Alternative Histories

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that anyone could make a duller, more boring, version of The War of The Worlds than Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film that starred Tom Cruise. That was until the BBC got hold of the HG Wells classic, and made a complete pig’s ear of it.

I have loved The War of The Worlds ever since I first read the book over forty years ago, and have always wished that someone would make a version set faithfully in Victorian England. I am still waiting. The BBC chose – for reasons that are unclear to me – to shift the narrative from the late nineteenth century, to the early twentieth; a minor cavil, and certainly very minor compared with the liberties they took with the story as a whole, and ultimately how dull they managed to make the whole thing.

Spielberg's version of The War of The Worlds had its flaws, but the basement scene in which Tom Cruise protects his children from the Martian tentacle had more menace than the whole of the BBC adaptation.

The first episode was promising, even if Wells’s unnamed narrator and his wife Carrie had been replaced by someone called George and his significant other, Amy. George is already married, his wife refuses him a divorce, and his brother disapproves of George’s relationship with Amy. But at least we have the Martians, and the first sight of the tripods, although the heat-ray – which features heavily in the book - barely gets a look in; perhaps the special effects budget got spent on the red planet scenes. Those scenes of Amy wandering through a barren landscape with her child, which do not feature in the book in any way, were at first sight, baffling. They tended to dominate the third episode, and first my inclination was to deem them unnecessary. On reflection, however they actually added something. In Wells’s book, once the Martians have been vanquished, everything returns to normal very quickly, however it makes sense that the red weed, having strangled much of the land, would leave the country in a state of disarray.

The biggest problem with the scenes after the Martians’ hold on the planet had ended was that they so dominated the third and final episode, which to put it mildly, was one of the most boring hours’ worth of television that I have seen for a long while. Amy’s pontificating got on my nerves and added little or nothing. Not everyone made it to the third episode, however. I had bigged the series up to a friend on the strength of the first episode, which he watched. He gave up after the second, and I can’t say I blame him.

Some reviews made reference to the ‘woke’ nature of The War of The Worlds (woke in Woking as it was described by some), and I guess making Amy – an unmarried mother as it turns out – the driving force behind the story and probably the strongest character, supports that notion. There was – perhaps inevitably – reference to the comparison drawn between the Martian invasion and British imperialism, although this was hardly original; Wells himself drew the analogy in the book.

Eleanor Tomlinson as Amy, with Rafe Spall, who played George.

 

The problem with TV or film adaptations of much-loved books is that the viewer will have their preconceptions; the producers have different ones. There is inevitably a certain amount of tinkering with any adaption, however the BBC took it too far with The War of The Worlds and managed to change the emphasis to the extent that the war element was dealt with in a very perfunctory manner, while greater stress was placed on the relationship between George, his brother Frederick, and Amy, and the struggle of the humans to live after the war. Of the battle between the tripods and HMS Thunder Child we saw nought, and the Martians’ harvesting of human bodies was alluded to but not included explicitly.

The Man In The High Castle is a very different kettle of fish. I have come a little late to the party as far as the series on Amazon Prime is concerned, and at the time of writing have made it only to episode two of the second season. Whereas the BBC spread Wells’s book over just three hour-long episodes, Amazon have taken forty hours to adapt Philip K Dick’s book. Inevitably this means a good many different plot lines, liberties taken with characters and a few fundamental changes to the storyline. I say that, although I have not read the book for many years, although I intend to revisit it before too long. So far I have to say I have enjoyed The Man In The High Castle very much, although as with many series – especially American ones – there are meanderings away from the main plot that smack of padding, and the character of Obergruppenführer John Smith does not feature in the book, and therefore much of the TV series that centres around him has nothing to do with Dick’s novel. None the more for that, it knocks The War of The Worlds out of the park.

Alternative histories in which Germany won World War Two abound, from Len Deighton’s excellent SS-GB (subject of a patchy adaption, again made by the BBC) through Robert Harris’s masterly Fatherland (probably the best of the genre), Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy and of course The Man In The High Castle. These are just a few of the many novels that begin with that premise; an alternative outcome to the 1939-45 conflict is fertile ground indeed for authors.

Naturally, Philip K Dick’s version of an alternative reality would not be a proper Dick story if the real world – or at least another alternative – were not to be bleeding through. In the novel, this is signified by a book – The Grasshopper Lies Heavy – which becomes film in the TV series, a visual reference in a visual medium being more effective of course.

It is probably fair to say that one of the best adaptions of The War of The Worlds is actually Independence Day, which is thoroughly enjoyable in my opinion (the sequel is utter garbage, however), and which benefits from having Jeff Goldlum and Will Smith in the cast (I’ll happily watch almost anything that Will Smith is in. The bacteria that kill off the Martians in Wells’s book are replaced by a computer virus, and although the uploading of the virus from a laptop to the alien’s mainframe is of course ridiculous (the organisation I worked for couldn’t get two legacy systems to communicate with one another), it was a clever updating of Wells’s idea.

I live in hope that one day someone will make a version of The War of The Worlds that is faithful to Wells’s book, but in the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with Jeff Wayne’s musical masterpiece with its marvellous artwork by Peter Goodfellow.