The War of the Worlds, episode 1 review: small-scale Martians and women being woke in Woking
We all want the BBC to save money, don’t we? Not to spend it on pricey office space or doomed digital projects or Gary Lineker’s latest tanning spree in Barbados.
But one thing that needs the big bucks thrown at it – the thing that would be quite pitiful without a giant pile of cash behind it – is an adaptation of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Yet here is BBC One’s version, looking as if it was made on the budget of a supermarket advert. And not even a Christmas one.
True, Wells’ science fiction classic was not necessarily epic in scale – his Martians started off by invading Woking. But this is 2019, not 1898, and viewers like their scenes of aliens laying waste to the human race to involve some decent CGI effects. Not, as was the case here, some extras having their costumes set on fire by a wobbly prop that looked like a giant Christmas pudding.
The adaptation has been described as a “woke” update, but that is the least of its problems. Writer Peter Harness has, understandably, fleshed out the characters; in the novel the narrator is unnamed and barely drawn, which would hardly make for good TV.
Here he is a journalist called George, played by Rafe Spall as a decent but wet blanket sort of a chap. But Harness promised a “real and modern” version of the story, which means that Spall cedes the lead role to Eleanor Tomlinson as Amy, the kind of plucky, independent woman who now populates period dramas.
In the book, the narrator’s wife gets barely a passing mention. Here, she is a scientist, has a degree and can ride a rearing horse without falling off.
George has left his wife for Amy but not managed to get divorced, meaning the lovers are social pariahs. The only person who treats them with kindness and no judgment is the astronomer, Ogilvy, played by an underused Robert Carlyle as a confirmed bachelor.
Tomlinson is doomed by her hair to spend her career in period dramas – those billowing red tresses won’t get her much work past the 1940s – and her determined heroine is essentially Poldark’s Demelza but with more to moan about.
The action in this first episode was frequently and jarringly interrupted by flash-forwards set in a red, barren landscape and featuring a cloaked figure; the big reveal at the end was that this was Tomlinson, but I think we had all worked it out by then.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with adapting stories and giving them a twist – this is, after all, a late Victorian novel set in early Edwardian England that gained a new lease of life in the 1970s as a prog rock album narrated by Richard Burton.
But the essence of The War of the Worlds is terror. And you’d have found more of that if you’d switched channels to ITV and watched I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
Once the Christmas pudding had shed its casing and turned into an outsized Malteser puffing out little clouds of cocoa powder, we got our first sight of the giant Martian tripod.
This should have been a moment of horror that had you cowering behind the sofa. Spall gazed at it with the mildly perturbed expression of a man surveying the departures board and learning that his train will be seven minutes late.
The death and destruction felt so low-budget that I can’t have been the only one hooting with laughter when George and Amy’s maid was wiped out by a pile of Styrofoam house bricks.
I don’t know what Robert Carlyle was doing at this point, because he had disappeared from the plot altogether. Perhaps he had gone off to audition for Doctor Who, which this drama closely resembled.
Everyone who adapts a period piece wants it to be viewed through the prism of the present day. A hubristic speech from Parliament – “If you asked any man what nationality he would prefer to be, 99 out of 100 would tell you that they would prefer to be an Englishman...we are an Empire on which the sun never sets” – was offered up with plenty of irony.
Wells, a lifelong socialist and critic of British imperialism, would have approved. But lord knows what he would have made of his science fiction masterpiece being mashed up with a soppy love story which is, in part, based on his own life (Wells left his wife for a woman named Amy).
It wasn’t all bad. The shots of Earth and Mars had a certain beauty. The music was suitably eerie. It’s all good publicity for Woking. But there is a reason why no one before now has adapted The War of the Worlds for television. As small-scale spectacle, it doesn’t work.
