Apocalypse Later: War of the Worlds: The True Story (2. Director: Timothy Hines. Stars: Floyd Reichman, Susan Goforth, Jack Clay and John Kaufmann. For a whole bunch of different reasons, War of the Worlds: The True Story, the latest in a long line of adaptations of the seminal H G Wells novel, is one of the most fascinating cinematic experiences I've encountered. Most obviously that's because of the techniques used to adapt the source material, but the context makes those even more interesting. Many filmmakers take old stories and turn them into new ones, not least Steven Spielberg, who reworked this very story in 2. CGI. Director Timothy Hines, however, got a lot more imaginative in how he approached this film. He kept the story extremely old fashioned, with most of what we hear transcribed verbatim from the book and structured around the original chapter headings, but he told it in very modern ways. This therefore becomes of interest to a rather odd mixture of Victorian science fiction buffs, film restorers and teenage ADHD sufferers. Analysing what he did makes it all the more surprising that it works for the most part. For instance, he clearly went back three quarters of a century to the infamous and innovative 1. Mercury Theatre, which Orson Welles cleverly phrased as a progression of news bulletins and, in doing so, infamously conned a great number of listeners into believing aliens were actually invading. I happened to enjoy this version of H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds simply because Tim Hines chose to go back to the original. Wells' The War of the Worlds (2005 film) H. Wells' War of the Worlds. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Timothy Hines film) H. Wells' War of the Worlds (2005 film) or H. Wells' War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds - already filmed? Director Timothy Hines reflects. Timothy Hines, Director. 2012 War of the Worlds the True Story. 2005 The War of the Worlds (Video) 2000 Bug Wars (Video) 1999 A Midsummer Night's Dream (Video) 1994 House of the Rising (Video) 1985 The Edison Device. Pendragon Pictures proudly presents WAR OF THE WORLDS THE TRUE STORY, the last survivor's eyewitness account. HOME: GALLERY: ABOUT: OWN THE DVD. Accounts of mass panic have passed into our cultural fabric but they were actually less apparent than our need to believe in it. As if recognising that, Hines takes further, much more modern steps. ![]() One is into conspiracy territory by telling us that it already happened, exactly as Wells wrote it, but was then suppressed by the government. Another is into found footage territory, as he 'discovered' in 2. How Hines approached effects is similarly counter- intuitive. Rather than follow Spielberg's example and rock out with CGI, he mostly got physical. The Martian we see in the film was a full scale monster that took nineteen technicians to operate. The creature's ear was manipulated by woodwind musicians, its breathing by subdermal bladders blown into arhythmically. Puppeteers controlled hair and tentacle movement. Even sweating was replicated by piping glycerin through skin pores. Tripods, Martian fighting machines, are articulated miniatures animated through stop motion. Yet all this neat old school tech is then integrated with stock and public domain footage in new school mash up style using state of the art restoration techniques. Again, old meets new. If this sounds like a lot of work, you'd be right, but this is really the end result to what Hines calls a 'fifteen year journey'. Critics hear the word 'journey' a lot and it doesn't usually mean much, but here it's quite clearly about as appropriate as it gets. What Hines and his production partners survived is a cautionary tale that many could learn from. As he tells it, he financed a $4. The 9/1. 1 attacks scuttled his projected vision and left him in 'personal financial ruin'. Once he'd recovered, shot a faithful $2. Spielberg was finishing up a version of the story too and Hines wasn't likely to win out against the Hollywood machine. Most upsetting of all, it was released prematurely by an unscrupulous distributor in what Hines called an 'unfinished skeleton of a production', a three hour workprint of a film intended to be cut down to 1. It's a tribute to the dedication of Hines and his more honest and loyal partners that War of the Worlds: The True Story was even started, let alone finished and released to critical acclaim. That journey took them down a tough road indeed. I haven't seen the 2. H G Wells' The War of the Worlds, but reviews were not kind, putting Hines in the unenviable position of getting consistently worse press than the Asylum mockbuster released in Spielberg's wake. Director: Timothy Hines Stars: Floyd Reichman, Susan Goforth, Jack Clay and John Kaufmann. Buy DVD WAR OF THE WORLDS THE TRUE STORY. Realistic Depictions of War and Extraterrestrial Terror.) Studio. H G Wells The War of the Worlds 2005 (Timothy Hines) kosmoaelita 2. Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe 153 153. The War of the Worlds Trailer (Watch in HQ/HD) - Duration. ![]() In a clear attempt at damage limitation, he released two further versions, a director's cut in late 2. The Classic War of the Worlds which pruned it further to just over two hours, with new scenes added, others reedited and many effects reworked. It's tough to delineate reviews between these different versions but they still weren't kind. Trying to pick up those pieces and assemble a worthy movie that stayed true to Wells's original vision is a task perhaps best left to masochists, but Hines stuck it out and it clearly paid off. What he gives us does require some suspension of disbelief, in a similar way to the Welles radio take, but the rapid fire editing helps on that front. The Mercury Theatre only had an hour to tell its tale, so anyone paying attention could quickly poke holes; real news reports can't provide an accurate count of bodies a mere minute after the beginning of a battle, after all. ![]() ![]() Similar holes can be poked here; it's a stretch to believe that Hines, having discovered that the Martians really did invade England in 1. Surely the destruction of London, the capital of the world at that time, was far too big for governments to suppress and if they could, it's not likely that they would have left film footage to be declassified decades later at just the right time. The key is whether we find the idea that The War of the Worlds is really a 'seminal alien invasion memoir' delicious enough that we can look past the unavoidable fact that it can't all be translated like that. For my part, I love that idea enough that it isn't just strawberries, it's strawberries with cream, served during Wimbledon. Most of the footage plays out believably, real war footage including destruction on a scale that even Spielberg can't compete with. I could smile knowingly each time something happens that, even in a best case scenario, Hines couldn't have found footage for. Who was shooting video in the cellar in which Wells was stuck for a couple of days with an insane clergyman? I wonder how many audience members are so attuned to reality TV and the surveillance state that they take the presence of a floating camera for granted, even in 1. After all, in The War of the Worlds, Wells made a whole slew of predictions that came to pass in his future, from tanks, chemical warfare and laser beams to total war, blitzkrieg attacks and the stubborn creep of alien plantlife. Why not omnipresent cameras too? Sometimes the old classics are as important for what we read into them as for what they say. And so we watch the journalist Bertie Wells (the 'H' in 'H G' stood for Herbert) recount the adventures we know so well as real life events in interview footage shot in 1. Floyd Reichman does a solid job as Wells, effectively reading sections of the book but in such a way as to bring life to them as memories. He omits much, of course, and jumps back and forth a bit, but generally close to the original material and often exact. Jack Clay is an interesting choice of actor to play Ogilvy, the astronomer who first shows Mars to Wells through a telescope and who later finds the meteor on Horsell Common that gives birth to the first Martian cylinder. While he's an actor with a great deal of experience, this is his debut on screen. Off it, he studied under Lee Strasberg and taught many names we recognise, including Kathy Bates and Stephen Tobolowsky. Once the Martians begin their rampage, though, we don't pay too much attention to the acting. There's too much else to watch. While press for War of the Worlds: The True Story has been generally positive, often very much so, in stark contrast to its maligned predecessor, some of whose dramatic scenes were cannily repurposed into archive footage here, some criticisms have been raised. I don't buy that the attacks on London by tripods make the film feel long; personally, I felt it rattled along at a solid pace, aided by an amazing three and a half years of editing. To me, it was a short 1. I wanted more. However, I'm more sympathetic to the suggestion that the techniques on show eclipse the story. That rapid editing does its best to move everything along and wash over us like a visual overdose, but it's likely that this film's viewers are going to have an interest in cinema beyond just the latest blockbuster and it's this audience who are going to be most distracted by the impeccable technical work that went on to make this seem like authentic footage. Watch this and you'll swear that there were tripods in World War I. I love the old school footage. It's done very well indeed and I expect to watch a few times over just to examine this aspect of the film. Susan Goforth, one of the film's producers who also plays the young Bertie's wife, is an experienced effects tech and she and others have explained in detail some of what was done. After archive footage was carefully selected, it had to be 'stabilized perfectly where effects were combined and then returned to the original shaky and flickery state.' To add to the complexity, 'virtually every shot was reframed, panned to redirect the viewer's focus in service of the story' and 'carefully processed to support the memories Bertie Wells was recounting.' 'Many hundreds of pieces of war footage were split screened or blended into other war footage,' says Hines, 'then composited with heat- ray wielding mechanical alien fighting machines in the same shot.' The depth of how they matched up aging in a whole slew of ways is fascinating to read, going far beyond standard filters. To say the stock footage is well integrated is understating the case. The slavish devotion to detail is admirable and it pays off. We're given an array of material in sepia, black and white and even colour, to keep us both alert and interested, as well as to raise the believability factor. Only the recognisable bits lower it back down. I found both C Aubrey Smith and Shirley Temple, though I must have blinked when Judy Garland was on screen. That's Battleship Potemkin during the staircase scene, and Hitch's The Lodger for newsboys in the street.
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