" The War Of The Worlds" episode 1, latest BBC travesty of the HG Wells classic novel.
Sigh.
Really tried my patience this.
Really slow to get going and interspersed with needlessly cryptic short "arty" bursts of insects and such like. Tiresomely leaden attempts at symbolism I can only assume.
And there was me thinking the original book was about one man's view of a cataclysmic alien invasion.
Instead we get what seemed like half the first episode (of 3 only, it's not like they need to pad it out to 6 or anything) weighed down with a load of invented tosh about a late Victorian couple "living in sin" and being frowned on by their neighbours, and the bloke being more interested in going to see his ex-wife to try and get a divorce than he is in a Martian meteorite that's landed on his doorstep and is about to start killing people.
And let's make the live-in-lover a proto-feminist who's "with child" to boot.
Oh, and let's also invent a brother for this character, who happens to be in government as well, and who's fallen out with him over the scandal.
Ditto the newspaper that's his employer.
Cue scenes I also don't remember from the book, where the TV adapter decides that Wells' dialogue and characters presumably aren't interesting enough, so what's really needed is an editor type to snap at our hero the immortal (and not remotely cliched) phrase "this paper's got bigger fish to fry". Give me strength.
Why didn't they just pick one of HG Wells' social commentary novels and adapt that instead, that's clearly what the makers are more interested in making ?
I don't really know what it is about this novel that makes every film-maker who's tried a version of it feel the need to mess around with it so much ?
On the plus side.....CGI Martian tripods are a bit more impressive than the 1980's John Christopher series ones ?
But yawn we've seen CGI Martian tripods in the Spielberg film.
So left really not sure why this series needs to exist, other than to reclaim the story from the US to good-old-Victorian-imperialist-Britain for all the Brexit voters.
Only oops, Britain gets pretty much completely destroyed by the Martians - sorry for the spoiler. But then again I'm going by the book, so I'm sure that'll be rewritten as not being interesting and 21st century enough - maybe the Martians will turn out to be "woke" and not nasty at all, the first lot of deaths are just a misunderstanding.