Director: Byron Haskin
Cast: Gene Barry, Ann Robinson
Screenplay: Barré Lyndon
85 mins. Rated G.

• Academy Award Winner: Best Effects, Special Effects
• Academy Award Nominee: Best Sound Recording
• Academy Award Nominee: Best Film Editing

It was 88 years ago on this very day that Orson Welles did his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, so it would be best to cover the very next instance of this H.G. Wells tale that’s terrified so many over the decades.

A meteor has landed in the hills just outside of town. When the residents, aided by nuclear physicist Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry, Forty Guns), arrive at the site, everyone wants to know more about the crash, including Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson, All About Eve). While most of the town attend a local square dance that evening, a hatch on the meteor opens and extraterrestrials emerge wielding heat-rays and incinerating the men watching the crash site. Before long, the world has been invaded by these invading martians, and this war has begin.

Paramount had been trying to adapt The War of the Worlds for almost three decades at this point, with several failed attempts in the rear-view mirror, with even Alfred Hitchcock nearly directing a film version. Finally, George Pal produced this version, hoping to lean fairly closely to the novel, but Paramount wanted a romantic subplot and to keep the adaptation in the present-day 1950s. Haskins had to make some strategic decisions to preserve the feeling of the martians to work within the budgetary constraints. This choice is a perfect encapsulation of good adaptation. He knew that creating the “tripod” version of the aliens would be extremely difficult to work with and changed up the look to embrace a spaceship vibe which allows them to still be menacing without breaking too far away from the written piece. Back in the day, kiddos, we could make changes to the adaptation without angering all the “fans” on Reddit.

Unfortunately, most of the changes to the human characters and the story fabricated around the invasion is not so great, especially once the aliens show up and start causing havoc. These are paper-thin archetypes and it becomes clear in the back half of the film that they just don’t work very well. It’s enough to get the story started, but I almost wonder if they should have been completely abandoned in the back half in favor of a more anthological approach, different human factions fighting or fleeing, which happens to an extent. They don’t ruin the film; Clayton and Sylvia just don’t add much of value once the narrative gets going.

The War of the Worlds has excellent practical effects and creature design that are a sight to behold, so elegantly non-human and yet existing in our reality. I can see a film like this having a similar albeit less intense reaction on the public as the Orson Welles broadcast. The ships have an aquatic look to them and the tentacle-like tubules that invade the public areas are unnerving to say the least, so much so that they even get pretty much replicated for the Steven Spielberg version of the film decades later. If anything, the actual alien creatures themselves have aged the most, but not so much that they take away from the magic the moviemaking and viewing experience.

The War of the Worlds is a classic film that is seminal in the evolving landscape of cinema and special effects. It’s human characters are great until they aren’t, but the aliens themselves are disturbing and weird and beautifully crafted. George Pal and Byron Haskins have made some clever adaptations choices (though not all winners) that result in a film that works better than some of the book details would have for this time and place, and that’s the result of strong direction and adaptation, even if the humans lose a lot of momentum. This is a sci-fi classic that has spoken through the ages, creating imitations and inspiring nearly every film in the genre’s current day in one way of another.

3½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe