THE REAL WAR OF THE WORLDS MOVIE

Note: I made some Mormon reader angry over my negative reviews of books written by Mormons out to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews.

THE REAL WAR OF THE WORLDS MOVIE

If I was an English teacher, I'd use THE WAR OF THE WORLDS as a reading assignment, exposing the students to the 1938 'panic broadcast' by Orson Welles and perhaps even show the movie adaptions to engage the kids. And did the makers of the 2005 Spielberg movie bother to read the novels? I mean, come on: the section in the book of the men trapped in a house collapsed by a falling cylinder played so much better than the SIGNS rip off sequence with Tim Robbins in the basement in the film! Even the ending is brilliant (something else discarded by the filmmakers in their effort to remain politically correct). I kept hearing the authoritative voice of Richard Burton from Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical version of WAR OF THE WORLDS as I read the opening, as great a first page of any work of science fiction since. The writing also holds wonderful description and passages. The chaos and carnage of the World Wars decades later kept coming to mind as I read the passages of the crowds fleeing London as the city and country are ablaze under the power of the Martian war machines. Either on a personal level (the novel is narrated by one man with a section devoted to retelling what happened to his brother) or a description of the masses fleeing the attack, the story is quite believable. And that was only this story! To think he would also write THE TIME MACHINE, THE INVISIBLE MAN, THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU and THE FOOD OF THE GODS! Just think what his mind might have come up with had he seen the technology he forecasted in the 20th Century! Another well-crafted aspect of this novel is how realistically he writes of the human slaughter as the Martians invade.

Wells envisioned space travel, mechanized warfare as well as a killer Heat Ray and a deadly Black Gas the Martians employed to destroy mankind.

What struck me over and over about reading THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was the imagination that fueled this story at a time when men got around by horse and lit their homes with lanterns.

The real war of the worlds