H.G. Wells’ ‘The War Of The Worlds’ set people’s imaginations ablaze when it was first published back in the late 1800s. It’s a story about Martians invading the Earth and the travails that the poor Earthlings suffered as a result. The story was made famous by that unforgettable moment in U.S. history when in 1938 Orson Welles produced it as a radio play and tricked a large part of the populace into thinking it was breaking news, rather than a radio drama.
The story has undergone a number of reproductions in film, with the most recent being Tom Cruise’s version in 2005. Although, I have to say that his version of ‘War of the Worlds’ was about as close to the original novel as Brad Pitt’s ‘World War Z’ was to its book — in other words, the only thing they had in common was the overall premise of the without any actual faithful rendition of the story. Nevertheless, the idea of alien invasion sparks the imagination and is a trope that is near and dear to the inhabitants of geekdom.
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The next major iteration will be coming from BBC later this year, produced as a serial. The BBC just dropped a new trailer for it, which you can view in all its glory here:
It looks pretty sharp and with the BBC’s track record of producing high-quality scifi, such as ‘Red Dwarf,’ ‘Doctor Who,’ and ‘Torchwood,’ I think we can look forward to this show without any trepidation!
‘War of the Worlds’ will be directed by Craig Viveiros and set in Edwardian England (that’s 1901-1910 and about the same time that the story was first published), in the southern English county of Surrey. It’s currently set to be a three part series and will be starring Rafe Spall Eleanor Tomlinson, Rupert Graves and Robert Carlyle as hapless Earthlings caught up in the hijinks that always accompany a planet-wide invasion by an alien species.
Keep checking back here to ScienceFiction.com for all the latest updates!
Source: Variety
