid like those in the trailer, rather than Spielberg’s more octopoid version.
War of the Worlds (I have no idea why American interpretations of the book are so resistant to the “The” at the start of the name) is out on Amazon Prime July 30.
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