La guerre des mondes

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

I've been waiting most of my life for a faithful adaptation of the great novel. Sadly, the wait goes on. This is more like a cheap Dr Who episode crossed with Edwardian Eastenders. Absolutely crushed with disappointment. Ah well...

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

Boring yawn-fest with CBBC effects and a totally unnecessary and very 21st Century sub-plot.

What this story needs is the kind of love and detail that only a Director with passion for the novel (and a big budget!) can deliver.

What Peter Jackson did for Tolkien we need someone similar to do for War of the Worlds.

The impression I had was this production team were not passionate about War of the Worlds, H.G.Wells or maybe even scifi generally. Instead it seemed to me they were dumped with this project and so glossed over the alien invasion part and instead hijacked it as a vehicle for a modern agenda and made that the story instead.

Please god will I still be alive before someone actually produces a period accurate, book accurate, Thunderchild scene including, non budget limiting, visual representation of the original book ?

A message for all scriptwriters -

1. When involved in the representation of a classic masterpiece be accurate to the period it was set in, do not try to re write history with inserted modern sensibilities that simply did not exist at that time.

2. Do not be so arrogant as to think that your tinkering can improve on a literary classic, that you are somehow more skilled than the original author and can improve on their tale.

3. Do not do projects that you know require a very significant budget when you only have a limited budget. Bad effects are worse than no effects at all - some pictures can get away with near zero effects and are all the better for it (eg. the excellent Let the Right One In) but some like War of the Worlds you simply cannot do with out effects, so if you don't have the budget to do it justice then just don't do it. The money (UK TV License Payers money!) would be better spent on alternative projects.

It's quite clear the BBC can do amazing things War and Peace (2016), Peaky Blinders and even do big budget collaborations well as shown in His Dark Materials - How this got through the review board within the BBC amazes me, no wonder they were keeping it back for over a year and released it with so little fanfare they knew it was a **** up, what a waste.

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.