Spielberg farms Wells’ text for War’s images
When Steven Spielberg said he had gone back to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and found images that he could use, he meant more than just red weed.
Spielberg’s 2006 adaptation drew heavily on the text for inspiration, also for some who are caught up in the aliens, the fighting machines, and the blood sucking, the textual references may seem too subtle to catch at first.
Although I am still reviewing Wells’ book and will no doubt find many more key passages, I already noticed that significant portions of the opening scenes owe much to the original text, and in fact, in some ways offers the most authentic version of the text except perhaps for the ill-fated English version released last year.
Even the most criticized of my theories that Spielberg has given us a series of nightmares out of which the hero struggles to wake up seems to have some validity in the text, although Spielberg seems to have drawn heavily on the images and sounds that book suggested, giving us a visual of those things Wells merely described.
I’ll get the dream out of the way first before going onto the more obviously and documented comparisons from early in the book.
Spielberg’s adaptation tends to stay loyal to the structure of the book – although his deviations tend to be homages to the radio play and the 1950s George Pal movie. So that in his film, we are often greeted by the images in the same part of the structure as in the book. I’m not saying in the same order so much as elements are fitted into the same place in the progression of events.
For instance, when Ray returns to his kids after seeing the alien machines for the first time, he tells them they seem to be inside a dream.
Wells’ hero has a similar if not so panicked reaction to the encounter, when he questions whether or not the encounter was a figment of his own imagination.
“Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods,” Wells’ hero reflects when he is trying to make sense of the slaughter he had witnessed. “I do not know how far my experience is common. I suffer from strange detachments, from myself and from the world about me. I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong on me that night. Here was another side to my dream.”
While I have come up with various other theories to explain the Newark scenes, Spielberg appears to have closely read Wells for some very key images, such as the destruction of the church steeple early in the narrative that is translated to the Iron Bound section of Newark in Spielberg’s film.
Wells’ hero like Ray at the gas station has a difficult time convincing other people of what he had seen until of course it is too late.
Although Rachel seems to have evolved out of several sources, she seems to fit partly into the place of Wells’ hero’s wife, as least in the breaking of bread in the home scene when Ray wakes up to find she has ordered humus instead of food. Wells’ hero comments that the meal he shared with his wife was the last civilized meal he had during the adventure.
Spielberg is also loyal to Wells in that the hero of both spends a great deal of the story seeking to get to some remote location where their wives have gone.
Ray, of course, steals a van in order to get his kids to safety. The hero in Wells’ book pays double for a cart to take his wife to the safety of her sister’s house.
Spielberg even seems to have translated some of the subtle images from Wells book such as when Ray’s wife Maryann pauses in the doorway of the house when she leaves. In Wells, we get a similar scene also it is the hero leaving.
“My wife stood in the light of the door way and watched me, then abruptly turned and went in,” Wells’ hero recalls.
Perhaps no place so far in my comparing the film with the book does Spielberg take so much from Wells as he does in showing the arrival of the aliens.
While Spielberg appears to have drawn some of his humor in the Newark scene from another Wells text, The Time Machine, his images of the lightning and the strange storm that preceded the rising up of the aliens from the street in Newark come straight out of Wells text.
Spielberg in choosing his set for the homes he would later destroy seems to have been searching out a location that would allow him to nearly literally translate into image descriptions he found in early in Wells’ book.
Spielberg’s use of houses silhouetted against a sky full of gathering storm clouds seems nearly a direct translation of when Well’s hero sees the alien war machines for the first time.
The hero has just returned from seeing the aliens’ pit, but he has not yet seen the machines.
“As I ascended the little hill beyond Pierford Church, the glare game into view again and the trees shivered with the first intonation of the storm that was upon me. Then I heard the midnight pealing out from Pierford Church behind me, and there cam the silhouette of Mayberry hill with its tree tops and roofs black and sharp against the red.”
This passage and those that follow are duplicated in War of the Worlds when Ray comes out of his house in search of his son and sees people staring at the sky behind him. When he turns, he sees the storm and the silhouette of the bridge and the roof line of the houses. When he runs into the back yard, a strange wind picks up, and eerie light comes over the yard.
Wells’ description continues:
“Even as I beheld this, a lurid green glare lighted the road about me and showed the distant woods. I felt the tug at the reigns and saw the driving clouds had been pierced as if by a thread of green fire.”
As in the movie, lightning struck and thunder burst over the hero’s head like a rocket over his head.
“Once the lightning had begun it went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I had ever seen,” the hero recalls.
Spielberg, too, managed to capture the texture of the storm in sound effects, since he depicted the thunder as Wells’ hero described it, “a strange crackling accompaniment sound more like the workings of a giant electric machine than the usual reverberating denotations.”
As in the movie, the storm in the book is soon followed by the falling of hail.
In both the book and the movie this storm comes just before the arrival of the alien tripods, which Spielberg’s film seems to best fit what Wells’ described: “a monstrous tripod higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees and smashing them aside in its career, a walking engine of glittering metal” with “articulated ropes of steel dangling from it.”
These are, of course, early comparisons and I’m sure I will find many more as I continue to compare the book to Spielberg’s film. But it is clear that Spielberg delved deep into the text for some of the amazing images he produced on the silver screen.