I sat through all three episodes of War of the Worlds with growing boredom. Last night I finally got around to watching the 3rd and final episode and towards the end had to check how much was left because I was tempted to grab the remote and fast forward.
I wrote about the first episode in glowing terms. Yes it didn't follow the story but it looked good and set things up nicely. But then it just fell apart as it went on.
I've just completed a 10 week creative writing course. I don't claim for one second to be a literary genius, I write as a bit of fun, but we had an entire lesson on "show not tell" and how important this is for story development. Why oh why then do modern writers feel the need to ram points down our throats?
HG Wells original story is full of allegory and its not hard to spot. Ultimately, aliens invade Britain and science, reason, military might, religion and finally even the indomitable human spirit aren't enough to defeat them. It all comes down to bacteria. It shows that no matter how mighty you think you are, the tiniest of things can defeat you.
So what did we get in Episode 3? A brief lecture that goes something along the lines of "hey, it's just occurred to me, these aliens are a bit like the British empire stomping all over those poor people in the jungle. We deserve to be wiped out by aliens because we've been very naughty"
Worse still, we had our heroine tell her child about how she grew up with all those brown skinned people who were very poor but really happy. For crying out loud!!!!
Even the whole ending of the story was ruined because it had to be spelt out by a character who for some reason lives through the whole ordeal in this version but not in the book. We're told he starts destroying the red weed with a combination of Teburculosis and Salmonella. Yeah, good luck for the future of manikind after spraying that everywhere.
The suspense got less and less once it was clear in episode 2 that you were watching flash forwards so it was reasonably obvious who lives and who didn't.
Boring, lazy writing, pointless additions to a great story and overall dull, preaching bollocks.
Fuck you BBC for messing up a fantastic opportunity to show some quality science fiction.
