The Tripods are coming! The Tripods are Coming!

[akashiver]

Saw WOTW (the real one) last night. Enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

What I really liked: A few years ago, M. Night Shamylan talked about making a one-family's-pov-of-invasion movie with "Signs," but while there are some great scenes in that film, there was also a lot that didn't work for me. I enjoyed the intensity of WOTW's refugee/siege scenes far more, I think because it actually took itself seriously as a "war" movie. I particlarly liked the first-night-in-the-basement scene, with the family cowering away from the sound and lights outside. Usually in a summer blockbuster a character will peek outside, so that the CGI staff can deliver the goods. Instead we get a scene straight out of Blitz movies, with a family (sensibly) staying away from the windows and hoping against hope that whatever is going on outside will miss their house.

What I didn't like: WOTW's ending is a classic; sure, its a deus-ex-machina, but in a movie about imperial arrogance, it provides the perfect send-off. It's hard to pull off for modern audiences, but it's damn-near-impossible if you insist the martians have already visited earth and buried spacecraft there. They're doomed from the moment they land, get it?! Stupid, stupid hollywood rat creatures!

Other things I don't like: suicidally heroic people should die. Boston should be wiped out. We should not have to sit through a scene in which American soldiers prove their big bad guns can defend us all, providing the Martians start playing fair.

Everything else I liked. My companion, however, summed up a lot of what I liked from the film with, "that was the beginning and end of WOTW sandwiched around John Christopher's Tripod series." Part of my disappointment with the ending stemmed from the fact I really, really wanted it to end with the Martians taking over, so that we could zoom forward a few hundred years in the future and do The White Mountains. But that's the problem with Hollywood - it's either apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, never both. What the hell's up with that?
;)

Comments

[drydem.livejournal.com]

I loved those books.

[bneuensc.livejournal.com]

We should not have to sit through a scene in which American soldiers prove their big bad guns can defend us all, providing the Martians start playing fair.

See, I interpreted that moment rather differently. To me, it was, "hey, look, we can pretend we're accomplishing something by taking down a creature that would have been dead soon anyway!" Yeah, they probably saved the lives of a few of the people scurrying around at that moment, but in the longer run, it's like a hunter walking up and stabbing a mastodon while said mastodon is gasping out its last breaths.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Well, that's more or less how I saw it. I figured the scene didn't really need to be there - the aliens are dead, we've got that already -- so why have a scene of US soldiers finally being able to take down an already dead Tripod? I figured some Hollywood suit had looked at the script that that point and demanded a traditional Uplifting Moment (tm) in which the big bad aliens really get it. (I imagine you've read books like Goldman's biography, so you know the kind of reasoning I mean: "the audience hates character x, so we can't just have x die, we need to shoot him falling off a building from 3 different angles...) And yeah, given the "now our weapons work" involvement of the US Military after the hopelessness of the earlier engagements (which had the son trying to "enlist" at every opportunity), and I saw it as serving ideological purposes as well.

I just looked up the finale of Wells' novel, and here's the original version of the "martians snuff it" scene: "An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the road..." So black birds signal the death of the martians, ala the movie, but there are no soldiers and no final shootout. It makes me wonder if the movie's "ex machina" ending would have worked better if Cruise had stumbled on the dead martians by himself, w/ no explanation, as in the book.