The Hindu Business Line : War of the Worlds

"NO one would have believed in the early years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

"Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

This is the original text of the version narrated by Morgan Freemen, as only he can, in the opening sequence of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of H.G Wells' classic, War Of The Worlds. Freeman's voice and Wells' language go hand in hand, there is a touch of the scarred and timelessness to both. Not quite so with Spielberg's film, which betrays adaptation right from the modified text - "no one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century,'' to its lack of reference to Mars and absolute focus on war, less the worlds. As he may have rightly assessed, in the 21st century knowledge on Mars is more and the fascination for it, less. So, unlike in previous versions that saw Martians coming in from the outside, the latest film has a powerful lightning storm that brings to life buried alien war machines, tripods with death rays to kill. In each adaptation of Wells' book, the locale also shifted out of Britain. For Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast it was New Jersey and New York, in George Pal's 1953 film it was California and for Spielberg, it is a return to the US east coast with main protagonist Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) as a Newark resident working the gantries on Jersey docks.

Ferrier, an incompetent father, has his son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) visiting him for the weekend, when the storm strikes and a tripod rips through the earth at a nearby intersection. The next 10 minutes is gripping footage shot through a panic-stricken camera. Such deliberate camera work and retention of a human atmosphere runs through the entire film, giving a classical touch to the exhausted world of sci-fi imagery. That edge of palpability was the forte of Wells' book too, written as it was in a documentary fashion. As for Spielberg's story, the Ferriers travel through a countryside teeming with refugees and tripods to Ray's ex-wife (Miranda Otto) in Boston.

Irritants like the Ray-Robbie relationship aside, Spielberg's film is heavy duty Hollywood stuff, the quality of its craft firmly driven home by each thunderous step of the tripods and the quieter breathing spaces in between like the tense moments in Ogilvy's (Tim Robbins) cabin.

See it for Hollywood, Dakota Fanning and that Spielbergian ability to give personality to aliens - a probing tripod tentacle that reminds of ET-like curiosity (albeit sinister), for example. But see it more to remember Wells because imagining Martians in the late 19th century was a greater challenge than filming the special effects in the 21st. The adaptation's inability to tweak everything to the modern lingers. H.G. Wells wrote: "There are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians 10 times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.''

In the early days of science fiction, it was possible for death rays and death by microbes, to co-exist. Likely not, when you have claimed the excuse of today's world to dispense with Martians and period backdrop. After all, where there is life, there is disease.

Makes you wonder - couldn't Spielberg have simply narrated the original?

Wells had cause to dream of another world and he told a wholesome story replete with Martian logic and anatomy. Spielberg builds on the world's familiarity with aliens to portray just attack, a theatre-shaking alien attack, its constant rumble reverberant in the words of Ogilvy, "this is not a war, this is an extermination.'' It begs the question - by whom and for what?

The film is great spectacle, but has little to chew.

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War of the Worlds — a great spectacle