Thunderchild

[sergebroom]

Early in the 21st Century, I read that someone would finally make a film of War of the Worlds with a Victorian setting. Alas, it wasn't to be. Instead we were inflicted the Tom ("It's all about me!") Cruise version. Well, I can always find some solace in Jeff Wayne's musical.

"The Earth belonged to the Martians."

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I like that! But I wouldn't have given the part to a tenor. I think a bari would have made it sound more serious.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, the narrtor was the late Richard Burton, who does sound serious. That being said, the choice of musical voices may be due to Wayne having originally conceived this in 1976 although the stage version was produced for the first time only in 2006. I think I first heard this in 1978 when Starlog ran an aricle about it so I had to buy it on a 33rpm. (Does it show our age that we remember those?) The site has a DVD of the live show or sale, but it looks like it wouldn't work on North-American players. That's an incentive for me to get a portable player that'd play European DVDs.

By the way, did you know that, before George Pal's 1952 movie, Eisenstein had been planning to adapt it. Later, in the 1930s, Hitchcock actually began planning his own movie of it then it was shut down, over questions about who owned the movie rights to the story.

HG Wells apparently dismissed the novel as a minor work of his youth. Hah!

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yes, he sounded serious, but it's hard to take the talking head seriously! I did know about the other movies and that Wells thought it was a minor story. And technically, I suppose it is, but it really hit home to people after the broadcast.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The CGI head is a bit silly.

As for Wells's dismissive opinion of his own story, I'd disagree with him. There are very clunky things in it, like the narrator telling us, while the invasion is raging on, what was discovered about the alien devices after the Martians were defeated. But that novel is a seminal work of SF although I don't know how it was received by the public originally. My understanding is that, when he was writing those stories that we remember, he was suffering from tuberculosis, and that would explain their dark edge. He got better, obviously, and went on to become an Important Writer who uttered such pronouncements as that the Great War was the war to end all wars.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

But when you look at it from a literature standpoint, it has pretty much the single plot and straightforward execution. Non-SF at the time was much more complicated and I think that's what he was comparing it with. The story really sank into oblivion until the radio broadcast. It's the energy of people thinking it was real that keeps it surviving now.

A lot of people thought the Great War was the end (that's why we called it that) and they were all wrong. I think humans probably evolved in such a way that we will always war and I hope we'll evolve enough that diplomacy will handle it.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize that most of the public had forgotten about the story until Orson Welles's radio version came along. I don't think that SF readers had forgotten about the story, but then again we have a tendency to remember things that people outside the field let slip out of their memories.

(Come to think of it, would the non-SF people still remember and read Jules Verne if not for the movies?)

That being said, I don't know if it's the simplicity of his story, compared to the Real Literature of his times, that had HG Wells dismiss it. My understanding is that he became a bit of a pompous ass in his later years, but I may be wrong about that too. No matter what the reason, he was mistaken. His story had powerful images.

As for the reat War... True. They were wrong, but at least that motivated some of them to point out that war is not a nice thing, and that we should think before launching one.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

There weren't really SF fans back then. The Wells and Verne stories were just considered fantastical. The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, but wasn't a big hit. If it had been, people would have been less scared when the broadcast happened in 1938. The first SF fandom club started in 1937 and there's some dispute about whether the UK had the first SF convention in 1938 or the US had the first in 1939.

So while people would have read it, and early fandom appreciated it, it didn't become real to people in general until the Welles' broadcast.

Yes, some of the folks in the Great War said we shouldn't have another. Look how well that worked!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean fans as we now know them, with an organized fandom (sort-of organized anyway) and clubs and stuff. But there had to be fans, or proto-fans, who loved scientific romances, or tales of anticipation, who devoured what stories of that nature were out there, who remembered them while almost everybody else forgot about them. After all, Orson Welles brought this tale back to life. Someone may have brought it to his attention. Or Welles himself may have read it as a kid and never forgot. For all I know, he was a fan of SF. My understanding is that he loved comics. And he and Ted Sturgeon tried to make a movie out of More Than Human.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm sure there were people who liked to read that kind of story.

Victorian setting

[ajreardon.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I believe that this version of War of the Worlds has a Victorian setting, but apparently it's also very bad: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425638/

I could have sworn that I had read a review of it on Stomp Tokyo or one of their sub-pages, but a quick search of their site didn't turn it up. Now, I KNOW I read a review of it, but I can't think of where it might have been.

Can't really get into this musical, way too rock opera for me.

Re: Victorian setting

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I had never heard of that version, which is probably just as well, based on the comments at the end of its imdb.com entry. Another clue that this might not be a good movie is that it's 3 hours long. Very few movies deserve to be that long, and Wells's original story was quite short. It's been a long time since I read it, but I doubt that even a faithful adaptation of each and every event of the original would have added up to 3 hours. Also, when moving a story from one medium to another, what went zippingly in one sometimes turns into utter boredom.

As for the musical's style... Well, this was first conceived in 1978 (not 1976 like I said in my original post). Yes, the very modern music should clash with the Victorian setting. It didn't for me, for some reason. Ah, so it goes.