Weaving a tapestry of sources in Spielberg’s War
In re-examining War of the Worlds from the perspective of the original novel, I’ve come to appreciate the script even more for Steven Spielberg’s adaptation – especially in regard to the artillery officer and his theories.
Each reading of the book and viewing of the film puts me in awe of the creative process and how impossible it is to fine a pure source for an idea.
While I still believe the cleric/ambulance driver in Spielberg’s adaptation had its roots in the Orson Wells 1938 radio drama, I begin to see how Spielberg and his writers delved into the text, using it as a vehicle for recreation.
While many aspects of Spielberg’s movie are still shrouded in mystery – me speculating without mercy on where his ideas came from – Spielberg and his staff took a significant portion of the Artillery man’s speech and spread it out through several sections. While the ambulance driver – who serves as a combination of cleric and arterially man in Spielberg’s movie – mouths a significant portion of the artillery man’s speech, we find some of this also spread out through the crowds making their way to the ferry in an earlier scene.
This leads to a curious sense of structure and how each of the adaptations chose to handle significant moments in the Wells book.
Orson Welles chose to minimize the farm house portion, with the hero surviving the attack but without the significant emotional moment the murder of the cleric provided us in the book. But Welles positioned the artillery man in the proper place in the radio play fitting with the book, as the hero arrives in Newark on his way to New York City. In the book, the hero is on the outskirts of London. Welles painted his character in the light of growing Fascism in Europe, as a common man who would take control of the world if given the Martian machines. Well’s in the book paints this character as something tragic, a working class man (which oddly enough Ray resembles) with great ambitions, a lot of big talk, but unlikely to achieve any of his dreams.
The George Pal film paid significant attention to the farm house – although the cleric or minister dies earlier in the film in an attempt to communicate with God’s creatures, the Martians. Pal completely ignored the artillery man and his twisted philosophy.
In combining the Artillery Man with the Cleric, Spielberg manages to pay tribute to the book, the radio play and George Pal, combining elements of each into a single sustained scene.
We get the madness of the cleric, the philosophy of the artillery man (though Spielberg returns to book’s concept of a deluded dreamer adding a bit of perversion to the mix), and we get a combination of the farm house in which they are trapped, the probing tentacles, and even some of the artillery’s man’s plans to dig tunnels in the basement – as depicted in the scene prior to Ray killing him.
This melding of sources amazes me. In this, Spielberg has created a tapestry of characters and scenes that carries the plot forward yet at the same time pays tribute to his roots: Pal movie, Welles' radio drama and Wells book.
Okay, Steve, you finally impressed me.