They should show this thing in film schools as an example of how not to make one. The only problem would be the students running to the roof and then plunging themselves to their deaths after they've watched it..
Actually this thing could've been a bad SciFi original if only they would cut out an hour or so of the same guy walking down the same road! Actually I sped it up during a lot of scenes and cut about half an hour off the running time.
Things to watch out for if you ever attempt to watch this thing. By the way I only watched because I was picking up some of my movies from my brother and he lent it to me along with Evil Dead II and neat looking movie serial with Bela Lugosi called "The Phantom Creeps". Anyway onto what to watch for.
The walking and the walking and the walking. Did I say there was walking?
The main character (The Writer). Scenery chewer with one of the worst British accents I've heard. Luckily he didn't have to talk much because he spent most of his time.....you guessed it walking.
The Writer's younger brother. My, they look a lot alike. Mainly because it's the same guy ! The Writer has a cheesy glued on mustache and the brother doesn't. In fact even their wardrobe is the same.
The Martians. In the book they were heavy and sluggish, here they are as big as two men and jump around quite lithely on very skinny little tentacles. They must have been proud of the eyes, because they kept showing them quite a bit.
The heat ray. Okay some people catch fire and explode, others are reduced to skeletons (which still jump around even though everything is gone but the bones), and some people dance around with CG flames on them before being reduced to skeletons.
The heat ray is generated by what appears to be a spinning mirror (saved on lot texturing there).
The tripods. Sheesh! Did they purposely try making the CG look like stop motion? And when they walked, the feet hitting the ground sounds like the jug player from a hillbilly band.
The warship sequence. Holy s**t! I didn't know that Pratt&Whitney were making jet turbine engines in 1896. They saved a load on not texturing the ship either. The paddle wheeler the brother was on at the time also went through the water like Tim Allen had been tinkering with the engine.
The one good part, The Writer does finally bash in the curate's head in with a brick. Of course as annoying as the guy was in this I would've done it long before our hero does.
I swear there is not a practical special effect in this movie, every thing is CG (worsed than video games CG). Every fire is CG, a lot of the backgrounds are CG, and the CG London looks like it was made out of Legos.
Have you ever seen Earth vs The Spider? You know when they're in the cave and they have a glass plate in front of the lense that shows the cave ceiling and sides. This is how the scenes with The Writer walking down the road with the red weed and rubble on the sides look.
It also looked like they used old style compositing, because there were black lines around the characters blue screen scenes. And there were a lot of old style moving backgrounds. The one on the paddle wheeler is hilarious, the water is not only going by at 50 knots, it's moving in the wrong direction.
I could go on and on, but I will spare you the rest. This would make an excellent MST3K feature, but the robots would self destruct before they could get through all of it . The good thing about the three hour running time is that you can get a few quality naps between the action sequences.
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Post Edited (09-07-05 12:09)
