War of the Worlds - L'Invasione

I have two questions: 1. Why would one produce a really expensive, but fairly crappy, remake of a pretty darn good '50s SciFi flick? 2. Why would one produce a really cheap, and extremely crappy, remake of a pretty darn good '50s SciFi flick? Well, in the vein of the first question, my ex-wife thought spending was good, and spending a lot was even better.

As for the second, they keep doing this so I guess they plan to make it up in volume.

To the specific point of this venture, the acting was wooden, the dialogue inane, the animation amateurish. Since everyone knows the plot and outcome of this tale, some effort should have been put into making the intermediate activity interesting. It wasn't.

H.G. Wells' classic tale gets a surprisingly thoughtful modern retelling in this straight to video version from The Asylum. Writer/Director Michael David Latt is certainly no Steven Spielberg but he manages to guide his everyman C. Thomas Howell through the alien onslaught. C. Thomas Howell actually makes you care about his character, which is indeed a rarity in a straight-to-video horror or sci-fi release. Don't get me wrong. This isn't art. It is an exploitation film, as evidenced by the fact that one of the first shots features a topless woman coming out of a shower. And it works as an exploitation film. The special effects are actually pretty good. Of course, one still has the wonder about the overall value of this film in light of the vastly superior Spielberg version. It's good to know they could pull this off, but shouldn't they have expended their efforts on something more original?

The Asylum is a company I admire in spirit if not reality. I like the idea of a company devoted to making a new horror film every month, I just wish they devoted themselves to making a good horror movie each month. Most of their films are dreck. (Still, their films tend to be better than the garbage Maverick's CreepFX division has been releasing.) I wish they would take the time and effort they put into this film into some of their other releases.

I love scifi, and I can watch some pretty bad movies, but this movie is so bad it has a permanent spot in my "in case of emergency, throw away" list. That is to say, if I am ever out of space for DVDs in my cabinets, this is one of the movies I am willing to chuck out to make room.

This is the first movie I saw C. Tomas Howell in, and I couldn't stand him. Bad bad bad actor. Everything I've seen him in since has been the same bad acting experience.

Some people on IMDb actually like this guy. So, just to make sure I wasn't half asleep when I watched this movie, I watched it again....oh man, what torture. Bad acting (did I mention that?), low budget, BORING.

Stay away. You're not missing ANYTHING AT ALL.

C. Thomas Howell's manic acting style breathes some life (but not quite enough) into this low-budget version of the great H. G. Wells novel. Like most movie versions of this film, this film is more directly derived from Orson Wells' radio broadcast than the novel. Although set in the U.S., this film retains the overall feeling of the novel as well or better than the 1950s and Spielburg versions of the film. It is not, however, entirely successful for two reasons - (1) the film proceeds at a leisurely pace until it reaches an action scene and (2) when it reaches an action scene, it doesn't pay off very well because the special effects budget was lacking. While the fits and starts of the pace does give the film a sort of literary feeling, and lends it more authenticity as a version of Wells' original work, C. Thomas Howell and the cast are expected to carry the film through these lulls with rushed character development.

Howell plays a scientist obsessed with his work and distanced a bit from his young wife and daughter. When unstoppable extraterrestrials invade, he must desperately attempt to reach them both, not knowing whether they have survived. Meeting a host of odd characters on the way, he soon finds himself at the heart of a war between to two worlds.

For the most part, the acting works, but there are a couple of really startlingly poor exceptions. Howell is excellent and commands his role very nicely. Although some of the other performances are also very good (Giles and Richter), the script does not adequately flesh out any of the supporting characters. This is particularly obvious in Jake Busey's portrayal of a sociopath military man, but only less painful in Giles' portrayal of a stereotype itinerant holy man because of Giles' obvious talent.

The cinematography is mostly good, but the thankfully under-used mediocre special effects stick out like sore thumbs.

Ultimately, the film tries harder than Spielburg's contemporaneous special effects extravaganza, but doesn't quite challenge the Spielburg film. This version is less likely to annoy fans of Wells' original work, as it more successfully delivers the overall feeling of the book than Spielburg. However, the low budget special effects, the occasional lapses into pseudoscience, and the somewhat cardboard supporting roles are a little hard to put up with. I gave the film a middling rating mainly because I think it is worth seeing as a remediation for some of what Spielburg did wrong and because of Howell's performance, but it doesn't really stand on its own.

The problem with disaster movies is the fact you always have at least one scene where a character loses it. A scene where they spout how they question what they used to believe in, how they've lost faith, and show them on the brink of giving up (if you're a side character you do give up and die.) It's the scene that's supposed to pass as deep because it talks about issues and beliefs (maybe religion), where a character bleeds their soul in front of the camera. This rendition of War of the Worlds is scene after scene after scene of people I never cared about talking the cliché talk I've seen in other (better) movies.

But through all of its dialogue heavy confessionals, it never resonates as coming from real characters with real fears and concerns. It's the archetype priest (sorry, pastor) whose faith is challenged; the archetype rabid military commander who practically foams at the mouth with his battle obsession; the archetype everyman average Joe astronomer who lives to see the happy ending.

"Scientists win every war" the commander spouts, a valid point worthy of being explored (like many points in the film, I might add), but less than a minute later the film throws it away completely. I guess an elaboration is too much to ask. So we wind up with a series of vague statements that are supposed to pass as character development and provocative themes. It's just amazing that for all its talk the movie barely matches the depths of a Michael Bay action film.

All of the dialogue the characters are forced to recite lacks any real sense of valid observation regarding the real world. Nowhere are the details of everyday life that convince me that these characters genuinely reached this point in their lives, that they came to these conclusions on their own. It all comes across as undeveloped words for unexplored ideas that a writer rushed into a screenplay and into their mouths. It offers nothing more than surface level observations about society, organized religion, governments, the military. For the price you'd pay for the rental, you can probably get a more provocative conversation going over a 1.A.M. meal at Denny's with the regulars.

Unfortunately, a low-budget independent film can't really afford to lose the audience on a plot and character level since they can't afford to give an ambitious project like War of the Worlds the epic scope the effects require. The imagination of HG Wells has proved difficult to recreate on the silver screen, and films based on his novels have a tendency of pushing the boundaries of special effects. It's no surprise this movie cannot compete with ILM's spectacular display of destruction in Spielberg's version. The film just does fine with static shots of the aftermath, featuring nicely done composite shots that have a nice old-school matte painting vibe. The more dynamic effects (the aliens, the war machines), unfortunately, clearly show the budgetary limitations.

But, you know, it's not the lesser quality of the special effects that bothered me . . . it's the changes made to the design of the war machines. The War Machines resembled giant mechanical crabs, which I have to say is the most offensive design to cross a fan of the novel. At least the 1953 movie made an effort to make the War machines look other worldly – they would seemingly float and hover as they brought their destruction from city to city – and there was a fleeting reference to the tripod nature of them. The charm of the tripod design is the fact that it is alien to earth. Most creatures have an even number of legs: we walk on two legs, dogs and cats walk on four legs, arachnids walk on eight legs – what walks on three legs? A six-legged war machine lowers the Wells vision to cheesy monster movie featuring a giant insect.

Lastly the editing bothered me with its lazy fade-to-black transitions between scenes that I already felt had no sense of timing or rhythm and just dragged on. It just felt uninspired, monotonous, and redundant. It was like reading a story that used only simple sentences that never rose above "subject-verb-period" complexity. Editing is an opportunity to accentuate the on screen events, and provide an addition level of narrative depth through juxtaposition of images (which a novel of Wells' caliber requires). But in this movie adaptation, the editing is as interesting as watching a slide show in power point. Fade to black, and fade out with this review.