Ah, the weekend. I sure hope the lot of you enjoy your 2 days off, because the last time I got two+ days off in a row, I had to leave the city. I’d like to introduce a weekly column that I (hopefully) remember about. Saturday is usually a slower day at my internet cafe so I like to start it off by geeking out, and what better way to do that than to educate people about movies that quite simply kick ass?
This way, you can start downloading/renting/finding out who has them so that you can ‘borrow’ them today, and watch them tomorrow! So, without further hesitation, I welcome you to, “Phenomenal Films to Leave You Flabbergasted“.
#1 The War Of The Worlds (1953)
Don’t start talking to me about that Tom Cruise/Spielberg crap that came out a number of years ago. I saw that film with nothing but the best of hope for the crew, and came out feeling disappointed and empty. Given, I had not actually read H.G. Wells’ classic at the time, but I found it to be a dull and disappointing film, regardless. So I went back to it’s visual roots: the 1950s.
I don’t think age has anything to do with a film’s general quality so don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. Casablanca doesn’t come off as cliché either because it’s the cliché’s that emerged out of films like that, and this one. The War of the Worlds starts off like any story of this kind would, introducing and letting you get to know the human survivors. They’re definitely likable people but their budding love interest isn’t the focus of the story (just as the people themselves aren’t that important in the original story), it’s the overwhelming hopelessness that they portray that really makes the film.
Cruise tried to do this I think, but it ended up being too much of a character-driven drama. This is a disaster story. What’s going on in the people’s lives and their various problems is completely unimportant, even to themselves, as the terror of their world’s approaching destruction dawns on them.
Now, many have commented on the tripods not actually being tripods on this film.. and well, this was an accidental oversight. The way that the alien tripods were designed was so that beams of light would emit from each of their three green ends, which would serve as the near-invisible legs of the machines. Unfortunately, while they tried as many tricks as they could, they couldn’t get the light to show up correctly in the end product, and the tripods instead look much more like they’re floating, but hey, that fits more with modern sci-fi anyway.
Nothing about this film feels like a 1950s cliché, even the love-story side-plot that was tossed in so that audiences of the time would accept the film, feels quite natural and feeds the feelings of dread that the characters have to face. So pick it up somewhere, enjoy some older special effects of things blowing up, and next week I’ll suggest something a bit more modern, at least for the more skeptical of readers…
-Jeff “DanyLektro”
