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Title: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (2006)
Format: DVD
Score:
Starring: Anthony Piana, Jack Clay, James Lathrop, Darlene Sellers, and John Kaufmann (III)
Director: Timothy Hines
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Runtime: 127 minutes
Hits: 125
Favorite:

Review of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds

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Comments for H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds

• Posted on 2009-10-13
  various thoughts...
  
  - I liked when the dog came into the demolished house and the man
  was trying to coax it in. It left and the man felt so lonely.
  But then, he realized it was safe to go outside.
  
  - I liked near the end when the guy was coming down the road and
  then the walker was coming by and he crouched down and watched it
  pass in fright. It looked cool to me and it crashed right through
  a nearby home; that was a favourite scene.
  
  - the skeletons moving even though they had nothing on them was
  silly
  
  - it took forever for that thing to unscrew from the capsule
  
  - one minute it was raining; the next it was sunny (for example)
  
  - far too-much lone walking/running.
  
  - color schemes very uncomfortable
  
  - nice music score
  
  - I'll keep this because it's not available any longer and might be
  sought-after (somehow) in the future
  
  - truthfully, I didn't even know until now that the original novel
  was set in the late 1890's...so, I'll be getting a copy
  
  - Originally, this wasn't even going to be set in the same time
  period as the novel. Would it have been better then?
  
  Ultimately, it was too long but I thought it was okay watching it around the autumn season. I got mine for about $3 at a yard sale.
  
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• Posted on 2009-09-14
  Rediscovered Early Soviet sound/color/animation masterwork confounds audiences today
  
  Sometimes artists and scientists are ahead of their times. Leonardo invented the helicopter and a new kind of realism in painting, hundreds of years before we were ready for them; some consider Shakespeare to be the first "psychological realist" in drama, 300 years before Freud. These two of course have been revered through the ages, but sometimes the great innovators are forgotten and only resurrected through chance or the perseverance of a few devoted followers.
  
  Such a one was Timur Hinesikoff (ca 1892-1937?) the director of the great, forgotten (until now) early sound, color and animation masterpiece The War of the Worlds, filmed in the lost community of Nonsensk, located approximately 800 km northwest of Moscow on the shores of the river Doofka, in the summers of 1929 and 1930.
  
  Hinesikoff was apparently an ethnic Latvian, born in South Africa to Marxist radical activists attempting to start a racial revolt in the early 1890s. He seems to have spent his first 6 or 7 years there before being moved to Russia as a refugee after his parents were killed in the Boer war. It is theorized that the shocks he may have experienced during that conflict, the impact of seeing his parents taken away (and possibly, seeing his father shot) before his eyes, may have formed the genesis of his preoccupations with the English socialist writer H.G. Wells and his visions of future-warfare as an adult.
  
  Taken to live in Moscow by his Russian aunt, Hinesikoff learned Russian as a second language and always maintained a proficiency in English, later learning German and French as well. His extended family were members of the intelligentsia, and his uncle Volgon was an inventor and inveterate tinkerer, probably a genius himself who certainly helped spur young Timur on in his experiments with film, sound, and color. Timur encountered such luminaries as Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kalatozov through whom he learned the rudiments of the film language, but it would be his own inventions of the so-called "Hinesikoff Process" and "Timurkolor" that would make his name in film history.
  
  Without getting too technical, the Hinesikoff Process was an early multiplane camera system that predated Walt Disney's experiments by nearly a decade; even more novel was the inventor/filmmaker's idea to combine both animation and live action, and to film the whole in color. His Timurkolor was extremely variable in quality due to its need for optimal light conditions - the results typically show bright, almost 3-color Technicolor-type hues in bright natural light but a more artificial 2-color or sepia character in lower light conditions. He also had invented a new film type that would allow a much more seamless blend of the animated effects and the live-action footage - or so it would seem. Alas this last element was never quite perfected and thus the effects sequences in War of the Worlds at times look primitive even by 1930 standards, despite the color and the vastly superior sound.
  
  It should be noted that Hinesikoff was working off a vast fortune; despite his own parents' deeply-held Marxist/anti-capitalist beliefs and his attraction to British-style socialism, it either never occured to the filmmaker that he was only able to create his epic through the system he despised, or there was some justification he devised for it. We will likely never know; most of the director's papers seem to have vanished around the time he did, in a Stalinist purge shortly before World War II. And Hinesikoff apparently spent nearly all of his fortune acquiring the worldwide rights to Wells' bestseller and filming it.
  
  Allowances of course must be made with a film of this type, but it may help to know something of the circumstances in which it was made. Given Hinesikoff's insistance on showing the true horrors of war, and the reluctance of Stalin's government to allow him to film in or near any large city - as well as his insistence on making the film in multiple languages to reach the largest possible audience (a not-uncommon practice in the very early days of sound film), the small town of Nonsensk was chosen, and it was the only possible candidate. Nonsensk, in the late 1920s and early 1930s was an artificially created utopian city, little-known outside of the Party in the Soviet Union at the time and not at all known elsewhere; it was in fact a cosmopolitan, multilingual town made up of Marxist and Communist refugees from England, France, and the United States - mostly the latter - and it was funded as a technological experiment. Here Hinesikoff could find his actors, and build his virtual animation studio. Here also he happened to meet his composer, Jamie Hall, whose lush romantic score was reminiscent of Borodin, and his Swedish production designer Eric Nielsen, responsible for so much of the bright, unearthly and very un-English look of the piece - clearly deliberate and meant to throw the viewer off and create a sense of unease.
  
  The actors were, not surprisingly, mostly amateurs with linguistic backgrounds. As Hinesikoff was spending most of his money on his models and animation, and as this was clearly what was most important to him - the film contains an absolutely unprecedented amount of FX work, which would not be equalled in any film made anywhere until the 1990s - great dramatic ability was not always to be found or even looked for. Then, too, we must remember that the exaggerated style evident in such characters as the Writer (Anthony Piana) was more common in those immediate post-silent days - and The War of the Worlds was, in fact, the very first Soviet sound film released. More problematic to modern audiences still will be the length of the film - 3 hours - but taking a close look at what few records survive of the picture's abortive test screenings indicate that this was problematic for the early audiences as well. Hinesikoff's genius at invention and his forward-looking depiction of future-war did not, apparently, gel even in 1930 with his amateurish cast and his rather too literal screenplay.
  
  Also worth noting are the herky-jerky character of many scenes, particularly ones in which animation is involved; whether this is because they were shot silent and never quite properly synched, or because there are actual frames missing (again, not uncommon with Russian film of the period) remains unknown. In fact, for as many ways as the film points forward, and even might be considered avant-garde, in just as many it remains primitive and tied to the early sound era from which it comes - there is precious little camera movement for example, despite Hinesikoff's smaller, more mobile camera and sophisticated sound equipment.
  
  Still, some were impressed, among them the great writer of the original story himself, who soon afterwards embarked on getting many more of his ideas onto the big screen - the 1930s was a good decade for H.G. Wells indeed. And directors such as Eisenstein, Disney and Powell expressed admiration for the virtuoso effects techniques in the 10 years or so that the film remained in limited circulation; and over the succeeding years it seems that a few major filmmakers of modern times (most notably Guy Maddin and Robbie Moffat) have managed to bask in it's novelty as well. Somehow, though, by 1940 it had vanished out of general circulation, and so it remained for 65 years until the director's great-grandson, the American Timothy Hines, brought it back to life in this stunning DVD.
  
  Some cynics have actually suggested, absent proper documentation either on the disc or in any proper university or film archives, that this whole project is in fact a hoax - that there never was a Hinesikoff, that all of what I have just written was in fact made up by film scholars to discredit Mr. Hines, who unfortunately seems to believe that this is, in fact, his own work. While feeling quite sorry for Mr. Hines in his clearly problematic state, I think it quite obvious that no one, sane or not, could actually have made such a film as this in all seriousness in 2005. As a bold experiment with new technology, far ahead of its time in the between-war years, this is an extraordinary achievement; but as a film made 28 years after Star Wars? No one could make up a joke so bad as that.
  
  
  
  
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• Posted on 2008-12-27
  not bad
  
  This was and interesting spin and movie for good price i paid. I don't feel ripped off. I am satisfied.
  
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• Posted on 2008-06-30
  What a disappointment!
  
  I hated the 2005 film with Tom Cruise: it bore so little resemblance to the novel, it shouldn't have been called "War of the Worlds." (Forbidden Planet wasn't called The Tempest, even though it says it was inspired by it.) I liked the 1953 George Pal film, although it lacked a crucial image that scared me wonderfully at age 10, when I first read the book: the three-legged war machines. (The George Pal version is embarrassing to watch today too: the leading lady's main job is evidently to scream at the Martians.) The Orson Welles radio version is my favorite telling of the story, even better than the novel: it's no wonder many people thought it was a real news report.
  
  I therefore welcomed the idea of this film, as a faithful adaptation set in the 1890s. I enjoyed the scenes of this in Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos: I long thought it was too bad there wasn't a full-length feature film like this that told the whole story. I don't mind cheap special effects, if a film is fun to watch: indeed, sometimes bad special effects can make a film more fun to watch, as in some old Doctor Who episodes or Godzilla movies. IMO, the only real sin a film can commit is to be boring.
  
  This film was excruciatingly boring. A competent film editor could have reduced it to half its thee-hour length, and should have. Again, I didn't so much mind the over-use of green-screen techniques (for example, for nearly all the scenes riding in carriages): when Oberon waves his hand and says "I am invisible" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, I can see that he's invisible. This film was 90-95% faithful to the original (the author's making his way into a deserted London at the end is cut), but that might not have been advisable: the whole sub-plot of the writer's brother and the two ladies he befriends could have been cut, as it was little more than a distraction, even in the book.
  
  What was inexcusable was how much time I had to spend twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the next scene, in practically every scene of the film. They could easily have cut many of the less-effective special effects, for example the last shot of the first meteor seen in flight, the only one in which one can see it in detail. And why, oh why, do we have to see a human squashed underfoot by a Martian war machine TWICE?!?
  
  It portended badly literally from the very beginning, with the opening narration: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us." I still get a chill whenever I listen to Orson Welles read that, even though I've listened to my CD of the radio show hundreds of times; the actor who read it on Cosmos delivered it well, too. When the guy who read that in this film read it, it was flat and lifeless: Bill Gates could have delivered these lines more effectively.
  
  Furthermore, if the audience must be subjected to having to stare at actors for long periods of time, the actors really ought to convey emotion convincingly, or in other words, act. Part of the fault here was the direction: but then, this was so bad, I couldn't discern much of the dialog, even though I knew what they were about to say because I re-read the novel recently. The costumes were OK, except for the leading man's clearly fake mustache: Monty Python did fake mustaches better than that.
  
  That's three hours of my life I'll never get back. This is one of the few DVDs I have actually thrown in the garbage: I don't want to risk subjecting anyone else to this.
  
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• Posted on 2008-02-18
  don't waste your time or money!
  
  This movie will give "Plan Nine from Outer Space" a run for worst movie ever made. There is truly nothing redeeming about this. Please, take my word for it. I know how it feels to want something new from this great story, but this is NOT it.
  
  I would give you specifics but the fact is I would have to recount the entire movie. The acting is terrible, the cinematography would not pass a college course, and the interpretation of the original material is by far the worst.
  
  It took WEEKS for me to get through the whole film. I literally had to stop over and over because I just couldn't take it! When I eventually did finish I put the CD away and swore I would never inflict such pain on myself again. If I could give this no stars, I would.
  
  
  
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