The War of the Worlds Episode One Review

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is known for being one of the most influential sci-fi novels and has been adapted numerous times. The BBC miniseries marks the first time the novel has been adapted to an Edwardian setting.

George (Rafe Spall) and Amy (Eleanor Tomlinson) are a couple from Woking, living in sin. George is a journalist who’s a social pariah because of his separation from his wife, Lucy (Aisling Jarrett-Gavin). Amy works as an assistant to Ogilvy (Robert Carlyle), the local astronomer. A shooting star crashes near Woking and soon all hell breaks loose.

The War of the Worlds was a series I was interested because it seemed like it was going to be a more faithful adaptation of the novel. Other famous adaptations updated the time period and changed the setting from England to America. Sadly the first episode of the series was disappointing.

The War of the Worlds was a short novel, it’s less than 200 pages and most of the characters were nameless. For the adaptation to work as a three-hour-long mini-series there needed to be a lot of expansions. This was done through the characters – in the novel the lead character was simply a married man and sends ends her to London when the aliens appeared. This is nothing new with adaptations of War of the Worlds, but the BBC version opened with  35 minutes of dull period melodrama.

The episode does pick up when the aliens attack. It’s just a shame that the budget doesn’t match the show’s ambition. The CGI effects were like Doctor Who in 2005, looking incredibly fake. This is made even worse when this version of War of the Worlds is compared to the 2005 film where the effects still hold up. The attack of Woking was still pretty effective seeing that the town gets destroyed by something that is beyond imagination for most Edwardian people.

The episode was intercut with imagines of a red, dusty landscape which seemed to be of Mars and added nothing to the episode. It did, however, lead to an effective twist at the end of the episode.

The first episode of this version of War of the Worlds did underwhelm as an adaptation of the classic novel due to it stretching out a short story into a series.