Finally got Kay to sit still for the George Pal <i>War of the Worlds</i>. As a movie, it has no more personality than Wells’ original, but the effects — in particular the Martian War Machines — still are Teh Awesome.
A bit of fun trivia from IMDB:
Modern viewers often complain that the wires used to suspend the Martian war machines are plainly visible throughout the film. The film was originally shot in three strip Technicolor, with prints made using a dye transfer process that resulted in very saturated colors but a slight reduction in overall resolution. This reduction in resolution “fuzzed out” the wires in original prints, making them effectively invisible.
Later prints were made in Eastman Color, which uses a photographic process and yields sharper prints, but here had the side effect of making the support and electric wires plainly visible. (The models had electrical wires as the side pods of the machines really lit up green and the “cobra heads” lit up as well.) It is common practice in the film industry to take into account what details will be visible when a print is projected so as not to waste production time and money on details that will never actually be visible to a viewing audience, especially in the areas of effects and matte paintings. Thus the filmmakers never thought the wires would be visible and in fact they weren’t until the first Eastman Color prints of the film were struck in the late 1960s, and they have become even more visible on modern video releases as there is no dye sublimation resolution loss when making video masters from the original negatives.
One of the fun aspects of this film is the setting, being an old California native (from the Pomona area). The initial landing in the Chino Hills (just south of my old townhouse in Phillips Ranch), falling back to north of highway 60, maneuvering around near Corona, and a nuke dropped in the Puente Hills (think of the shopping mall!), all fill me with insider glee. Plus, I can never pass under the “Stack” on the Harbor Freeway without thinking of the evacuation scene in the film.
Fun. Next stop, the adaptation Pal chose when the Wells’ estate offered their appreciation for his job on WotW by letting him choose any other Wells tale to adapt: The Time Machine (1960).