Another big surprise today, well not really I knew it was coming, but the surprise was really in the lack of content and the shattering of an illusion.
The Spielberg (The Director with no first name) remake that is The War of the Worlds is coming soon, and the trailer has arrived, and an anti climax it certainly is, for me at least.
The problem for me is that I was brought up listening to Jeff Wayne’s audio version War of the Worlds, actually, when I say brought up I was dragged up and I didn’t really listen to it all the time, anyway! The moment the voice over kicks in on that record was awe inspiring, and I love that opening dialogue with the voice of the amazing Richard Burton in the lead role, and those terrifying words:
“No one would have believed, in the last years of the
nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”
Those words, and the way that Burton (my namesake) said them was chilling. So as the trailer played I waited, and I heard the first word and thought “they’re doing the speech!” I was so excited, until about the second syllable. It lacks the power and gravitas, and for me that dropped the excitement and the opening thrill was lost.
Still, I am making an unfair comparison, so I kept watching, and there was little content to speak of, save a group of scared and confused neighbours looking at the strange lights in the sky and listening to the noises in the distance, and then, then the big titles. Cruise (The actor with no first name), Spielberg, big titles.
Oh, and what’s with the tagline? They’re already here? Yeah, I get it, but I don’t really get it. Never mind, it is only a trailer and a tag line, we all know it’s going to be stunning, and how can I expect a movie, made with someone elses imagination, to compare with an audio recording made real by my imagination? You just can’t. I’ll have to dump those thoughts and let myself go to the movie, something that I managed to do quite well before. So here’s to the War!
What do you think of it, and what are the chances of anything coming from Mars?
