GOING BACK TO THE WELLS
THE LATEST TAKE ON HG WELLS’S CLASSIC THE WAR OF THE WORLDS FAVOURS WEIGHTY SOCIO-POLITICAL THEMES OVER MARTIAN HEAT-RAYS. SFX MEETS THE CAST AND CREW OF FOX’S UNCOMFORTABLY REALISTIC SCI-FI EPIC
NO ONE WOULD HAVE believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
So reads the sublime (and extremely long!) opening sentence of HG Wells’s seminal 1897 science fiction tale The War Of The Worlds: a simple, powerful story, unprecedented at the time, about a human race utterly ill-prepared when Martians attack Earth, and the mass hysteria that ensues.
An avalanche of film and TV adaptations have arguably reduced the story to a cliché, however. Granted, Orson Welles’s 1938 radio drama, Byron Haskin’s 1953 film classic and Steven Spielberg’s inevitable balls-out 2005 blockbuster were all brilliant. But with countless spiritual descendants of varying quality over the years, was it any wonder last year’s BBC three-parter felt so… unnecessary?
Hot on its heels, however, is a new version from Fox, that not only eschews “same story syndrome” but has more in common with the essential, urgent viewing of Russell T Davies’s Years And Years than the period drama with which it shares its name. Why? Because it’s set in the present. And let’s face it, The War Of The Worlds’ age-old themes – the fear of invasion, the collapse of society – have never felt more pertinent than they do today.
BACK TO THE PRESENT
“HG Wells’s idea had so much resilience,” says Elizabeth McGovern, one of the show’s stars, speaking to SFX at its European launch in Paris in October. “It keeps reincarnating over and over. What’s meaningful about this story, for me, is we’re now looking at a world that’s becoming seemingly more divided, in spite of technology that in some ways unites us. It’s a world where, in the country I come from, we’re building walls and pulling up the bridges that reach out to other countries.”
The actor, best-known as Cora, Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, adds: “Where I live today, England, is pulling back from alliance with Europe. And so I suppose, for me, the story posits that the onset of the outside enemy is a unifying force. We see the only way for us to survive in this world is to unify, for the barriers to break down.”
“In whichever time it’s been, the book has spoken to a different fear and anxiety,” elaborates writer Howard Overman (creator of SFX favourite Misfits), whose years-old idea for an alien invasion story coalesced with the Wells novel coming out of copyright in 2016.
“When it was first written, people were talking about colonisation,” he says. “Then when Orson Welles did it, it was in the shadow
of mass communication. With Spielberg, it was post-9/11. People today have a different take: ‘You must be talking about Brexit’ or ‘You must be fearful of global warming’.”
THE EX FACTOR
In the eight-part series, McGovern plays Helen Brown, one of a few survivors left after aliens all but wipe out the human race in one fell swoop. Playing Helen’s ex-husband Bill is Gabriel Byrne – last seen injecting some much-needed warmth and humanity into 2018’s relentlessly horrible satanic horror Hereditary. Once reunited, the bitter exes must traverse the corpse-strewn streets of London in hope of finding their son, Dan. As part of a large ensemble cast scattered across Europe, Helen and Bill typify the dysfunctional family minutiae that forms the lifeblood of this apocalyptic tale. In fact, Byrne essentially disregards aliens’ importance to the plot altogether, calling them “metaphorical”. “The idea that a flying saucer is going to come down and creatures are going to come out of it is very unlikely to happen,” he argues. “The fact we may destroy ourselves through nuclear war or environmental disaster is much more real. When we deal with the world of fiction, we tend to see it as ‘out there.’ The reality is, the real threat and danger to us is within, and it’s already here. The aliens are already here.”
In whichever time it’s been, the book has spoken to a different fear and anxiety
A focus on human behaviour over sci-fi bombast proved a draw for McGovern, too. “What’s interesting about the story is not actually the alien with googly eyes – whatever your idea of an alien is!” she says. “It’s ‘What does this threat say about us as human beings? How do we behave in the face of it?’ In the case of Helen and Bill’s stories, we have this fractured marriage, but we’re thrown together because of this cataclysm. As the series unfolds, they’re drawn closer together, but there’s this unfortunate lie that’s between them.”
A NEW ARRIVAL
Cèser Award-winning French actor Lèa Drucker, who plays scientist Catherine, is also armed with an emotive family subplot, concerning a wayward sister. Mercifully, though, it’s in her performance that moments of potent sci-fi really pop: a blessing for genre fans who might otherwise tire of the show’s seriousness. The look of understated panic on her face when she detects that first extraterrestrial signal, for example, is absolutely compelling.
“They’re trying to send sounds into outer space to make first contact, to see if it’s possible,” she says of the opening episode. “It’s very true, very realistic. Then something happens, something occurs. You could say it’s wonderful for science, but it’s also something that’s going to destroy life. It shakes up who they really are.”
It prompts the question: how would you react in such a situation? Would you be the unhinged liability, or would you be the hero? “In the event of a catastrophe like that, we can’t predict, individually, how we would react,” offers Byrne. “All I know is that the biggest existential threat to the human race is climate change, and we don’t seem to be acting terrifically well in relation to that. I can’t think of anything more threatening, and yet I can’t think of any great collaborative reaction to it.”
For the most part, Overman focuses on people who are emotional but practical responders: grown-ups who use their various skills and experience to solve problems. They bring to mind a certain Amy Adams performance from earlier in the decade. “Look at Arrival – it’s sci-fi, but it’s moving and emotional,” he says.
Overman treats his characters with Arrival-style restraint, and so too his aliens. “I want this show to appeal to people beyond those who would traditionally watch sci-fi,” he explains. “So I wanted it to not feel too futuristic, not out there, because sometimes you get people who are like, ‘I don’t watch sci-fi.’ I don’t want the aliens to be so advanced and weird that people are put off. They’re five minutes [away] from our future, almost, and
you can picture that existing without great leaps of imagination.”
“You can’t escape that we’re making science fiction – a combination of science fiction and drama,” argues director Gilles Coulier. “But for me, the balance tips over into drama. Still, you have to stay very true to the genre. The CGI, the digital effects, the robots: it looks good. But for me, it’s a lot about what you don’t show. The human mind is very strong and what you don’t show is often a lot creepier.”
Conversely, there’s one powerful moment Coulier didn’t shy away from depicting. “I talked to people yesterday who said, ‘How horrible that you killed a child in episode two!’ I was like, ‘We just killed three billion people!’” he laughs.
He remembers the heartbreaking pictures of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose drowned body shook the world in 2015, thus raising another issue easily projected onto the story. “Everyone’s aware of the refugee crisis, and then the picture of this little boy with his face down on the beach… The whole world is talking. ‘Oh, this refugee crisis! We have to change it!’
It’s still going on.”
“In this story,” concludes McGovern, “we have a refugee who is at the very bottom rung of the social ladder, who is allying with the English middle class family and the upper middle class academic couple. They realise we are not as different as we perhaps seem.
“These walls that we build between us are really artificial creations. And they’re meaningless, when it comes to looking at us from the perspective that survival might mean acknowledging that we’re all just human beings. That’s the power of this story.”
War Of The Worlds stars airing on Fox from 5 March.