Author Topic: War of the Worlds (Read 1049 times)

Gunslinger · « **on:** July 17, 2005, 12:17:56 AM »

OK I know there is previous posts on this subject but this is kinda a different sway so bare with me and ignore the poor spelling I've been drinkin beer all day.

Have people never heard that this was actually a book?

I've seen the movie and loved it. Besides all the Tom Cruise scientology hollywood drama recently he did a great job in the movie and I thought the movie held to the book really well.

the biggest complaint about the movie I've heard was that the ending sucked. I will join them in saying the climax in the movie was kind of a sizzle instead of a bang but it held to the book. If you've read the book the movie made sense. It just dumbfounds me to hear people say "why the heck are aliens gonna die after conquering a planet"? Was in not beleivable in the book? I mean really the ending was published. Do people not read? I read this book in High School, it's considered a classic. From what I've heard the brodast reaction has actually been studied by the DoD for disaster releif reasons. but over and over I've heard from people that they just don't get it.

Personally I blame Katie Holmes. If she would have just said "tom...it's great bangin you because your twice my age and stared in Top Gun but I really don't beleive in Scientiology" all the confusion and hype would never have melded together and people would have just concentrated on the umph of the story originally pened by a great classic writer. I just don't get it.

anyhow that's my rant....carry on.

Hangtime · « **Reply #1 on:** July 17, 2005, 12:31:42 AM »

If yah had a breaker bar, you'd have no trouble puctuating your explanations to numbskulled movie goers that regardless *whack* of how big *whack* a sweetheart Cruise is, *whack* HG Wells wrote *whack* a great book.

And you'd a been able to drive home, too.

Steve · « **Reply #2 on:** July 17, 2005, 12:50:07 AM »

I wanna bang Katie Holmes too. No doubt I could bang her better than Cruise, perform in a film just as poorly as Cruise, all for a fraction of the price. I'm waiting for a phone call.

Boroda · « **Reply #3 on:** July 17, 2005, 12:56:26 AM »

From what i have heard they didn't stage the most impressive scene from the book, with a destroyer, "Son of Thunder" (at least it's how it was translated to Russian 100+ years ago) shooting one tripod and ramming another...

I am reading a book again now. Amazing for what was written in 1898.

When I was a kid I have read all Welles 15 volume "collected works". Some stuff like "War in the Air" (sorry, I have to translate titles back to English from Russian) is still "actual" (that's why we build tanks and Americans buid bombers, our leaders have read Welles

) and was a real eye-opening back in 1900s.

Holden McGroin · « **Reply #4 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:01:05 AM »

Besides HG, the other Welles version was the best. Still heared on the radio on Halloween.

You can download the audio (that's all there is) from this website:

Mercury Theatre

Boroda · « **Reply #5 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:02:00 AM »

BTW, can anyone give me a link to original text of "War of the Worlds", of simply send part one, chapter 17 to tengrie [dog] sky.chph.ras.ru ? Please, do me a favour!

Steve · « **Reply #6 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:05:54 AM »

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html

Boroda, this looks promising. check it out.

moose · « **Reply #7 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:14:35 AM »

i forgot the part bout the destroyer boroda.. ill have to go back and read it again

the glaring omission for me was the absence of the poison gas that the martians used after one was taken down by a concealed army emplacement. that took part right around when the main character holed up in the house if i remember correctly but never occured in the film

nevertheless, it was a good movie and there were a lot of jaw dropping moments. the scale of the tripods versus the humans was done very well

Boroda · « **Reply #8 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:16:12 AM »

Many thanks!

Quote

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a waterlogged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child.

It really shows how many things may be lost in translation. Even when professionally translated in the times of good old Russian Empire. In Russian a "Thunder Child" turned into a "minonosets" (destroyer, torpedo-boat), it was "covered with armour"...

I still can't understand why they didn't make this pathetic episode into the film

Contrast between the crowd running to escape and unseen people aboard the "Thunder Child" making a suicide attack, seeing a battleship formation on the horizon...

Gunslinger · « **Reply #9 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:25:17 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by moose
i forgot the part bout the destroyer boroda.. ill have to go back and read it again

the glaring omission for me was the absence of the poison gas that the martians used after one was taken down by a concealed army emplacement. that took part right around when the main character holed up in the house if i remember correctly but never occured in the film

nevertheless, it was a good movie and there were a lot of jaw dropping moments. the scale of the tripods versus the humans was done very well

yea I'm thinking that too now. I'm just sick of talking to people that never read the book that say this was a bad film. Even in film version it was excellent.

Hang. I ran out of beer about an hour ago and I quit smokin 3 weeks ago. Unless you want a pissed off Marine on your bellybutton I sudgest you shut your suck....THERE that more "enlisted type" and less "louie" for ya?

Hangtime · « **Reply #10 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:30:34 AM »

LOL!

Quit smokin? Outta beer?

Good time to take up cat punting.. careful how yah pick 'em up.

Boroda · « **Reply #11 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:30:38 AM »

I suddenly understood that English books I have read before were only some crap for semi-illiterates. Welles is absolutely great. Thanks for the link, it's really a great experience for me, I can compare it only to reading Leskov after some post-Soviet pocket-book fiction.

Quote

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the waterline.

A sweetheart of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the Thunder Child sounded through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam hid everything again.

"Two!," yelled the captain.

Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.

The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could be made out, nor could the third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.

Gunslinger · « **Reply #12 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:36:36 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Hangtime
LOL!

Quit smokin? Outta beer?

Good time to take up cat punting.. careful how yah pick 'em up.

the wife would kill me. Then I'd have marital problems. If that's the case I should have worked on the Mustang anyways this weekend.

Maybe Nash is right. roots of Karma and all.

Boroda · « **Reply #13 on:** July 17, 2005, 01:44:02 AM »

"To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. "

I think i'll never learn the damn language. 9 years at school, 2 years pre-school, 2 years at the college (this probably doesn't count because in fact it was me teaching others) - all futile. You have to be born with the language.

Boroda · « **Reply #14 on:** July 17, 2005, 02:07:04 AM »

For me - the main idea of the book was to evaulate a society and it's reaction to facing an irresistable, inhuman, but absolutely rational (in it's behaviour) force.

Welles foresaw the nazis.