by Roger Bourke White Jr., Aug 2005
I watched the movie, then, inspired by a story of my own that I'm writing for my HX alien series (one in which aliens come to Earth and trash it), I read the book. When viewed through the technofiction prism they were night and day different: the movie was so-so, and the book was excellent!
Steven Spielburg and Tom Cruise have certainly put together a summer blockbuster in War of the Worlds. It's a fun movie to watch if you like movies in one of the classic science fiction traditions: that tradition of menacing, creepy, nearly invincible aliens; crowds of screaming, panicked people running hither and thither to escape them; lots of buildings getting broken up; and some human interest thrown in -- the Godzilla movie tradition.
But how does it stack up as Technofiction? As a technofiction movie it's about average for a summer blockbuster. Here are the technofiction holes I noticed:
The introductory narrative by Morgan Freeman comes straight from the opening lines of Wells' story, which means it comes straight from an 1898 time frame. It talks about alien intelligences studying Earth carefully for years before attacking. This would work, if the movie was set in an 1898 setting, but the rest of the movie is clearly set in the 2005, a hundred years later, and this brings up some fundamental problems that dog the rest of the movie.
The biggest problem with this comes at the end of the movie. In Well's day (1898) science had just discovered that microbes were linked to disease. This was cutting edge science in his day. So when he uses this as a way to defeat the aliens from Mars, he is saying mankind was saved by pure dumb luck. It was pure dumb luck that microbes caused disease. And, that as the smoke clears from the destroyed Maritian war machines filled with dying Martians, mankind should be thanking its lucky stars. That was the point of his ending: mankind was saved not by its own ingenuity, bravery and skill, but by pure dumb luck.
In 2005 this same ending looks silly. Mankind has now known about the microbe-disease link for a hundred years, and given what humans now know, killer microbes would be Biology 101 to any planet-traveling aliens. An alien race that had been studying Earth for years would not miss the microbe problem. A comparable "dumb luck saves mankind"-ending in 2005 would be something such as: The aliens (Spielburg is careful not to call his aliens Martians) die because their nanomachines go berserk after a few days without a UV light power source, and Earth's Ozone Layer was not seen by the aliens as they studied Earth in preparation for their attack, so they didn't bring any sunlamps. The point is: it has to be some cutting edge science tidbit of 2005 if it's going to have the same meaning as microbe death did in 1898. (The movie Independence Day -- another War of the Worlds movie -- was truer to the H.G. Wells' spirit when the writers chose to defeat aliens with a computer virus because that was cutting edge at the time of that movie, and farther from it because a computer virus is a work of mankind, not a fluke of nature. In Independence Day, mankind saves itself, it is not saved by dumb luck.)
A second related hole: Why did the aliens park ships on Earth a millennia ago, and not stay to colonize Earth then? (In the movie the aliens teleport down to their previously buried ships on lightning bolts. I guess this is to avoid the plot problems caused by having Earthling radar detect the ships as they are approaching, and the physics problems of the huge explosions the ships would have caused if they imitated meteors and crashed into Earth at meteoric speeds -- a plot hole in Wells' original story.)
Did the aliens somehow predict that humans would evolve, and that Big Mac Humanburger would sell by the billions and billions throughout the solar system? If they were interested enough in Earth biology to predict humans evolving, how come they didn't predict that Earthly microbes would eat their lunch?... or, rather, eat them for lunch.
Unrelated hole: Tom Cruise and his family flee from New York City to Boston, another nearby major metro area. Why should Boston be spared while New York is being trashed? It would make more sense for Tom and family to be fleeing to, say, Woodstock -- a rural area in upstate New York where the low population density might make it a tertiary target of the aliens. Also, the current happy ending of the movie makes no sense. Downtown Boston would not be that tranquil if a Martian war machine had just been working the suburbs -- the death-throe Martian that Cruise sneaks by just before meeting grandma and pa.
Another hole: The military attacks on the aliens looked fresh from World War One: they have lots of men and material charge across open ground at an enemy they have no hope of defeating. The soldiers should be hiding -- using cover -- and the "big guns" should be firing first. If those don't work, everyone else would run away until some tactic that was at least partly successful was devised.
Another hole: It's cold. But when Tom and family get dumped in the cold water around the ferry station, they suffer no ill effects. When they come out of the water they don't shiver and they don't bother to dry off.
Another hole: In all the crowd scenes, Cruise is at the front of the crowd. In real life when something nasty happens to such a crowd, the people in the front die, and the people in the back surge forward to see what happened, so more people are pushed into the deathtrap. Super Lucky or not, Cruise should have died many times in those crowd scenes.
Another hole: The crashed airplane at the ex-wife's house did not look terribly real. It was too in tact, and there were no bodies. The plane should either have been in a hundred burning pieces with body parts, or, if it was in one piece without flames, there should have been lots of screaming survivors, some of whom would have found his home and basement.
Minor related plot hole: How did a video camera get a picture of the lightning bolts when the lightning bolt EMP wiped out all the other electronics in the area? (the EMP is why the cars all stopped running. Speaking of which... Cruise should have made his getaway in a pre-60's car with a pre-solid state ignition. Those are not affected by EMP.) And... How did the newscasters know that the ships had been buried for thousands or millions of years?
Another hole late in the movie: The scene with people pulling Cruise out of the alien digester did not make sense, nor did his leaving grenades behind when they did so, nor did those grenades blowing up the alien. If it was that easy to keep people out of the digester, how did the Martians get any people eaten? And, if it was that easy to kill aliens -- feed them grenade sandwiches -- the military would have found that method much earlier, and his son would probably have been first on the list to try the tactic out.
A bigger plot hole: What were the aliens doing with people? These are a species that had been carefully investigating Earth and mankind for thousands of years before they came. If they wanted lots of people to eat, they should have left civilization in tact and just harvested people. They should have flown over the big cities with loudspeakers and said, "Your quota of people this year is one million. Feed us, or we will do you serious harm." Since human weapons could not hurt them, and an in-tact civilization can produce a lot more people for consumption than a world of refugees surviving in Stone Age circumstances, why trash the cities? On the other hand, if they wanted to exterminate people, why were they eating them? Was hunting humans a liesure time "goin fishin" activity for these aliens?
A motivation plot hole: The son arguing with Cruise about running off to join the army while they are in the middle of dodging an alien attack made no sense. The context was all wrong, and wrong on two points: a) It would make sense only if the son saw that by joining the Army he could make a difference -- something no one had seen up to that point, and b) at a time like that -- a time of active threats and stress -- the instinct is to cooperate, not to head off. A more logical time for the son to argue and head off is after they have gone to cover successfully, and been relatively safe for a few days, say, in the cellar scene which immediately follows. There he can go stir crazy, confront his dad, and split.
A small plot hole: Why did the crazy man in the cellar pick them out of the crowd of people walking by to invite into his cellar? Just more one-in-a-million luck... like being at the front of a crowd watching aliens and not dying?
All-in-all, the movie had a lot of technofiction problems. Moving the 1898 story elements into a 2005 context just made them look silly. The character motivations looked equally silly given the context they were shown in. Once again, Spielburg has demonstrated that while he can tell a moving story, he is a mediocre-to-poor technofictionist.
The movie is so-so technofiction, but the book is outstanding! It is outstanding because Wells accurately deals with science and people as they were known in his day, and his story is internally self-consistent. On top of that, 107 years later, it is still an exciting read!
Wells takes the time to explain how the Martians get to Earth (this is before rockets, so they are shot by a giant cannon), and in so doing gives them some serious constraints. Unlike the movie- and radio-versions of War of the Worlds, Wells limits his Martians to just a handful -- Earth astronomers see just twenty shots come from the Mars cannon, then the shooting stops, then a year later, Martians show up. They are clearly limited in numbers.
Likewise, during the telling of their time on Earth, Wells' characters tell about the times when they see Martians brought down, but leave you with the certain impression that these victories were sparse exceptions to the rule of Martians kicking British Empire butt. In the book the military is much more rational, and the fog of war is much better depicted. The main weapon Earthlings use against the Martians is artillery, not infantry. In turn, the Martians defeat artillery handily with poison gas. Wells' description of what the Martians are up to (conquering London to use it as a base of operations), and the British Army's defense of London (putting artillery behind every hill between the first landing spot and London) is far superior to the movie versions, which show invincible aliens and no particular plan or reason for their moving about Earth. Sadly, the book does not include a map because Wells is quite detailed in his geography, and I would have loved to have kept up with it on a map.
Another feature of Wells' Martians is that they are busy little beings. They fix things, they make new bases, they mine minerals, they suck human- and animal-blood for nutrition... the point of view character gets to see them do a lot more than just tramp around the countryside wantonly killing people. Wells' also points out that this business happens in spite of their gravity-challenged physiology. The movies show no non-military activities, and do not try to show Martains struggling to move around in Earth's comparitively heavy gravity.
Wells tells his story as a recounting -- a report being written after the events have come to pass and order has been restored. This lets him include some post-mortem facts in the tale without having it lose self-consistency. It also lets him switch between two different point of view characters -- the main character who witnesses the Martians, and a brother who witnesses events as people evacuate London in a panic.
The book is also a fascinating read for how science and technology have changed over the last 107 years. Let me outline a few differences that caught my eye.
Those are some of the details which caught my eye as I read the book. Once again, it was a fun read from the technofiction perspective, and I hope you have fun with it, too.
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