Review: Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds on Criterion Blu-ray

The best American sci-fi films from the 1950s about alien invasions possess a poeticism that shames most modern-day FX extravaganzas. These ’50s films often strove for a dream logic that was enhanced by the methods of creating their special effects, from mattes to paintings to miniatures and puppets. This handmade quality is naturally, resonantly unreal, while CGI often encourages filmmakers to achieve a kind of anonymous, forgettable realism that isn’t usually realistic anyway, fashioning a worst-of-both-worlds aesthetic. Producer George Pal’s 1953 sci-fi landmark The War of the Worlds is particularly gorgeous and intense, centered around various fears that still haunt us today.

The film’s opening is by itself more beautiful than many contemporary genre movies in their entirety. As opening portions of H.G. Wells’s 1897 source novel are read by Cedric Hardwicke, describing the cold Martian intelligence that’s enviously surveyed Earth for ages, director Byron Haskin spotlights the solar system’s planets, which are visualized as paintings by Chesley Bonestell. The paintings’ rapturous colors offer less a factual representation of the various landscapes than a rendering of the space of our imaginations, suggesting something closer to the sensibility of Edgar Rice Burroughs than Stephen Hawking. This eerie, nearly supernatural prologue primes us for the heightened atmosphere that will govern the film.

Shot in three-strip Technicolor by cinematographer George Barnes, The War of the Worlds abounds in lush reds, greens, and blues that link the Southern California small-town setting with Bonestell’s paintings as elements of a mythical, soon-to-be-bygone world. It’s as if the annihilation we’re about to see by the Martians is being remembered rather than witnessed, and that already extraordinary events have grown into folklore. The sets, featuring small-town touchstones such as the library, the diner, and the stoop where newspapers are sold, embody a dream of ’50s-era Americana that’s cast, via the Technicolor colors, in a sinister light.

The effects everyone remembers of course pertain to the Martian war machines, which art director Albert Nozaki reimagined from towering tripods, per the Wells novel, into long, floating boomerang-shaped ships that suggest flying manta rays, out of which protrude a long and sleek periscope device that resembles the head of a cobra. The reveal of this thing is one of the great set pieces in sci-fi cinema, as the first war machine arises out of a smoldering meteor, gradually orienting itself while its first soon-to-be victims watch in naïve awe.

The sound effects intensify the ship’s semblance to a snake, suggesting the noise that might be yielded if a theremin was called upon to approximate hissing. This scene, relatively prolonged, invests the ship with a vast malevolent agency, dramatizing the violation of alien occupation. The ship may be just a vehicle, but it feels as if it’s the monster. The true Martians, weak, squishy little creatures with long arms and a central, three-lensed eye that’s divided into the three Technicolor hues, are almost poignantly beside the point.

The contrast between the powerful war machines and the dweeby aliens subtly honors one of the chief themes of the Wells novel, about humanity being humbled after a Martian invasion annihilates our illusion of supremacy. In the novel and film, the Martians regard humans as we might either cattle or the inhabitants of an enemy country: as organisms to be slaughtered for plunder. In each work, human society achieves equality via undiscriminating genocide by another species, which Wells explicitly sees as ironic just desserts for colonialist egotism and incuriosity. Yet the Martians are overcompensating, egocentric colonialists themselves, a shadowy reflection of us whose power also resides in military might, and their death is sealed by their ignorance of the land they seek to seize. This narrative simultaneously detonates the delusions of two different species, one imagined and one quite real.

Such a bleak theme is adaptable to whatever fear of doom plagues society, and in Pal’s version of The War of the Worlds, Wells’s portrait of a near-apocalypse is connected to the Atomic Age and the communist scare, as the Martian invasion then paralleled America’s worst fears of infiltration—fears that have stayed with us to this day, even as the perceived agent of death changes from era to era. Now, The War of the Worlds can even serve for modern audiences as a cathartic metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic, as there are scenes—of people bunkered down, of life stalled—that bear an unmooring similarity to our present-day reality.

Pal, Haskin, and screenwriter Barré Lyndon affirm Wells’s relentless aura of futility, which was in vogue in McCarthy-era sci-fi films, permeating William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, among others. These productions lack the jingoism that often seeps into modern films about alien invasions, suggesting that the world, or, really, America, has a tenuous hold on its stature among other societies. This terror may be acutely felt by American audiences for a distinction uniquely specific to our country: Since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, it has never before been invaded on a mass scale by an outside force, at least not until Covid-19. This premise really is endlessly malleable, as evinced by Steven Spielberg’s terrifying 2005 remake, which is rooted in the iconography of 9/11, until recently our closest brush with domestic invasion. In one fashion, however, The War of the Worlds is more idealistic than modern reality deserves, as it features scientists who are respected, a government that’s earnest, if ineffectual, and a populace that’s capable of acknowledging the aliens in front of its face.

Image/Sound

This disc is sourced from a 4K restoration of the original three-strip Technicolor negative, and the image is revelatory. The spectrum of colors is gorgeous, restoring to the film a nightmarish subjectivity. Reds, greens, and blues have a renewed sense of agency that’s complemented by rich and beautiful darkness, intensifying the mystery of the special effects. Close-ups boast impressive levels of detail, and the paintings of the solar system that open the film are once again properly, well, painterly. There are two soundtracks, one a traditional LPCM monaural, the other a 5.1 Master Audio that opens up the film considerably, fulfilling a once-discussed attempt to exhibit The War of the Worlds upon release in an aural presentation that suggested stereo before that technology existed (the creation of this second track is documented in a supplement included with this disc, “From the Archive: 2018 Restoration”). Both mixes offer vividly immersive soundscapes, with the Martian rays exhibiting a particularly visceral sense of menace. It’s difficult to imagine this film looking or sounding much better.

Extras

Two supplements produced for Criterion in 2020, “Movie Archaeologists” and “From the Archive: Restoration,” offer bracingly specific details about the creation and restoration of The War of the Worlds. The MVP of these featurettes is sound designer Ben Burtt, who deeply researched the methods that were used to create the film’s unique sound effects, which would be reused by genre productions endlessly afterward and become iconic and pivotal to how we imagine alien invasion. (For instance, certain shrieking alien weapon sounds were created with violins and the reverb of a guitar played backwards.) In terms of preserving The War of the Worlds for future generations, a challenge was posed when the three-strip Technicolor was subsequently rendered on lesser and overly bright film, compromising the richness of the cinematography and the illusions of the effects, revealing the wires used to move the models of the alien warships. As the 4K restoration included on this disc illustrates, Burtt and visual effect supervisor Craig Wasson’s efforts are astonishingly successful.

“The Sky Is Falling” is a supplement produced by Paramount in 2005 that includes interviews with most of the principal actors, elucidating, along with “Movie Archaeologists,” the history of The War of the Worlds and how Cecil B. DeMille obtained the novel as a property that he eventually allowed his pal George Pal to tackle. A commentary track from 2005, featuring filmmaker Joe Dante, film historian Bob Burns, and writer Bill Warren, fleshes out this information, and Dante proves to have in particular an encyclopedic knowledge of the character actors who appeared in this film and the careers they had before and after its release.

Also included in this package is Orson Welles’s notorious 1938 radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, as well as an interview he gave in 1940 with Wells in which they frankly discuss the respective effects of World War II on art in Britain and America, with a significant difference in sensibility being that America hadn’t yet entered the conflict. Meanwhile, a booklet with an essay by film critic J. Hoberman compares this version of The War of the Worlds to Spielberg’s 2005 remake, contextualizes it in relation to other Pal productions, including his Puppetoons animated series, and discusses its beauty as a classic 1950s-era spectacle. The theatrical trailer rounds out a wonderful collection.

Overall

Criterion’s astonishing restoration allows modern audiences to savor The War of the Worlds as one of the most influential and beautiful of all American sci-fi horror epics.