| Shadow1980 said: There have been very few fictional novels that I liked, but WotW was one of them. Good to see them doing a proper period piece set around the dawn of the 20th century, just like the book. By moving the setting to the 50s and then to the 00s, the film adaptations had to change the Martians' technology a lot. In the book, the Martian Fighting Machines were tough, but not invincible. The British military did manage to take down several Fighting Machines, though it wasn't easy. The Fighting Machines as described in the book would have been annihilated by a modern post-WW2 military force, so the films needed to give them invincible force fields, meaning no "hope spots" like the battle with the HMS Thunderchild (even a nuke failed in the George Pal film). The films also excised the Martian "black smoke," one of the first, if not the first, portrayals of modern chemical warfare in fiction. |
I feel pretty much exactly the same; in the book, one of the greatest moments is when the Thunderchild attacks the Martian fighting machines and manages to take one down, giving a burst of hope, which is then dashed when the remaining machines obliterate the warship.
The films never quite got the ending right either; the last dying Martians howling out to each other over the dead city of London in the book and the main character finally deciding to end it all and marching up to one of the machines only to see birds feasting on its dead pilot is just so much more impactful than the way the films did it.
Also, the series finally has an air date; the 17th of this month on BBC. Hopefully that means it can be viewed online on BBC iPlayer for those of us outside Britain.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 06 November 2019
