Review for War of the Worlds: Season 1 Boxset

Introduction

I used to love late night television. It's not the same now. All that any insomniac, shift worker, student or the like has to entertain him or her into the late hours now is a diet of gambling, shopping channels and sex chat on the commercial channels. Meanwhile on the public service channels, you get the daytime shows shrunk to a postage stamp, while someone signs the dialogue in the corner. Hard of hearing insomniacs are well catered for. But fifteen or twenty years ago, when the regulations regarding late night television had just been eased, the schedules for a night owl like me were a godsend. Channels back then actually spent some money, made some effort into catering for the duvet averse, and it wasn't all red triangle stuff either. I may not have been too enthused by the ubiquity of Prisoner Cell Block H, but as a rule I'd wake up at 4am on Saturday morning for baseball. Better, the late night schedules were a dumping ground for repeats of old shows, classic movies that just didn't seem to fit, and best of all for this sci-fi addict, the genre shows that no-one felt comfortable showing at prime time. The late night schedule was where I found shows like Highwayman, Timecop and Highlander: The Series. It was where Time Trax and Andromeda resided; it's where Babylon 5 wound up, and where you'd find the uncut Buffy and Angel episodes. It's also where I found one of my favourite late eighties sci-fi TV shows, War of the Worlds, a sequel to the classic 1953 movie.


It's been 35 years since the War of the Worlds, when alien invaders came to Earth back in 1953, decimating the defenders in their impervious flying saucers until stopped by the unlikeliest of weapons, common bacteria. They weren't killed however; the bacteria merely drove their bodies into dormancy. The government gathered the aliens and their technology, and sealed it all away in secret storage facilities. But that dormancy comes to an end when a terrorist group launches an attack on one of the storage sites. The attack breaches containers of nuclear waste, stored near the barrels in which the alien bodies are sealed...


The radiation kills the bacteria, and the aliens begin to revive. After a three decade hiatus, their invasion resumes, but this time they have to be circumspect and more devious. This time they are taking over human bodies, and using their hosts to infiltrate human civilisation. But after the invasion of 1953, a collective amnesia erased the war from the minds of those who witnessed it, and precious few remain who are prepared to battle the aliens anew. One such man is scientist Dr Harrison Blackwood, an orphaned survivor of the original invasion who was adopted by Clayton Forrester, and grew up with his father's stories of the invasion, and his research on the aliens. Forrester couldn't get the government to listen to his theories and was eventually discredited, but Blackwood now picks up where his father left off, and with the aid of microbiologist Suzanne McCullough, computer whiz Norton Drake, and professional soldier Colonel Paul Ironhorse, they resume fighting The War Of The Worlds.


Season 1 comes to the UK courtesy of Revelation Films, and 24 episodes are presented here across 6 discs.

Disc 1
1. The Resurrection (Part 1)
2. The Resurrection (Part 2)
3. The Walls of Jericho
4. Thy Kingdom Come

Disc 2
5. A Multitude of Idols
6. Eye for an Eye
7. The Second Seal
8. Goliath is my Name

Disc 3
9. To Heal the Leper
10. The Good Samaritan
11. Epiphany
12. Among the Philistines


Disc 4
13. Choirs of Angels
14. Dust to Dust
15. He Feedeth Among the Lilies
16. The Prodigal Son

Disc 5
17. The Meek Shall Inherit
18. Unto Us a Child is Born
19. The Last Supper
20. Vengeance is Mine

Disc 6
21. My Soul to Keep
22. So Shall Ye Reap
23. The Raising of Lazarus
24. The Angel of Death

Picture

You get a 4:3 regular transfer which, quite frankly varies from the bad to the hideous. That's no fault of the DVD though. It's the curse of late eighties US television, where the NTSC format, coupled with the tendency to produce their shows on relatively low quality videotape, resulted in a whole era of low resolution, colour smeared, blurry and ghosting off-palette imagery. War of the Worlds comes from that era, and what we get here is the worst such image I have seen in a long time. Colours are smeared, skin shades are monotone, and detail is a just an optional extra. Given the fact that in some episodes, the commercial idents are in place, makes me think that these episodes are sourced from second generation copies, held by network affiliates, and the original masters were not available for whatever reason. In some episodes, the colour bleed is so bad that the characters look as if they've escaped from the A Scanner Darkly movie. It's hard to judge the special effects of a sci-fi show through this mess, but from what I can tell, the practical, in camera effects work is very well done, while the composite post production work is less so. It explains why this show is more about the body-snatching horror than the flying saucer mayhem.

Sound

The audio is DD 2.0 Surround English, which is good enough for the most part. There is the odd moment of hiss, indicative of the tape source, but by and large the dialogue is clear throughout, which excuses the lack of subtitles up to a point. War of the Worlds comes from an era where the sci-fi music of choice was synthesised, and I'm surprised to hear just how badly it has dated.

Extras

Six discs come with animated menus with episode select screens. The only on-disc extras worth mentioning are the episode synopses accessible from a separate menu screen, two to a page. Since I received only the check discs, I cannot comment on what the packaging may be like.

Conclusion

In the space of five years, everything changed.

I cut my sci-fi teeth on the 1953 War of the Worlds movie. I must have seen it before I was even able to walk, let alone make coherent sense of what was happening on a television screen. But there was something about those golden flying saucers, that weird humming sound, the alien screech that heralded their death rays, which buried itself into my subconscious and never really let go. In 2012, I've seen the Steven Spielberg remake that paid closer homage to the original novel, listened to the Jeff Wayne musical with the Richard Burton narration, and indeed I have read the H G Wells novel several times, but it is that 1953 feature film that for me is the definitive War of the Worlds. So in the late eighties when ITV started catering for insomniac teenaged students with late night sci-fi, and I found a TV series that served as sequel to that movie and resurrected those ominous flying saucers once more, I was in heaven. When the only other sci-fi choice at the time was Star Trek: The Next Generation, the body-snatching horror that was The War of the Worlds became a great counterpoint. I loved the War of the Worlds television series back then; I loved its secret war against the aliens, the conspiracies and the mysteries, the characters and the stories, the idea of a government concealing the truth from its populace, and a small group of knowledgeable heroes leading the fight. I don't love it anymore.


You see in 1993, a man named Chris Carter introduced his own take on the paranormal and alien to television. He took the idea of UFOs and close encounters, the idea of abductions, of government cover-ups and conspiracies, and gave it an adult and more realistic spin. That little known television series was the X Files, and in comparison, War of the Worlds looks exceedingly lame. Of course I didn't know that at the time. By the time The X Files had come around, I'd long since finished with War of the Worlds, and never even thought to draw any comparisons. It's just now, some twenty plus years later that I revisit the show, and I realise just how juvenile it is.


'Juvenile' is the key word here. War of the Worlds is hamstrung by the action adventure paradigm of mid eighties television. The writing, and especially the characters are based on ideas and tropes that would play to the younger audiences that would be more at home watching shows like The A-Team or Knight Rider, while the body horror, the alien possession, the mutilation, and the violence is aimed at an older audience, raised on a diet of horror movies. The simplistic stories don't really appeal to the older viewer, as the writing can be excruciatingly clichéd at times, the stories driving the characters instead of the other way around.


It felt as if I was watching a Power Rangers set up, with the Blackwood team battling the forces of the aliens, with the aliens working on a brand new plan to defeat the humans each week, and the humans coming up with a last ditch idea to save the world. It's pretty small scale stuff for the most part, and with some really daft ideas explored. One week they may be planting subliminal messages in pop music, another they may be creating a new lethal designer drug to turn humans homicidal. The next week they may be trying to poison the grain, another they may try blowing up the phones. Of course the price for failure in true Power Rangers style is death, so the idiot aliens gradually thin their own ranks, and just as each alien is about to die, it cries out the show's catchphrase, "To Life Immortal!", which seems exceedingly daft.


The biggest problem with War of the Worlds is the inconsistency. It isn't just in the characters, although Harrison Blackwood's girlfriend is conveniently forgotten after the first two episodes, while Norton's Jamaican accent lasts only a few episodes beyond that. It's in the way the series develops, the immediate intensity of the opening episodes are lost as they settle into the small scale jostle for power that typifies most of the run. Also, the abilities of the aliens seem to change from episode to episode. The possession of human bodies is there from episode one, but in a later episode we find that they can mind meld all of a sudden, in an even later episode, they are hacking computers by just grabbing onto a cable. What they are capable of chops and changes at the whim of the writers.


Of course that's nothing compared to what happens in season 2, where half the main cast vanishes, those that remain have their characters grossly altered, the aliens are exchanged for a completely different set of aliens, all the plot threads from this season are ditched, and the world is suddenly an apocalyptic wasteland. I thought Season 2 was bad back in the late eighties, but that's a matter for another review.


It isn't all bad. While the stories may be disappointing, the writing lacklustre, the main characters do offer much of value to the show, even if they are written to the conventions of a pre-teen male audience. I guess that's testament to the quality of the acting here, who can make such painful lines work. It's also the way that the four distinct characters interrelate that make it fun to watch, the bohemian, pacifist, freewheeling scientist in Blackwood, the hard as nails career military Ironhorse, the by the book microbiologist McCullough, and the rule breaking computer whiz Drake. They are four people you would expect to rub each other the wrong way, and initially they do, but as the story progresses you can see the way that they begin to respect one another and mesh into a team. The guest cast at times is also worth watching for, with TV stalwarts like Greg Morris, Alex Cord, John Colicos and Patrick MacNee. A treat for fans of the movie would be Ann Robinson who reprises her role of Sylvia van Buren.


There are also a few episodes that do stick in the mind, and for me it's mostly the few that feature alien spaceships. It wasn't a regular occurrence given the special effects technology and the budgets of the late eighties. But horror fans would no doubt pay greater attention to the episode where an alien possesses a pregnant woman, who then goes on to give birth to a hybrid, fast growing baby. There's also the air force scientist who experiments on himself with alien DNA. The character of Quinn, another alien human hybrid is another one of those interesting ongoing plotlines that was dropped for the second season. John Colicos in the role gets the best line of the series, and the show would have been better with more of him, and less of the Advocacy that ruled the aliens. Unfortunately the final episode is one that sticks in the mind too, for all the wrong reasons, as Season 1 ends on the worst possible note, when a Pat Benatar lookalike arrives to go on a killing spree, looking like a leather-clad mime.


War of the Worlds was great sci-fi television in the eighties but not so much now in 2012. For once, nostalgia has failed me, as I find this show is nowhere near as good as I had convinced myself it would be. I find instead I have outgrown it completely. Its target audience is probably just below its age certification, but that's a generation that is accustomed to HD quality, and CGI perfection. How they would take to the NTSC murkiness of yesteryear is questionable at best. I think you'll have to be a lot more forgiving than I if you want to appreciate War of the Worlds, but there are moments when the show still manages to shine.