WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953)
Tagline: Amazing! terrifying! The most savage spectacle of all time!
(Sci-fi, Thriller, Simon Says Electronic Alien Heads) [G]
Well, the jets went in, but not one of them came out. I watched high-level bombers drop everything they carried... They were knocked out of the sky and their bombs did nothing. Nothing was effective against them.
In this one, a meteor lands in the hills near a small town in California. Everyone is pretty excited about it and even trying to figure out how to make money off it, but it doesn’t take long before it becomes clear that the meteor is actually a vessel with deadly intentions. A full-scale invasion of earth has begun, will mankind survive…THE WAR OF THE WORLDS?
First off I kind of shy away from reviewing older movies that “everyone and their brother” seems to love, but this one is actually pretty cool. This is not to say that I don’t want to review movies that everyone else seems to love, but I typically get more excited about reviewing the lesser-known stuff. In any regard, this thing is well done in almost every aspect.
Acting-wise the lead actor is Gene Barry who plays Dr. Clayton Forrester. He is okay in this role, but at times overplays some of the scenes. It’s hard to tell the level of freak out you would have during an alien invasion, but most everyone else that is a professional anything in this movie handles things better than he does regarding “freak out” level. I compare him just to the other scientists and military personnel because a lot of the regular citizens go just nuts and have “off the chart” freak-out levels. Gene Barry is also in the sci-fi film THE 27TH DAY and was also in the 2005 version of WAR OF THE WORLDS. Ann Robinson plays the female lead and she is decent throughout. She does have a few massive “freak out” moments, but I think it matched the scenes she was in fairly well for the era. I mean, these aliens don’t look super intimidating once you see them, but back then, an alien was an alien and just that thought alone would have been pretty haunting. Like Gene Barry, Ann Robinson was also in the 2005 version of WAR OF THE WORLDS. She was also in the 1980’s WAR OF THE WORLDS TV series. Robert Cornthwaite plays Dr. Pryor in this and is good in this as he was in THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD. We also have a brief Fred Graham sighting. He plays one of the looters in this but had a big role in THE GIANT GILA MONSTER.
Effects wise this one is outstanding for the most part. I do think some of the flying saucer and alien effects look pretty dated, but the destruction in this movie almost feels like it was out of a TOHO kaiju movie. I mean, everything is on fire. One thing that a lot of fans of the source material might notice is that the Martian ships don’t have a tripod-like apparatus holding them up. This was due to the director not really knowing how they would move around. So in this movie, all the Martian ships are floating if they are not on the ground. The score, settings, and storytelling are superb. There are a few slow parts and it feels like for “this story” they could have shaved 10 minutes off the final film, but once things get going, the movie never lets up.
I loved that they included a faith-based ending or at least related things back to God’s wisdom. This is something that is missing from a lot of modern sci-fi with few exceptions. H.G. Wells was apparently agnostic which at least made him intellectually honest, it’s an “I am just not sure” approach to God...of course Psalm 14:1, but moving along.
Overall this is a pretty rad 1950s sci-fi entry that looks slightly campy by today’s standards but still manages to hold up to the test of time. I do however wish the ending wasn’t so abrupt. It feels a bit empty, even though the possibility of it ending how it did is brought up earlier in the script.
For me, this is a near-perfect movie, so I have to give it a 7 out of 7, with the caveat that I wish we had gotten two better leads.
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