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This is the Fusion Patrol podcast.
Each week, we look at a different science fiction TV episode or movie
and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life.
Welcome to the discussion.
A question the writer of this adaptation no doubt asked himself many a time, but like him, let's be precursory and get it over with so we can move on to what we really want to say.
Martians come to Earth and land on Horsal Common, where they cross paths with a pair of cohabitating unmarried fornicating socialists and also the secretary of the Ministry of War, who happens to be the estranged brother of one of the aforementioned cohabitating unmarried fornicating socialists.
They get separated, they travel, they come back together,
and travel some more as the Martian colonial war machine
tramples the might of the British Empire under its spiky boots.
Then the truth comes out.
The Martians are eating humans, but it gives them a tummy ache, and they die.
But not before everyone in our largely uninteresting band of fellow travelers is killed and eaten.
Except for Amy and her unborn child, George Jr.
Ears in the future, Amy roams the wastelands of an earth turned into a Martian surrogate.
It is a world of infertile red earth, Martian weeds, red skies, and a sun that is mysteriously
millions of miles further distant than it should be. Amy and her son are searching for her missing
husband. And when I say husband, I actually mean her cohabitating unmarried fornicating socialist
partner, who's actually been dead the entire time and she's known it all along, but her sad,
pathetic existence has no point but to keep looking. When word comes through the grapevine
that her husband has been found and is returning, she dares hope despite the fact that she knows him
to be dead for years. It turns out it's Ogilvy, a minor character from the early part of the story
who for probably plot and economic reasons is both the chemist that this ruined world needs right now
and the astronomer that discovered the Martian launches and the first Martian landing. The Earth
is dying. George Jr. is dying. The village is dying. Babies aren't happening. Crops won't grow
except in graveyards, and the remnants of humanity are falling into jingoistic, patriotic, and
religious mindsets to explain the world around them. But Amy's got an idea. Maybe it's the typhoid
that killed the Martians, and maybe old Gulli can make a serum, which they can use as a Martian
weed killer, which he does, and it works. But the village leader won't hear of such nonsense. That's
Tommy defeated the aliens.
That night, she smashes it all up,
but then sees a green plant and gets religion.
The end of the BBC's adaptation
of something vaguely associated with the world.
I'm going to start this with a question.
What is the worst episode of Doctor Who ever produced,
in your opinion?
Probably the web planet.
Well, the web planet.
I know what you're gunning for.
You know where I'm going, though, don't you?
Kill the freaking moon.
Absolutely.
I don't know that it is the worst episode of Doctor Who ever written,
but it's got to be in the bottom three,
along with In the Forest of the Night and possibly Twin Dilemma.
I can...
I don't know.
So anyway, we have this War of the Worlds,
which, why did they do this?
I mean did you like it I guess I guess I should preface this by saying
where I'm coming from on War of the Worlds because I get the impression that you're quite an
aficionado are you going to tell me you've never heard of war read or seen I'm not saying I've
never heard of War of the Worlds I have in fact heard of War of the Worlds and I could probably
just about hum along to parts of the Jeff Wayne album but beyond that I know that there are some
tripods in it I haven't actually read it I haven't incredibly I haven't seen or heard any other
adaptations there was a film of it it seems like only the other day but I looked it up and it turns
out to be over a decade ago the uh there was a Sherwood Studios audio adaptation two years ago
Big Finish did an adaptation one year ago Fox have done an adaptation this year
as well as the BBC doing this and this is the one that I seem to have ended up watching
okay
okay well then then we well what of my points okay but that didn't answer the question did you enjoy
this then i'm sorry did it did i enjoy this this was a this was a pretty painful thing to watch i
thought i mean i i knew all the way through because it's it's it's written by the guy who
wrote kill the moon i knew that you would be gunning for the writer in this and because i like
because because i i well i was going to say i like the zygon inversion slash invasion and the you
You know, the kind of themes of colonialism and the effects of war and refugees and so forth,
probably closer in that than they are to this.
I was actually, through most of this, I was much more offended by the appalling, appalling direction.
Oh, it's terrible.
And the casting, because this is such a waste.
I mean, I've no idea who Eleanor Tomlinson is, I'm afraid.
I've not seen her in anything else.
And maybe she's terrific.
But I know for a fact that Rafe Spall is terrific.
They cast him in the kind of straight chiseled-jawed lead role.
I mean, they got him and Rupert Graves the wrong way around.
That was a stupid mistake.
Yes, they did.
And, yeah, the kind of endless, ponderous shots of Amy looking,
I don't know what.
I mean, I wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to be registering at times.
Good point.
And the unsupply grading.
Arbitrary slow motion.
Yeah.
Yeah, because it did feel a bit kind of neither fish nor fowl in terms of
They obviously decided, and my understanding,
I've listed a few recent adaptations of it.
The famous adaptation of which I'm aware is the 1938 radio adaptation.
But I think the film in the 50s as well as the film in the last 10 years,
we were all set in the present day.
But this has gone back almost to when it was written,
but apparently not quite.
And it's got that, in the way it's shot,
it's got that kind of chocolate boxy look of a period piece.
Yeah.
And, you know, all the kind of Red Planet stuff
is painfully obvious how studio bound it all is.
And yet it's supposed to be this kind of super duper visual spectacle
that we're all tuning in to watch the special effects for.
Yeah.
Yeah, I did not think much of the directorial choices in this episode.
And I think some of them are downright deceptive in an unfair way.
And I alluded to one of them.
When we see all those first shots of the red, dusty world,
we keep getting a shot of a sun that is way too far away from the Earth.
That is a sun about the size you'd see it from Mars.
And it's intended for you to believe that when it is not Mars, it's Earth.
There's no explanation of that.
That's just the director wanted to do that to fool the audience.
There's a lot in this story that's about fooling the audience for stuff that is not drama or not interesting for that matter.
So if you know enough about War of the Worlds to know that it ends with the aliens dying.
We did nothing.
That's the end.
The aliens died of a bug, the cold.
Who knows?
We don't even know.
It's not about eating flesh or anything like that.
It's they came here.
They got a cold.
They died.
They had no resistance.
They died.
End of story, right?
We get out of it.
There is no post-apocalyptic nightmare.
And I think that what happened when they sat down to do this is they said, there is war of the worlds.
And that's what people want to see because, you know, it's got name appeal and it's got tripods and it's got aliens.
But that's not the story I want to tell.
So I'm going to have to tell a kind of fluff through it, spending most of my time on a story nobody cares about, about George and Amy at all.
and their their domestic problems and his divorce and his estrangement from his brother and all of
that but i was i was i was ready to care about a bit of kitchen sink faff as you put it i i could
have coped with that if it hadn't been if it hadn't been so i mean they just didn't commit to it
it was like it was just going through the motions of it there's literally a line where
George says he's in the middle of he's in the middle of um some explanation about what's been
going on to him said you know about how the second one's landed at Byfleet and he says I have to tell
you something I met my wife yesterday it's like she won't give us a divorce are we being selfish
this is literally just here to to kind of give you give an excuse of why the you know why the
full explanations or pad it out or yeah yes and and but but where i was going with that was that
i don't think that i mean everyone
i i now have to clarify that comment possibly not you uh but everyone knows that war of the
worlds ends with the aliens dying not of mankind's involvement but of because of a freak accident we'd
have been wiped out if it hadn't been for just dumb luck and that's that's the story that's it's
it's as famous an ending as you know soylent green is people or that film with bruce willis
where he's dead or whatever it is everyone stop stop you're gonna hit something i don't know
that was as many i was gonna go but you know they they everyone knows that there's no suspense
in that. We know where this story has to go. And it ends there. And then it doesn't, because
what they wanted to tell us was the story about War of the Worlds is about colonialism. And I think
what Harness wanted to tell us was about post-colonialism and post-industrialism. He didn't
want to talk about how we go in and we kill the natives. He wanted to talk about how we go in and
after we've killed the natives, we built all the trains and polluted their jungles and stuff.
And, okay, that's a different story. Tell that story.
There are books out there, I've read them, that people picked up post-H.G. Wells' War of the World and said,
here's what happened after the invasion, or of interest or not interest.
Why not do that? That's the story he really wanted to tell.
And the whole bit about George being dead, you know, throughout the whole thing, we're throughout the whole bit where we're in the future,
And this story is not told in the linear logical order that I laid it out.
It's told interspersed.
And the whole time in the red planet Earth, Amy is searching for George.
Amy's searching for George.
I haven't seen him since the thing.
And I'm searching for George.
And then when we get to the end of it, she knew he was dead all along.
If not dead from typhoid, then dead from a Martian sticking him in the chest.
She knew that.
That was completely designed to fool the audience into having some false sense of, oh, what's going to happen?
Are they going to escape and be happily reunited? No.
Well, that would all be very well if when the revelation came that George was dead, anyone actually cared about it, which I doubt, sincerely.
No.
I mean, I think you make an excellent point there.
The only thing is that if you took away the kind of post-industrial, post-colonialist story from this,
you'd probably be left with about an hour and a half still of the story of the invasion itself.
And so I think it might not be that it was the story he wanted to tell,
but it might be that he couldn't find a way, he couldn't find sufficient interest himself
in the events of the book to get three hours out of it.
And in fairness, a lot of adaptations are a lot shorter than that.
To be fair, the book War of the Worlds, like many H.G. Wells books,
has a completely unnamed protagonist who is telling this from a first-person narrative.
And apart from the fact that he has a wife that he's trying to get back to,
We don't need to know anything about this fellow, except he lives somewhere near Horsal Common.
And so a lot of times when they come into adapt War of the Worlds, they can't do that.
They have to create characters.
And I have recently heard the Big Finish adaptation, which was quite good and was set back in the time of the thing.
And they had to create basically a series of characters who had to go through the various events and, you know, bring in a female to have some parody there.
And, you know, all of the things that you have to do in a modern adaptation like they've done here.
But for a show that does not concentrate on the actual War of the Worlds that much or doesn't seem interested in the War of the Worlds that much.
It's 16 minutes before they even bother to drop a Martian on the planet.
So if they cut out the post-apocalyptic stuff, then they would still, however much time they had left, they could still cut 50% of that for the, well, let's pick out the wallpaper for the baby's nursery.
And let's talk about the wife.
Although there are some themes there that may be intentional.
But yeah, it just feels like you didn't want to be doing this.
You wanted to do something else.
And they said, now, come on, man.
We've got to have a war of the worlds.
Everybody's got one.
We need one too.
I don't know.
So if you're wondering about where Peter Harness came up with the characters then,
this chap who was known by everyone as George,
who married his first cousin,
but ended up leaving her for a woman called Amy.
It usually is H.G. Wells.
Indeed.
They usually pattern this character after H.G. Wells.
That's a very common thing they do in adaptations of Wells' stuff.
I think I've seen it in The Time Machine.
I think I've seen it in a couple...
It's just a thing that the writers do
because it's first person and it's H.G. Wells.
But yeah, there is definitely some H.G. Wells there,
who was a huge advocate of free love and a socialist
and all of those things that this character was.
Except, of course, H.G. Wells didn't die in the Martian invasion.
But yeah, it's just...
I've seen an adaptation of H.G. Wells' life
that was far more interesting than this.
And I think it was done by the BBC.
I've seen paint drying.
No, I won't get it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yes, I was out to defend Peter Harness right up until the end, actually,
in terms of saying he wasn't the problem with this.
It was the speech about the happy but poor brown people that did it for me.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that was pretty bad.
And that ending.
I mean, so was that her?
I don't even understand what happened there at the end.
So we had the-
No idea.
First off, I think those little glass things that she smashed,
are those like mini greenhouses?
Is that a thing they do?
They're cloches, cloches.
I've never heard of that before.
Is it like to protect a plant in bad weather or something?
Well, it's to protect a plant from frost normally.
There was no sign of frost because we don't understand what the post-invasion weather system is like.
I would recommend using the tops of lemonade bottles, plastic lemonade bottles.
But I think they probably didn't have those in Edwardian times.
And probably post-Edwardian times because I imagine the king got killed.
So it's a whole new area.
Yes, he quite possibly may have done it.
Yeah.
Or eaten.
Well, and then that would be killed as well.
But so she goes and she tells a story about the happy brown people where she used to come from and how they were poor, but they were happy and had bright colors and did a lot of dancing and stuff, which is all very.
And then she goes up and smashes the galoshes or the galoshes or things, which is she saying she's trying to destroy our world because she's found the way to solve the problem.
But now she's going to wreck it because we don't deserve.
Is this that whole we don't deserve to live nonsense?
and then and then she sees the little green plant the happy little green plant
and suddenly she's looking to the heavens that seem to part for her with a light in the sky it's
like well is that is it is she having a god moment there i don't have no idea what's going on there
i don't know why she went out and smashed the things but i think it was supposed to be a
hopeful ending probably because you know her potatoes had sprouted and stuff was that a
potato well it was potato tomatoes probably something in the nightshade i don't know i
would believe that you could identify a potato by its leaves i'm not i could not but i i know you
have more of a garden thumb than i do but i just i just thought of it frankly now that you mentioned
it probably was some sort of a food crop i was just thinking it was something they'd planted
to see if it would grow.
It does make perfect sense that it would be food.
And potatoes would make a very good choice.
In fact, that's what you do on Mars
if you're stranded up there with Matt Damon.
You plant potatoes.
Yes, you plant potatoes.
You're right, it was probably potatoes.
But it was probably the most egregious example
of amy doing something that was just completely inexplicable i don't know if we were meant to
have some kind of self question oneself about what the deep meaning of this but i really wasn't
having i wasn't having this thing setting me homework at the end of three hours of living
through it and there were there were other instances where it just seemed like he hadn't
he hadn't bothered to write in anything about her character. As you say, this is not really,
the narrator in the book has a wife. There is nothing much for the actress here to go on.
So there are some moments where you would think she is developing in terms of her reaction and
therefore our our kind of understanding of how humans might people might react in situations
where they are being invaded by colonists who are massively massively more technologically
advanced than they are and one such key one is where she and Rupert Graves are running away from
the black stuff and Nicholas Lepervo's down the end of the alleyway and they start shutting the
doors yep and amy says no no don't open them again and and uh brother frederick says i you
know i can't possibly live with myself if i don't and he opens the door and lets nicholas leprevaux
whoever he's supposed to be the minister of war the minister of whatever and there's a and there's
a moment there where so and in and in fact both amy and frederick are are unaffected by the gas
cloud it doesn't the opening the door costs them nothing it transpires and there's a moment there
where it actually appears that nicholas perot has had survived and clearly he would not have done
had he been shut outside i want to know how amy feels about that okay now wait a minute wait a
minute wait wait wait wait wait this is one of the themes that comes up in this thing over and over
and over again uh george tries to save the baby but ultimately has to leave the baby behind
amy has to leave george on the horse and there's that whole scene with frederick was like well
when he told you to leave what did you do did you actually leave like well well yeah i i did
then there's she leaves she lets george go out and kill himself um she leaves the guy behind in the
george leaves the guy behind in the pond yes um i mean this this comes up uh i'm sure they left
some people behind on the beach the old lady in the house i mean for crying out loud but i was
a theme in the story with george with george it's less of a it it's a theme with amy it's a development
with amy i think i mean i take your point about it it occurs george it happens to george a couple
of times george looks pretty anguished about it and in fact when he has to leave the baby
he you know you there's the dialogue with the soldier he's with at the time and then he's
talking about it with amy afterwards it clearly has a big impact on him the there are there are
there are there's a journey i think that amy is supposed to be going on here where she gets more
and more kind of survival minded i you know another instance of it is where where she finds
the water in the vase and says you know we're not giving or um rupert grave says we're not giving
any to mrs what's her face and she thinks about it for a minute and then she just says well don't
tell george because he'll want to he's a nice person you know he's a nice person exactly now
i now i'm not she won't leave the maid remember the dead maid yeah that's true that that's true
that's true so that's a good example of where she has come from where she has come from um i think
leaving i think leaving leaving george when she's on the horse is a very difficult one for me to see
as being in any way pivotable because it's so utterly utterly contrived you know it's like yeah
get get on the horse um so where are we going uh the admiralty okay and if we get split up let's
both go to the Admiralty.
Okay, that seems a bit like unnecessary,
given you've just said we're going to the Admiralty
and that would be a reasonable assumption,
but whatever, better safe than sorry.
And oh, look, there's Benji or Benny
or whatever he's called the dog.
Let's leap off and standing sort of 20 feet apart
over a pile of rubble that's, you know,
that horse could have jumped over.
Suddenly it's like, right, you head off to the Admiralty
and I'll stare out this Martian tripod.
And speaking of piles of rubble,
the pile of rubble that George found himself under,
did you notice it was all like wood?
It was all just sticks of lumber,
no bricks or anything like that.
All the buildings and everything are wrecked piles of rubble,
brick and stone.
And he is somehow under a completely unconvincing pile of lumber that's been piled up neatly on top of him, practically.
It was terrible.
And it was as unconvincing as the thing that they couldn't have climbed over to get on the horse to escape.
It was terrible.
Terrible, terrible.
Yeah.
I'm not super impressed with this story.
The other theme that they had going on in this, which I wish I'd written down.
I do have it written down here somewhere.
I just don't.
Oh, it's the whole stay and do the proper thing.
The wife.
It's like, well, if you do the right thing and buy us, you know, and the brother has
a couple of examples of saying that and you know it's all very stereotypical british upper class
stiff upper lip lord peter whimsy kind of kind of stuff and of course in the end that's exactly
what george does oh another example is when they make him do it you're gonna volunteer we're looking
for volunteers uh no i gotta find my wife yeah you're gonna volunteer you're gonna do the right
thing here i need what i need is an untrained man working in artillery shell sure that's perfect
that makes perfect sense um but you know it's it's got that sort of their i think they're
obviously making fun of the british well they are making fun of the british they aren't this whole
thing is making fun of the british at times um the the minister of war out there giving his speech
about you know you ask nine out of ten people in this world what nationality they'd like to be
born in it's british and our war machine and we're the greatest and so it's all very heavy-handed
but also very superficial because there is no there is no kind of self-examination about what
these things mean what you know what at what point is this does this switch from a a code
if you like to being actually the the moral imperative that you ought to follow and at what
point do you just, under threat, do you actually become entirely selfish about your own survival?
And to what extent is that ever justified? Is it like, please put on your own oxygen mask before
helping others? Or is it just every man for himself? Well, now, if you think that's the
good question remember george asks that question because lucy tells him oh you're just being
selfish for not wanting to do the right thing and he turns around to amy and he says are we being
selfish and then amy's like yes all life is selfish love even more so yes i guess i guess
exact words bonk bonk on the head yep uh but i wouldn't i wouldn't count that as being a a
it's not it's not what i'm looking for in terms of how that affects our our protagonists oh no
no it's just if you can't show it speak it right if you can't dramatize it adequately speak it
war of the worlds is a book about colonialism that's it's you can't read that book if you know
anything at all about the history of britain which anyone would have when that book was written
you can't not see it as an indictment of colonialism.
And even to this day, I maintain that anyone watching War of the Worlds should at least,
even an American, should understand that that is about going out and colonizing places
and all the harm that comes from it.
And yet, and yet, we still had to have that painful scene where George and Frederick get
into a fight over this is exactly what we do isn't it we just go out there into the lands with all
those happy dark-skinned people who dance a lot and are poor and we kill them all we don't go
there and talk to them or we're not nice to them we just shoot them all up and we build our railroads
and we smoke up the whole place and like it we shouldn't have needed that scene not only not
only should we not have needed that scene well it's not it's not that that it's not that some
kind of articulation of those ideas from george at some point would have been completely inappropriate
it's that at that point at that point it's completely inappropriate because it almost
seemed like he was giving up well no it wasn't like that it was it wasn't clear what it was like
I didn't get the sense that he was giving up. I didn't get the sense that there was any real
purpose behind why he was saying these things at this time. I mean, it's not just that it wasn't
constructive to the situation. It wasn't a pep talk that would galvanize everyone else into
action. It's like, why did it even pop into his head at that point? It's just the writer needed
to have someone say these words. Giving up isn't exactly what I meant there, but it is.
At that point, George has now turned this around in his head and he's saying, this is justice.
This is our payback for doing that.
This is our penance.
It's a very religious, Catholic notion there that I'm taking the guilt on.
So I deserve this.
I deserve what's happening to me.
That's kind of giving up.
That's like, no, I don't deserve it.
We're going to fight back.
I think there is a theme there because there is also, that's what Amy says to Frederick.
The thing is, I don't understand how either of them feel about that at either of those moments.
There's nothing there to tell me what they feel this means for them.
So I get it. I get the idea that this is punishment. This is payback. Okay. Does that make you feel angry? Does that make you feel rebellious? Does that make you feel resigned? Does that make you feel guilty?
You know, do you accept that you are in some way getting your just desserts?
Or do you reject that whole idea?
And do you feel that you want to fight back against how unfair life is?
I have no idea what they actually think about it.
All they're doing is saying, oh, look, here's this interesting parallel, isn't there?
And I think one of the more interesting lines in the film, and that's saying a lot because there weren't any.
was Frederick's response to that.
Oh, this is what you always do.
Seeing things from the point of the other person.
That's not an acceptable excuse
when it's down to survival.
And it's like, yeah,
what you just said is that empathy is impractical.
Like, I would argue empathy is...
No, I know, but it's just...
He's not saying what he should have said.
if he were being practical is george this isn't the time and the place to express these thoughts
instead he he wants to get in some kind of philosophical argument about how it's not
practical but he's not being practical by having that argument yeah yeah so um it's it's it's a
weak argument at the best of times but you know if you if you if you want as a dramatist to explore
and essentially to pick apart the arguments that you dislike,
then it's your duty to express those arguments as strongly as you possibly can
so that your argument can win by virtue of being stronger than the strongest opposing argument
rather than by virtue of the fact that you have constructed a straw man and then just knocked it down.
I was thinking that they were going for whoever was loudest.
But speaking of the theme of Amy becoming someone who does what she needs to do, were we to survive?
Were we supposed to take from this that she put out sexually for that soldier who was catching her stealing the can of food?
Because I kind of got that.
I think I think we were supposed to take that was what he wanted.
Well, then we get nothing more out of it.
She just, then it's the end of the scene.
And the next scene, she's got the can of food.
And of course it turns out to be rotten.
Ha, ha, ha.
But, because of course it is.
But I, and then we never see that character again.
And I'm just like, we're, if that went somewhere,
it would kind of fit with a theme.
It's supposed to be another example
of terrible things that happen.
But again, how far would she go to survive for her child?
What would she do?
I mean, that is an interesting moral question.
it is an interesting moral question but the dramatic question is what's the psychological
effect that it has on her that too and we don't get that too no none whatsoever except it makes
you smash up the window clashes or whatever yeah
oh let's you know something in a with with the exception of that bit where rupert is
is complaining about george is always seeing things from the other guy's point of view which
is terrible.
It's just a terrible
point of view to have
and to hold.
But, okay. Apart from that,
Frederick's character
pretty much through this thing,
I liked better than almost
everyone else in the show.
He wants to go back for the minister.
Even though he doesn't
really like Amy, as soon
as he finds out she's with child,
he's there to try
to protect in its family but still i would have much preferred him to be the star of the show
whether that in fact i would have much preferred him to be as as the character he was to be the
primary star of the show which you know to some degree uh i would almost argue he was second bill
after amy but um because george was just nothing through the course of this through the course of
thing but uh what about the character of ogilvy the convenient chemist astronomer character of
ogilvy well the one thing the one thing the one good thing i have to say about this whole production
it's not really about the character it's just i thought robert carlyle was really good
despite everything now i'll i'll agree with that he he was probably the better better performance
He and Rupert Graves were the ones that...
He gave the best performance in this.
And I've seen Rupert Graves and I've seen Rafe Spall
both give absolutely top-notch performances.
So it's not a question of that.
It's just, I thought he was really good in this.
And given how bad some of the other good people were,
that's probably quite an achievement.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, I, you know, we have the whole bit of cottage drama at the beginning about them being unmarried
and the town doesn't like them because they're an unmarried couple.
And apparently no one is welcoming to them except for Ogilvy, who is, as he puts it,
the aging gentleman or the gentleman bachelor of advancing years who likes to keep himself
well turned out which if that doesn't sound like he's saying they all think i'm gay i don't know
oh yes what doesn't go anywhere doesn't inform the character doesn't nothing no just just lines
just lines to be it's it sad to say but it's like they're ticking off a box why are they ticking
the box got a gay character go he's not gay is he not that's the point about the line is it i don't
because that was delivered in such a way that was what i took from it i thought it was i thought it
was a nice line it didn't go anywhere you're right but yeah just it was absolutely there we go
i just threw that out there that's why the rest of the village doesn't thinks i'm a pariah i don't
know they didn't even really say he was a pariah too he just said they say things about me in the
village and and it was such a stereotype as well that he's describing well i'm the stereotype so
there you go i don't know it just just like well there was there was a few more minutes we ticked
off until we got to the martians arriving and and that was was in the first 16 minutes and i was
already thinking at that point this is mighty slow this whole show it's like huh yeah all right
i hope it gets better what about the special effects let's let's let's try to turn something
into uh i'm not gonna say a positive but uh the martians the martian war machines
any thoughts they were fine they were right
i i admit i liked i i liked the weirdly segmented leg arrangement i think of all the tripod
imitations or implementations I've seen in movies. You know, the worst being the George
Powell 1950s version, which they didn't have legs. And, but all the others, those were the
most alien looking legs because they just didn't, it didn't bend like man. They didn't bend like
spider. They didn't bend like dog. They just were different. And I thought that was an interesting
interpretation of it the martians themselves
kind of muscly they've been working out they're buff you could really see those toned muscles in
their backs but um i i overall they were competent but but that was that was the best i mean uninspired
design even there i guess they're okay is the best best we can say which by the way i absolutely
think we should we should on a future uh future podcast we should do the tv series bbc also uh
the tripods ah which i was i was gonna say bbc tv series the tripods yes this is the first this is
the first no i mean i thought you meant to be another war of the worlds but this is the first
bbc adaptation of war of the worlds i think it is not it is not it is not it is an adaptation
it is sadly only two of three books but it's an adaptation of uh some books by a guy whose name
i can't remember at the minute they're on my bookshelf but i can't see them because my glasses
aren't on um the city of gold and lead and the the white mountains and um uh there's one other
but it's three stories and you know where i was talking about earlier if you want to tell a story
what happens after the Martian invasion.
That's kind of what this series is.
I mean, they don't specifically state
that it's a War of the Worlds sequel.
And obviously the aliens were never wiped out by diseases,
but it is the world after the Martians have taken over
and their giant tripods rule over the world.
And it was great.
We should definitely do that.
Pretty sure I've got it somewhere.
Or we can find it.
anyway that was a detour i don't know that i have anything else to to say or pick on um i i i have
nothing really more to say about this i'm i'm going to mention the titles purely because i
thought there was a kind of promising combination of imperialism and entomology there but it didn't
really lead to anything in terms of what we saw in i think it's a fair fair comment the um all the
insectoid life and the ants mostly mostly ants but not entirely ants i didn't really get that
out of these creatures no exactly and they're not a colony of ants i thought because right at the
very start one of the opening shots is i think of some ants yeah that's it that's it it seems like
that was that was just to link in with the titles rather than the titles actually foreshadowing
something that was going to be an exploration. Yeah, there's no, I mean, I guess you could,
okay, I guess you could make a very tortured argument. I'll try. I'll try. Because there
have been science fiction stories where we talk about insectoid creatures coming in and swarming,
even if they're intelligent insectoid creatures. And that's much more obvious here. We don't get
that but you could make the argument that the british empire swarmed across the planet like
army ants destroying everything in their path and so the the colonialism is a metaphor not for the
martians but for the british or the the answer the metaphor for the british uh colonialism uh and
destroying everything in their path and eating everything all the resources and destroying our
planet and then the martians are just doing that to us so again really tortured but i that could
be what they were going for but they didn't go for it i mean that was the point what it there's
there is there's i don't know there's some there are ideas and imagery that you could
mine from those parallels that they just really didn't explore so i don't i don't understand what
was going on in those titles i wonder if that even had anything to do with the writer no that
could just strictly be the director or the art director or someone who's like yeah hey let's do
that yeah you know it's like there's nothing about it in the story but i like it i like the
visuals so let's go yeah all right i was so i gotta say i was so looking forward to this i was
really looking forward to this story and i will say that i wasn't spoiled on it but apparently
new zealand got this before britain did and so we had a new zealand we were we were we were not
getting the first transmission other countries got it before us oh i'd say new zealand had it a
month ago quite a while because i got a note from from somebody who saw the first episode of it
and fortunately they weren't being spoilery but they did kind of warn me that it might not be
as good as as we all hoped uh i think i think it was due to air earlier and that
that may not be not unconnected with the fact that it's not very good
let's push it back uh we've got some more strictly come dancing we can watch instead or anything
but yeah um but you know i was i was looking forward to i was hugely pumped for it i got that
and i was kind of like i'm gonna i'm gonna go in with an open mind war of the worlds by peter
harness like oh no no no no no no no no no no and i still tried to turn i still tried to turn
of positive to it but i watched the first episode with five other people and we all just kind of
shook our heads after part one it's like wow hope it gets better hope it gets better none of them
watched the other two parts with me they didn't hope it got much better because they didn't care
anyway oh well if that's it simon thank you for joining me well it's a pleasure as always
and listeners
I do hope you'll join us all again
next time on Fusion Patrol
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