ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Here's a odd trailer that includes no actual scenes from the movie, and which quotes the opening of the Wells novel. Curious, eh?
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___________ War of the Worlds (2005) trailer


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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For those who don't like Tom Cruise (a sentiment I don't share), look at this IMDB trivia item.
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While filming nearby, Tom Cruise, along with a twenty-member entourage including Steven Spielberg, visited a Lexington, Virginia Dairy Queen. Cruise saw a jar on the counter with a photo of Ashley Flint and her story. Flint had been in a go-cart accident a few months earlier, leaving her family with a mountain of hospital bills. Cruise put $5,000 cash into the jar.
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For those who might think that Steven Spielberg doesn't have a sense of humor (although I'm sure no one does), here's a funny item from IMDB.
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During the filming of the underwater scenes (where the ferry capsizes), director Steven Spielberg played a prank on Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning by playing the dramatic music from Jaws (1975) (also one of Spielberg's films) through the massive underwater speakers on the sound stage.
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Ever wonder what it's like to be Steven Spielberg and juggle great ideas for your next project? If so, ponder this item.
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Steven Spielberg owns one of the last copies of the Orson Welles radio script, which he purchased at an auction. The director wanted to make the film years ago, but decided against it when Independence Day (1996) was released. However, the director wanted to work with Tom Cruise again after Minority Report (2002) and picked War of the Worlds (2005) as their next project.
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Ever wonder where Spielberg got all those authentic-looking pieces of the crashed 747? Well, it wasn't easy!
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An actual out-of-use Boeing 747 was bought to be used as the crashed plane.
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This IMDB item is intriguing! I really want the find the trailer that includes this unused scene from the movie!
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Shots that were seen in the trailer were not in the finished theatrical release. The most notable of these is named "camelot" for its ethereal lighting design where Robbie, Ray and Rachel encounter a roving battalion of tripods in a deserted Massachusetts neighborhood. They watch from behind a SUV as a tripod pulls people out of a building with its tentacles.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

There were many elements of this version that I disliked, especialy the "underground for thousands of years" idea for the invasion. It was unclear and confusing. I would have preferred the cylinder bombardment from a staging base on Mars instead.

Many scenes were quite good, like the basement encounter and the scenes of Cruise rescuing his daughter from the tripod.

I still wish for a good retelling of the story from a Victorian perspective.

By the way, there WAS a special TV version that was shown only in Britain a few years ago titled THE GREAT MARTIAN WAR. It used film from WWone combined with new effects to be a pseudo-documentary. I've been looking for the whole thing but have only found snippets on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvFjetZ5lQ

[orzel-w]

[Gord Green]

Thank you!

I did find a copy of this, but it's a very cut down (shows only the middle of the screen!) on youtube :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq_YrXmx9Gw

And the sound is kind of funky!

ALTHOUGH, a great animated version of Jeff Wayne's full epic is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMix0dsXOzs

Check it out!

[Custer]

Darn, the animated version video isn't available in Britain... isn't there a fairly simple way to avoid regional YouTube bans like that...?

I must confess that I haven't yet watched the Tom Cruise movie; my copy is still in its cellophane wrapper. The idea of aliens, or their equipment, buried underground sounds rather Quatermass to me... a little check at Wikipedia points me towards "Quatermass and the Pit." Such a brutal change to the plot of the H.G. Wells novel makes one wonder why they used its name - mainly because it's a name we all know, I guess. And Martian: Impossible would have sounded silly, right?

[Bud Brewster]

[Robert (Butch) Day]

Gene Barry, Ann Robinson. Les Tremayne and Ray Bradbury at the 2003 50th anniversary party:



And Gene and Ann in the movie:



Ever wonder why there are ALWAYS cats foraging around in these disasters?



They know how to protect themselves from aggressors!
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Common Sense ISN'T Common

[Eadie]

Alien invaders know about and are afraid of CAT SCRATCH FEVER??????

[alltare]

Has anyone else noticed that the crashed airliner scene in WOW is almost a direct ripoff of the crashed airliner scene in The Quiet Earth (1985)?

[Eadie]

A fantastic movie! But we don't seem to have a thread on it.
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Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.

[Bud Brewster]

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Here's a trailer made by Shooting Star Film Productions which is described on YouTube in the text below. Notice that the tripod design is pretty much the same as those in War of the Worlds (2005).
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Hi everyone, a lot of people are saying “it's been 3 years!” No it hasn’t... well it has, but two years had passed before we even decided to start on a second trailer.

When we made this trailer that's all it was, it was just a trailer. There was never any intention for it to be anything more, but when we made it a lot of ideas came out of that process and we knew the copyright was about to expire, so about one year ago we decided to put all of our ideas down and see what we could do with it. It became evident that the best format for us would be the mini series and that's the path we are pursuing.

_____________ The War of the Worlds Trailer 1


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bogmeister]

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____________ War of the Worlds (2005) trailer


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A new version of the H.G. Wells classic sf novel, preceded by the 1953 version. This was by the team of Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Cruise, who had already teamed up before for Minority Report (2002).

Cruise plays a working stiff in this one, with a hint of irresponsibility and more than a sign of wise-assery. He has an ex-wife (Miranda Otto) and two kids who live with the ex's new husband, who is rich.

The kids, a rebellious teen son (Justin Chatwin) and a younger daughter (Dakota Fanning), are brought over to stay the weekend in Cruise's working class neighborhood at the start of the film.

The feeling Spielberg conveys in the first few minutes is that this really is just another typical day, as seen from the perspective of Tom Cruise's character and his kids (where it will remain for the entire film). There's nothing ominous in the air (even the TV blips of strange weather project nothing bad). It's a day like last week and it will end as just another day. There's that sameness to everything which all of the audience can relate to. Day after day, week after week, even year after year — nothing to really get excited about.

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When it shifts, it's a jolt.

It starts with that weird lightning, pauses for a few minutes to build more tension, and then escalates to Hell on Earth within a few more. If one were to describe one of those alien tripod machines moving past a couple of blocks away, blasting with it's death beam, it would probably elicit a laugh from listeners, but there's nothing funny about how it's depicted, to Spielberg's credit.

He'd learned his craft in this regard by the time of Saving Private Ryan's beach scene.

When Cruise peers around the corner, a small, almost mouse-like figure, a lucky survivor of the initial onslaught, all you feel is his fear, his shock, his helplessness. The tripods even produce a bizarre musical sound, a deadly counterpoint to the notes we heard in Close Encounters produced by Spielberg's friendly aliens.

Here, the aliens are sounding the death-knell of the human race. I must confess I'm not sure this intensity comes across so well on a small TV screen. I saw this in a theater and they turn up the sound so high, a person walking to his car across the screen could here it.

The weakness to the story are the kids — the daughter tends to scream or yell unconvincingly, while the son is the cliche, accusing Cruise of being a rotten father even as the world collapses around them. His behavior in the final act is baffling & inexplicable ("I need to see this . . . " — snapped into irrationality?).

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So you're with Cruise and his kids the rest of the film. All his neighbors are dead; his other relatives in other cities? Maybe. You don't know. Any minute now, he and his kids may be joining the hundreds dead. No, must be thousands. Millions? No, it's too insane, too dreadful!

The first act, ending with Cruise walking back to his house, numb and covered in the dust of people, and then managing to escape in the only working vehicle, is the best sequence. Spielberg can't really top it.

But the next few scenes all come pretty close in a series of heart-stoppers.

The one extended scene where Spielberg, Cruise, the writer, and all the participants were at a loss was being holed up with Tim Robbins. It just didn't work, and it slowed the picture down.

And the ending? The undoing of the aliens followed along the same lines of the original climax of H.G.Wells' novel and the '53 film version. The filmmakers simply couldn't find a way to trump Wells (one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time) and why should they? The alternative is the aliens win, mankind is dead — that's another film (here, we stop at about a billion dead).

But I didn't agree with Spielberg's reverting to his usual safety net and letting the audience off the hook by miraculously saving the son (ok, there's always a chance he could have survived, but this was a set-up). This was a war, perhaps the most terrible war, and people don't just pop up without a scratch after something like this, unless it's a, well, a Spielberg-type movie.

Spielberg, even when you got it — for 90% of the film — you lose it in the end. Now let's all hug each other and wish away any more possible alien attacks. Sigh.

Trivia of the Worlds: Narration at the start and end by Morgan Freeman — some viewers mistook Freeman for being the voice of God, but he isn't. He's probably a survivor of the war who recounts the tale years later. Cameos by the stars of the original, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, as the grandparents at the end of the film. A couple of low budget direct-to-video versions of this Wells story were released in the same year.

_______ War of the Worlds Tripod Invasion


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______________ War of the Worlds - No Shield


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BoG's Score: 7 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Bud Brewster]