Krieg der Welten 4 die wahre Geschichte

Seeing this title in my Amazon Prime suggestions I jumped right away at giving it a shot. The idea of a mockumentary telling of the War between the Planets as a real event struck me as utter genius and gold. I was wondering if it would be something like World War Z (the book), as an "oral history" in the form of interviews with survivors after the fact in a world irrevocably changed by the events, or perhaps some manner of Alternate 1960s in which Earth has assimilated Martian technology and greatly advanced over the century far more than in reality, or perhaps even some manner of post-apocalyptic telling in a world dominated or partly destroyed by Martians using one of the last remaining video cameras.

I appear to have gotten far ahead of myself in that regard, as what I got instead was a very safe re-telling of the actual novel War of the Worlds, almost completely by the book in the form of an uncovered 1965 interview with the last remaining survivor of the "war" itself.

Given that it follows the book very strictly, there is little room to indulge in historical what-ifs, given that the "war" only lasts a few days/weeks before the Martians succumb to Earthborn illness and bacteria. This rather disappointed me, as I felt that so much more could have been done with the story. About the only thing new with this version is the framing device of a documentary, and nothing more.

Not only is this an immense letdown, but it betrays what you begin to suspect during much of the prologue exposition and the interview itself, and which is painfully revealed in a postlude claiming that Bertie Wells, after surviving the War of the Worlds, went to America and became a war correspondent and served...

... in World War I.

So despite the literally species-changing event of an interplanetary invasion, one which has resulted in tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, the destruction of multiple English towns and cities, and the remains of Martian technology left behind which could conceivably change all of human civilization unlike anything that had preceded it, far beyond that of even internal combustion, electricity, or the radio...

... despite all that, Human history continues along basically the exact same path, with a World War I around the same time as real history, and the mere phrasing of it as World War "I" implying a World War II as well.

This was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the film.

Despite that, it was an interesting ride for what it was, and while a lot of the footage relied on documentary-standard re-enactments, most of the "actual footage" is sufficiently realistic looking, while used sparingly enough so as not to oversaturate the piece.

Really cute idea. Found footage, fill the obvious gaps with a narration from a survivor, and also use basically the text of the original source novel.

And that's it. Nothing else worked. The overall style is just a total mess. It doesn't emulate any documentary done by anyone, anywhere, with the weird titles flying across the screen, etc. All graphics look like they were done on an Amiga. Yes, in the 90s. had to look several times to confirm this is from 2012.

The fake found footage is hilariously bad. Even the stills are just atrocious, junior high project level bad. Newspapers with Comic Sans hastily over-printed for example. The film is... I can't tell. The conceit admits they have some re-enactments, but it's not clear which badly done bits are supposed to be re-enacted, which are supposed to be stock, and which are supposed to be the original footage.

And all the film is... weird. Like post-processed to reduce quality I /guess/ but it looks just strange instead.

Good idea, someone should do it. Just none of the people involved with this. Ever.

I am surprised most people consider this to be fiction. My great-grandfather tells me of the huge machines marching across the landscape, their heat rays blasting great swaths across the...

Okay, maybe not. I enjoyed this film quite a bit, for several reasons. One: it didn't take itself too seriously. This is comprised of a great deal of "found footage" scenes... none of which is so blatant as a young Shirley Temple stepping out on a balcony to view the destruction. Similar "popular actor" scenes can be found if one is watching closely. I found that enjoyable, a sort of built-in easter egg they added for the fun of it.

Two: the dialog/script was excellent. People today are largely unaware that the language we speak in the U.S. today is vastly different from that of the 1800s and early 1900s. The film stuck true to the language of the day, giving it a greater feel of authenticity.

I also enjoyed the "Steampunk" element to it, visible nowhere so much as in the design of the Martian Tripods.

There were three major flaws in the film, which is why I give it 8 rather than 10 stars.

1) The distance / time correlation was faulty in several areas of the film. People walking on foot could not possibly have traveled as far as indicated in the film within the short time given. Similarly, at the beginning of the film, they would have had to have newspaper printing presses faster than the Internet to publish the number of editions rolling out within a very short period of time. These were continuity errors that are forgivable within the otherwise interesting presentation of the film in general.

2) Blatantly missing (and contradictory to logic) is the concept that scientists of the day would have been hard at work disassembling the Martian machinery and reverse-engineering it to create their own massive war machines in preparation for a future invasion. The idea that this invasion was very closely followed by World War I really made little sense-- and the total lack of Martian weaponry during that war difficult to believe. At the very least they could have mentioned, "Great effort was made to reproduce the Martian death weapons, but they were simply too far advanced beyond the science of the day." That would have at least explained such a glaring omission.

3) The utter inability of mankind to fight back. They showed one scene where an artillery shell by sheer coincidence made direct contact and blew a Martian Tripod apart. Why then, weren't the battleships at sea able to do the same? (I believe in the original work a couple of Tripods were indeed taken out in such a manner.) Most of the cannons shown were mass-destruction "lob" types. Where though, were the far-more-accurate sight-aimed artillery weapons? Those could have done some significant damage.

So those items knocked the film down a couple of stars. Beyond that the acting (especially of the elderly "Wells") was superb, the directing well-done, and the story, though pretty much by-the-book and nothing-new-here... was enjoyable (a story well told, even if known, is still a good story). Also two thumbs up for the ancient-but-effective special effects. The results of the Martian death rays were as well-done as the Tom Cruise remake... which was one of the original-concept high points of that movie.

I enjoyed the fake-documentary style of this, the occasional obviously-fake-footage while making the whole film relatively believable, and the effort in general of simply telling a good tale. In that, I believe they succeeded.

As a youngster, I read WOTW and was absolutely enthralled by it. I watched Hines' original movie and reviewed it (not entirely unkindly) on this bulletin board, and in doing so I noted that one of the major flaws of movie versions was to remove the setting of the story from the end of the 19th Century to "the present day" - which was one of the saving graces of Hines' WOTW I - keeping the time and place, in theory at least, of the book. My reasoning was that even as far back as the 1950s, when George Pal filmed the book, modern day man has reached a comfortable acceptance of at least the possibility of life elsewhere than on this planet, but to the average man or women of Wells' day, this idea was totally unthinkable, which, when the modern day reader accepted this, gave rise to an insight into the utter terror that would have been felt when his book was published.

In WOTW II, Hines has done a very interesting piece of mental trickery to convince a modern day movie audience that the fear was more than just a simple fear of death - it was the complete overturning of the fabric on the mind. He keeps the viewer in two disparate worlds, that of the 19th Century, while still being addressed by a citizen of the 1960s. Whilst the method has been used before (eg Little Big Man) of using a participant in the events to relay their story directly to the audience, the device of mixing real footage with "re-enactment" is meritorious in this construct.

I watched the movie quite happily until I was struck by an unbelievable error which completely spoiled the entire movie, and that was the episode of the Torpedo Ram "Thunder Child" failing to destroy any enemy. In the book (and indeed in Hines' previous film) this event was absolutely crucial to whole of the story, and indeed much of Wells other literature. Firstly, this gave the reader a burst of hope (as also in the destruction of Sheperton) by showing that as merciless and technologically advanced as the Martians were, they were nevertheless still capable of being destroyed.

Secondly, in the book the ship destroyed two of the Martian fighting machines, once by ramming, and the second as the ship exploded, in a battle of human machine versus Martian machine - the humans and the Martians were present, but invisible, as the mechanical warfare was fought.

Wells is credited with forecasting aerial warfare, the atomic bomb and armoured fighting vehicles ("The Land Ironclads"). He predicted the outbreak of WWII to within a year ("Shape of Things to Come"). In fact, having re-read "The Land Ironclads" after I finished WOTW II, I was astounded to see that when Wells describes how the "soldiers" in the tanks were killing their infantry opponents, they were within an enclosed space with a projected image of the battlefield, and targeted their victim by the seemingly simple action of using a device like engineers dividers and pushing an electric button. If the shot missed, the operator moved his device, re-aimed and fired again. Sounds remarkably similar to robot warfare of today with operators in remote locations operating drone aircraft to destroy their targets.

So in removing the clash of the mechanical Titans in WOTW II, Hines has completely stripped much of Wells' vision of its power by doing what George Pal did (and presumably other film makers, but I've not watched any other versions) and that was to make the Martians supremely indestructible (except for the Shepperton action), thus removing any semblance of hope. "If only the humans could have worked together just a little bit more ... they just might have brought it off." But alas they stumbled almost within reach of the final goal.

Apart from that one huge failure, I actually enjoyed the movie, modestly, and think it at least as good as WOTW I, and probably better.

Not great cinema, but an above average audio book with video and illustrations.

I'd rather read the book or listen to the audio book in my car. Not a good use of TV time for me.