When Martian war machines hit the Western Front

October 7, 2014 8:03 AM

This may be the best War of the Worlds movie ever made, and it's barely three minutes long. And it's not exactly doing HG Wells per se. It's a trailer for or clip from The Great Martian War 1913-17, which concerns "the catastrophic events and unimaginable horrors of 1913-17, when Humankind was pitted against a savage Alien invasion." The video seems to use a mix of reenactors, period film, and f/x. (SLVimeo)

Some more background here.

posted by doctornemo (32 comments total)

On reflection, the music may be distracting. It's worth watching on mute, as a silent film.
posted by doctornemo at 8:04 AM on October 7, 2014 [7 favorites]

Needs a few cuts to Shelby Foote pontificating in front of a bookshelf.
posted by Iridic at 8:13 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

I thought this was fantastic, but needed a bit more interaction between humans and the martians to really sell it.

People who enjoy the aesthetic of this and also dig comic books might want to check out Scarlet Traces.
posted by bswinburn at 8:19 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

I feel like such a nitpicker. But half of my brain very quickly noticed that there's a lot of shots with a ton of film grain on the real elements, and absolutely none on the CG Martians. And it just kept on telling me that throughout the whole short.

Other than that it was very pretty!

(I used to be in animation, and have tuned my visual cortex to see shit like that. It's kind of annoying sometimes.)
posted by egypturnash at 8:22 AM on October 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

That's almost excellent. The idea certainly is, and its realisation almost so. Buuuut.. minor point, there seems to be one of those irksome fast focus pulls at around 00:38 which You Do Not Get in WW1-vintage footage. And I think you should not get anywhere, but thasjusme.

Have some unease about using real footage of people dying violent deaths for something so trivial. Still chewing that one over.
posted by Devonian at 8:22 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

This is awesome.
posted by vorpal bunny at 8:23 AM on October 7, 2014

Certainly better than the series itself, which was kind of meh.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:25 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Some more background here.

(whines) There's no link linked to the "here"!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:26 AM on October 7, 2014

Saw this yesterday and I agree that it's probably better without the music. (Also, thanks to egypturnash for pointing out what was bugging me about the mix of CGI and period film. There was something a little wrong and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was. When I read the comment, I was all OHHHH.)
posted by immlass at 8:29 AM on October 7, 2014

Trench warfare? Trenches were a part of the long term siege warfare practiced in Europe. These Martian tripod things weren't siege warfare. If you're going to ripoff actual history then you need to make sure that it makes sense.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:34 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's weird, Empress. I'm not sure what happened to the link. Here it is. Sorry about that.
posted by doctornemo at 8:39 AM on October 7, 2014

On reflection, the music may be distracting. It's worth watching on mute, as a silent film.

A waste of a good opportunity to license Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:44 AM on October 7, 2014

The HG Wells Martians have three levels of military technology, don't they? Death rays fired from the landing cylinders, walkers, and flyers. Trenches may have been employed in the early stages of the war to surround the cylinders, giving troops safe from death rays and restricting Martian movements. Trenches were built very quickly in 1914, for example.

When the walkers are constructed, things become more mobile. However, it is not implausible that one or more human Powers sign up with the Martians: cooperation with the invaders is always an option for one side or another. So a number of possibilities for trench warfare.
posted by alasdair at 8:46 AM on October 7, 2014

Neat point, Devonian, about the pull. I wonder when people started doing that.

Re: "using real footage of people dying violent deaths", the PLAZMA studio account holder addressed this in a comment down on that Vimeo thread:

Hi Eric. We did not use any sensitive footage. We made choices mainly from controlled news reel archives, most of these were re enactments from the time filmed in the UK..
Most of the footage with soldiers in combat are modern day reconstructions, made to look old.
I understand your point of view and this is why we deliberately used no footage of actual battles.

I don't have the technical chops to assess just how far they carried out that intention.
posted by doctornemo at 9:07 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Some parallels between the War of the Worlds and the First World War come across so remarkably in this video that it's strange that no major movie studio has tried to pull it off. UK independent Pendragon Pictures' H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and documentary-style sequel War of the Worlds - The True Story look like only direct-to-video efforts (and no, Asylum 's H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds doesn't count).

Trench warfare? Trenches were a part of the long term siege warfare practiced in Europe. These Martian tripod things weren't siege warfare. If you're going to ripoff actual history then you need to make sure that it makes sense.

And since H. G. Wells was the grandfather of tabletop wargaming, this would undoubtably have occurred to him, and one could imagine him playing out various scenarios for the Martian invasion with tin soldiers. The use of Martian "black smoke", which certainly foreshadowed gas warfare in WWI, was just one of the ways he came up with to counter trench tactics. Similarly their Heat Ray was fired from their walking tripodal elevated platforms, which combined artillery and mobile armor far superior anything fielded in even final phase of the Great War. (Whether the "red weed" was a case of Martian bio-warfare or just an invasive species was unclear in his novel, as far as I recall.) Welles's explicit theme was how superior alien technology would utterly devastate the British Empire's forces - humankind's best at the time - in much the same way the Maxim gun and Winchester rifle overwhelmed the Zulu assegai and the tomahawk ax. That's completely missing from this video, of course.

(The second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen got all this right, but nobody wants to see another attempt at big-budget studio adaptation in that series.)

I understand your point of view and this is why we deliberately used no footage of actual battles.

Re-purposing actual war footage for a fictional project would be pretty bloody tasteless. Even mixing in contemporary newsreel footage is questionable since this is the centenary of "the war to end all wars". It's not surprising that this is a History® Channel undertaking - even the Syfy has higher standards than that.
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:11 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

On reflection, the music may be distracting.

I dunno; for my money, nothing conjures up the late Edwardian Era like nu gaze at 160 beats per minute.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:14 AM on October 7, 2014 [5 favorites]

You could just scrap the Martians; the Great War breaks out in the wake of the Martian Invasion, Human armies using poorly understood alien weapons technology -- heat rays in place of machine guns, no-man's land made of glass.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:20 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

On reflection, the music may be distracting.

If PLAZMA wanted something contemporary for their soundtrack, why not a minimalist score like Philip Glass's The Fog of War or Michael Nyman's Enemy Zero?

P.S. For another example of Welles's impressively prescient pieces of science fiction, his The Land Ironclads pits proto-tanks against 19th-century army tactics circa the Battle of Balaclava and makes for similarly unsettling reading during the Great War centenary.
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:22 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the link, a comment from the creator:

Thank you for the positive responses, this clip was at first just intended to be a directing/vfx reel. It seems to have taken on a life of its own which is great. A composer has put together a very different audio track to the footage that i will post soon. Also must give mention to the great team that worked on the show.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:46 AM on October 7, 2014

I would enjoy this a lot more if I didn't get the sense so strongly that the History Channel was more interested in doing this than in doing an actual documentary on World War I.
posted by dannyboybell at 9:54 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

On reflection, the music may be distracting. It's worth watching on mute, as a silent film.

Yeah, I was hoping for something a little more newsreelish. This aggro music and fast cuts thing gets tiresome fast.
posted by mhoye at 10:09 AM on October 7, 2014

Trench warfare? Trenches were a part of the long term siege warfare practiced in Europe. These Martian tripod things weren't siege warfare. If you're going to ripoff actual history then you need to make sure that it makes sense.

Entrenching would be the only way to stay alive while being attacked by a heat ray. You might get a situation more like the Eastern Front; armies moving around a lot (comparatively) but digging in when they came into contact.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:57 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wow. Weird timing. In the last few weeks I've been working a script for a period piece riff on War of the Worlds. Little or no CG, but this is some good research material! Thank you!
posted by brundlefly at 11:58 AM on October 7, 2014

This is going to be very popular with players of All Quiet on the Martian Front, the 15mm wargame released this year by Alien Dungeon.
posted by Soulfather at 1:47 PM on October 7, 2014

I'm pretty sure this was shown over here in the states on one of the cable networks. I swear I saw it fairly recently. It was a fun watch, though they do repeat a lot of the same scenes over and over throughout the two hours.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:23 PM on October 7, 2014

Yes, it was just on BBC America about a month ago. It wasn't very good. And yes, they repeat a LOT of the scenes over and over. It was a neat idea, but not very well executed in my opinion.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:37 PM on October 7, 2014

The real distraction, like anything with walking tripods, is how they work. You just can't lift one of a tripod's legs without falling over, in reality. Looks great, though.
posted by Rash at 8:59 PM on October 7, 2014

njohnson23 : Trench warfare? Trenches were a part of the long term siege warfare practiced in Europe. These Martian tripod things weren't siege warfare. If you're going to ripoff actual history then you need to make sure that it makes sense.

Remember though; the War of the Worlds broadcast was 1938, so the high speed mechanized warfare that characterized world war II hadn't really happened yet. And as countries always are best prepared for their last war, it would actually make the most sense that if there was some kind of alien invasion around that time period, they would instinctively start with trench warfare as a way to claim battlefield space (and they would lose quickly),

But as we can see, throughout the film, they adapt existing war machines to use the same high power weapons, making it much more of a mobile war that we are familiar with in industrialized, modern conflicts.

Personally, I loved the video, music and all. It pinged all the best parts of my brain, particularly the biplanes firing off energy weapons and the tripods. That was fantastic.
posted by quin at 9:11 PM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The real distraction, like anything with walking tripods, is how they work. You just can't lift one of a tripod's legs without falling over, in reality.

Same applies to bipeds though, surely? Don't make me think about how I walk I may never be able to move again.
posted by um at 11:08 PM on October 7, 2014

Luckily for my wallet, nobody has made a 15mm war game out of this.

/shuts eyes la la la
posted by obiwanwasabi at 11:20 PM on October 7, 2014

@Ray Walston, Luck Dragon: Human armies using poorly understood alien weapons technology

That was a possibility that always seemed implicit at the end of The War of the Worlds. Wells mentions in the Epilogue that

the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter.

But given the massive military advantage such technology would give, they'd be sure to keep investigating (and not in laboratories in the middle of a major city, but at some British equivalent of Area 51).
posted by raygirvan at 4:36 AM on October 8, 2014

Ray Walston, Luck Dragon:
You could just scrap the Martians; the Great War breaks out in the wake of the Martian Invasion, Human armies using poorly understood alien weapons technology...
At times WWI resembles science fiction, as each side rolled out wild mad science inventions: poison gas, flamethrowers, zeppelins raining death from the skies, freaking land ironclads.
posted by doctornemo at 7:25 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]