[Caution: spoilers]
I’ll be honest right from the outset – I’ve never read the original novel. It’s one of my keenest reading regrets, and one I do hope to correct soon. However, through the fantastic Jeff Wayne musical version and the solid Spielberg version – more faithful than many realise, Cruise & modern setting aside – I’m pretty familiar with the tone, the themes, the main story beats.
When I heard the BBC were making a big-budget version set in the novel’s time, I was pretty excited, as it’s been a quiet desire of mine for quite a while. I therefore went into it with fairly high hopes.
For most of the first episode those hopes were by and large fulfilled: beautifully filmed, well acted with solid dialogue, nice atmosphere and build of tension, some lovely little moments – chief astronomer touches the sphere, his hand print remains, and so does his reflection, even as he steps away – and good music. Yes, the changes made – sphere instead of cylinder, that rises and spins instead of slowly unscrewing, and emits some kind of invisible heat pulses rather than the rays – were bemusing, but I was willing to roll with it. Then the fighting machine rose from the ground, albeit unseen, with zero explanation, and I started to waver just a little.
The biggest issue, though, were abstract moments of redness, dust, weeds and crystals, that eventually resolved into flash-forwards, to the time after the invasion, after the Martians had died, which did little more than confuse. They just didn’t seem to serve a purpose. But, the fighting machine was decent enough, with an interesting insectoid touch to the movement, and they seemed to be laying in solid character work, so I was still willing to keep watching.
On reflection, there was more of concern in the first episode, not least the strange disconnect between the tripods and the destruction they caused, mainly that you never saw how they caused it. It just happened, while they loomed and lurked, occasionally beaming searchlights. It was also the start of a strange thread that I’ll detail more later.
The second episode was where things really started to falter. The flash-forwards became a lot more pronounced, and still didn’t make sense. They drained most of the tension, confused the storyline, and weighed down the pacing, having such a negative effect you wonder why they were thought a good idea in the first place. All the while, things are drifting ever further from Wells; there are echoes of famous characters – the soldier, the priest – and moments – a beach sequence mildly reminiscent of the Thunderchild set piece – but nothing more.
The London attack is confined to a building crumbling, a tripod looming, black smoke billowing, running along passages, and a pretty unsubtle imperialist minister being consumed and seemingly turned by the fog, if only for both to never reappear. This is where the narrative really starts to fray, threads going nowhere, the core drive fading away. In fact, it becomes clear there never really was a core drive.
Episode three, as a result, is almost entirely leaden, gloomy, paceless and directionless. It’s basically boiled all its initial promise down to the same listless bleakness as the ABC Murders adaptation from last year. The scenes of creeping around the house, where Martians are lurking are admittedly pretty effective…until you actually see a Martian.
It probably seemed a neat touch to have them be tripods, like their fighting machines, but they’re so simplistically designed – bags of flesh with three long, tapering, pointed limbs – they just don’t work. How do they build and operate their machines? They also seem able to do whatever the script needs them to, regardless of whether it actually makes sense. Stand on just two legs without toppling over? Fine. Lurk in the corner of wall and ceiling, somehow unnoticed by the four remaining humans, dropping down at exactly the right moment to kill a young girl who’d turned back to collect a teddy bear? Go right ahead.
Beyond the obvious issues with that moment – where did the Martian come from, how was it up there, how long had it been there, how had no-one noticed? – it’s also the worst example of that thread I mentioned earlier. It’s two-fold: one, random deaths of random people, often ones not normally killed in such things, like a family dog, an elderly lady, and the child described above, and a recurrent motif of people leaving others behind, either after being strenuously begged to, or while being begged not to. There are also a couple of instances of attempts to help people – an unseen, crying baby, the aforementioned minister, the old lady – that either fail, or are aborted. It’s inconsistent, seems to have no point or purpose, and ultimately comes across as almost nihilistic, especially when you consider that the teddy that caused the girl’s death was given to her as a source of comfort. It certainly robs George’s final sacrifice of what weight the muddled plot hadn’t already removed.
I don’t agree with those insisting the BBC is pushing a ‘PC’ or ‘woke’ agenda. I believe it’s a stale relic trying to appear ‘down with the kids’, in touch with modern sensibilities, and failing miserably. In this instance, that means a greatly expanded female character that ultimately serves no purpose, and a cleverly threaded allegory reduced to painful bluntness – there’s even a speech expounding it, at one point. It’s hamfisted and heavy-handed.
Ultimately, I struggle to understand what they were trying to achieve here. In fact, I honestly wonder if even they knew what they wanted to achieve. As a result, what could have been a thrilling, faithful adaptation ends up a muddled, rudderless, dispiriting, frustrating waste of a golden opportunity. It could, and should, have been so much better.
Foxy Musings 