The War of the Worlds

What a shame! After looking forward to this adaption I was left feeling empty and unsatisfied. Such was the lack of tension - half the family were sat eyes closed and snoring midway through this borefest. I couldn't feel any empathy towards any of the characters, and the story thread was weak. The special effects were equally weak. It's a shame that the scriptwriter felt the need to turn a classic sc-fi story into a dreadful three-part politically-correct soap opera.

As other reviewers have said the first episode wasn't really terrible although the flash forward scenes were annoying and confusing. However the second episode after the "miraculous" meeting between the "heroes" is a total disaster. In this episode the whole alien invasion thing becomes irrelevant and we're stuck with a little bit of a horror movie (where the aliens play the part of the serial killer) and a little bit of post invasion red planet survival simulation. In the end i didn't even care if the heroes survived in the past or in the present. The only people who might like this mess are fans of the lead actress Eleanor Tomlinson.

Who decided to take THE greatest science fiction story ever written and make this slow, senseless, passion less, pointless, plodding mess? Why? Why?? You took everything that made this story great and exciting and terrifying and clever and thought provoking and chucked it away!! I'm off to crayon over the Mona Lisa and then record a rap version of Nessun Dorma, cause, you know, that will make them more relevant to modern society and because, well, I'm smarter than their creator's.

This should have been made by people who actually read the ###### book . I feel cheated.

The acting is bad, the script is bad,the directing is abysmal, the love story is pointless and unnecessary, the male lead seems in a permanent state of stupification, the future time shifts stop the story dead and serve no purpose, the slow motion panning shots are so out of place I actually thought my pc was buffering, and the few scenes actually taken from the original source (of which there are five) are so poorly rewritten and changed that they lose all of the excitement and horror that the book evoked...... And..um...the music was *&#T!!

When will these Movie/TV writers/producers realise that this book is still relevant and being read - 120 Years - after it was written for a reason and Stop trying to make it fit their current/ views/agendas!!! For the love of God please just give us our book on the big screen! (sob!).

Kudos for setting it in (roughly!) the correct time and correct location, 1 star for each.

P. S for those close friends of Mr Wells who have chosen to defend this travesty by stating that 'he' would have been happy to have his book completely overhauled to better fit with current perceived social injustices, thank you for taking the time to channel his spirit and share his views with the rest of us poor lowly mortals.

Maybe next time someone decides to butcher this book on film, they could possibly call it something else.

I'll start with the positives, the acting was good, and it was nice at least to see The BBC making sci fi, in a time when it has been sadly shoved to the back of the queue.

Unfortunately, it's a pretty poor attempt, earlier in the year I thought this was going to be a big Christmas drama, big budget, exciting, featuring Eleanor Tomlinson and Rafe Spall, I'm glad they didn't transmit this at Christmas, it would have been an even bigger disappointment. Spall and Tomlinson were wasted, they're great, but were up against it with the script.

What should have been dynamic and exciting was slow and dull, not helped by the clunky jumps forward in time.

Sometimes tinkering works, sometimes it doesn't, I fear here there was too much tinkering. Simply put this was poor, with the last episode proving a real challenge to get through. 4/10

The BBC took a classic masterpiece and turned it into a steaming pile of ####!