War Of The Worlds: The Movie (Pendragon, 2005).

A certain message board on the net has been badmouthing this movie for the poor looking effects and acting on display in the trailers. But let's not rush to judgement. Pendragon are a small independent movie production company. In terms of time and dollars spent, the trailers for the Spielberg movie probably had more care and attention lavished on them than this entire film. We've all seen plenty of big budget movies with trailers that make us salivate at the thought of seeing them, only to emerge from the cinema lacking two hours of our lives that we can never get back. But alas, this film is already suffering comparisons with the Spielberg blockbuster due out in July.

Yet any comparisons with the Spielberg movie are frankly unfair, not just because of the budget disparity, but because they really are two different films entirely. The Spielberg movie is a re-imagining (a term to fill any movie goer with dread after Tim Burtons's Planet Of The Apes) while the Pendragon version is firmly set in the correct period and follows so it would appear, the plot of the book exactly.

For this in itself, Pendragon deserve an huge pat on the back. Yes, perhaps the acting will not be as good as we might hope (but give the poor actors a break and lets judge them on the whole performance) and yes, the effects won't have 10's of millions of dollars lavished on them, but the sum of the parts may yet add up to something special. I would also add that in America, this film may get a poor reception simply because it is set in Victorian England. It's a completely alien world to most people outside the UK and I think it is going to be very hard for the average American cinema goer to connect with this film at all.

The opening scene of the trailer with the earnest young lady singing her heart out was disparaged in one posting, but the whole point (or one of them at least) of the novel was that the Martians were intended by H G Wells as a metophorical kick up the backside to a placid Victorian England, a society that was doing it's best to stick its head in the sand and ignore, so Wells believed, the coming storm of war in Europe. The trailer is simply trying to capture that point and does it rather well. That it comes across as somewhat old fashioned and lacking in modern sophistication can be viewed as a bit of a compliment.

This film is intended to come out at the end of March, 3 or 4 months before the Spielberg version, but it remains to be seen how many people will see it. There seems to be no indication as yet to the number of prints and how widely it will be shown. This War Of The Worlds faces it's biggest battle at the multi-screen cinema, where it simply might vanish without trace. For the sake of a little variety in life, lets hope it fares better than that.

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