REVIEW: War of the Worlds TV Pilot (1988)

Like some kind of entertainment world version of puberty, it seems like every movie that's ever released in Hollywood will eventually start the process of turning into a television series. After a few years, if it's marketable, the movie will start to grow producers and slide into development again, and experience countless awkward moments in front of beautiful actresses. Then it'll go deep into debt, get shoved into a weeknight timeslot with some other show, and eventually produce spin-offs. It's a good morning for sloppy metaphors, isn't it?

Following right on the heels of George Pal's 1953 film version of the HG Wells' classic (at least in dog years) 1988 saw the release of television's "War of the Worlds" weekly series, initially produced by the Strangis Brothers. It's been thirty odd years since the Martian fleet attacked with their tripods and nearly decimated the population of the Earth, only to be felled by common earth bacteria contracted during a weekend tryst with the Hilton sisters. According to the television script, the government packed up all those alien bodies and machines and stowed them away in the mysterious Hangar 15, never to be seen again...

...until a group of terrorists take over said hangar in an attempt to commandeer a US broadcasting satellite so they can announce their demands to the world. I'm not exactly certain what their demands really are, other than the immediate resignation of the US President, and maybe to constructively suggest that the military post more than two (2) guards at the "abandoned alien technology" hangar. In the ensuing firefight with the guards, one of the errant bullets hits the alien carcass barrels, which leak a suspicious goo. Then again, isn't all goo suspicious in some way?

The goo starts to melt nearby canisters, and some spindly three-fingered hands emerge. Slowly, perhaps too slowly, each of the terrorists gets their body taken over by an alien being, which (at least as far as my recollection of the 1953 movie is concerned) is a brand-new alien ability. It seems that Hangar 15 is located right around some kind old nuclear test site, and the ambient radiation killed off the bacteria that downed the aliens in the first place. They weren't dead, as the world thought, they were just comatose for thirty years. Luckily, they missed the 1970s.

Cut to: zany academic scientist Harrison Blackwood, played with zany academic spunk by Jared Martin. Blackwood is apparently in charge of all kinds of New Age-y scientific experiments at some non-descript university, and I'll cut through thirty or so minutes of dull exposition by saying that he's "zany" and "unorthodox," he's romantically interested in his new single-mom research assistant Suzanne, and he's got a wheelchair-bound techno whiz buddy named Norton Drake that's analyzing radio signals from outer space. If you've rented the disc, you can just skip to chapter sixteen now. Drake has found some very interesting signals coming from space -- but they appear to be responses to signals coming from Earth.

Meanwhile, the no-nonsense hard-as-nails Lt. Col. Ironhorse is in charge of the investigation of the actual terrorist attack, which of course smashes his plotline against Blackwood's -- but can they work together to prevent the aliens from retrieving their spaceships and early-1950s ray-gun sound effect reels? With a little help from some of the more secret branches of Uncle Sam's family, you can bet that they're gonna try -- for at least two seasons.

I was pretty excited about this hitting DVD, since it's one of those "wish I'd paid more attention" shows from my childhood, just like the entire WPIX lineup. I remember bits and pieces from the original run and syndication, and I figured that I'd give it a try and see exactly how forgiving nostalgia really is -- turns out, nostalgia is really forgiving, because this show really sucks. Actually, to be fair, the pilot really sucks, so I doubt that I'll ever have the heart to sit through too many of the actual episodes.

I've read in articles and reviews about how this show helped jump-start various trends in modern television science fiction, and I can definitely see similar themes: mainly, vast government conspiracies and the paranoia of not really knowing who's on your side. On occasion, it's got that gritty, "X-Files" sort of feeling; other times, it's more of a high school video project. I'm not sure what budgets were like back in 1988, but the pilot episode -- usually the one to get money thrown at it -- looks like a particularly low-budget episode of "MacGyver". It's all close-ups, never more than five people on screen at any time, and even the alien ray-gun blasts at the finale look like they might have been blue-screened directly out of 1953; they're laughably bad effects that might've worked if the show wasn't trying so hard to be dark and gloomy. The "V" series also had pretty ugly bluescreen work, but it was such a goofy show that it didn't really matter.

Most of all, the pilot lacks a decent script. I've given passes to many a show and film that looked shitty, just because the script had something working in it. This time, the script sinks. Plummets, really, down the vast abyss of implausibility and "what the fu--?". Starting with the curiously under-guarded Hangar 15, and culminating with the realization that the show has no idea whether or not anyone remembers the giant alien invasion from 1953. I've seen plot holes before, but this hole has flashing lights and ConEd guys and lava shooting out of it, so it's pretty hard to miss. It would be better if the script didn't remind the audience that it didn't make sense every ten minutes, but it almost always goes out of its way to bring up the invasion, and then have every character act as if they've never heard of it. And then they bring in other characters who reference it. And then deny it. It's frustrating, because it's so, so stupid.

Here's the breakdown of the problem: the invasion happened (which explains the aliens being here). There are flashbacks to the invasion, the main character's family was killed by the aliens, and he was raised by a professor that devoted his life to studying the alien artifacts left behind. When Blackwood brings up his evidence that there are aliens communicating between space and Earth, no one believes him. In fact, most of the cast seems to think that the idea of alien beings is bizarre and implausible, which is why Blackwood is seen as so kooky. Hell, even Blackwood -- the one man who you'd think would be a little bit more realistic about alien life, since his family was melted by them and all -- has a SETI-like academic project where he's trying to imagine what a plausible alien life form would be like. I felt like I spent ninety minutes with those people who walk around with their glasses on looking for their glasses.

Just when you thought that the show couldn't get any better, there's the acting. Jared Martin, the thespian behind Harrison Blackwood, is actually fairly good; he does kooky as the script requires, and he's got one of those voices that almost sounds like it was made for early-40s radio drama. The part as written is more or less unforgivable, but Martin does well enough to make him interesting. That's the good stuff. The bad is everyone else, particularly Richard Chaves as Lt. Col. Ironhorse, and Philip Akin as Norton Drake. Chaves -- who should know how to deal with malevolent aliens after co-starring in Predator -- shouts and growls his lines like a fifteen-year-old pretending to be a drill sergeant. Akin, on the other hand, has perhaps the most distracting non-accent I've ever heard. I was going to say that it was a crummy fake Jamaican accent, but a little research reveals that Akin is actually Jamaican, so I guess it's a crummy American accent. Regardless of which dialect we're talking about, it's distracting and makes him sound like he's either trying to disguise it or bring it out. You'll probably have to listen to it to understand how annoying it gets.

I haven't seen the Spielberg/Cruise version of the story, but I'm a fan of the Orson Welles portrayal and I'd really love to see the story carried on -- even with the same basic premise as this series. I'd just need it to be a little higher quality, and maybe have it arbitrarily make some kind of logical sense. You know, the kind of things that prevent me from trying to shake sense into my TV's cathode tube. Until this hypothetical revival happens, I'm going to have to put this set next to "Werewolf" on the shelf of TV shows that sucked, but could have been great.




Okay, there's one good line. Blackwood is a pacifist, and when he and Ironhorse go to infiltrate Hangar 15, he turns down the opportunity to carry a sidearm. "I don't believe in guns," he says, to which Ironhorse replies: "I'm sure the aliens will respect that."