War of the Worlds

It's starting to feel like the chances of the BBC successfully adapting any classic novel are a million to one against. They did an okay job on "War and Peace" (despite their insistence on pushing a barely-there incest subplot front and centre), but they made a mess of "Watership Down", and their "Les Miserables" was an epic failure. And now this.

As far as I can see, there are three big problems with "The War of the Worlds".

The first is that the first half of episode one is spent on a massive diversion from the book, establishing a petty domestic drama surrounding George and Amy and how monstrously unfair it obviously is that they have to live in 'exile' in Woking. (Presumably, this was chosen because the trendy media types at the BBC could think of no fate worse than having to live so far from the centre of their universe. It's such a shame that their timing is so lousy, given the role of Woking in recent events.)

In theory, this is fine. It allows the audience to find their feet and identify with the various characters, so that they actually care when those characters start dealing with the Martian terror.

Unfortunately, that immediately runs into the second problem: the characters are all awful. There's the standard-issue 21st Century feminist, the sexually ambiguous atheist doctor, the caricature of a Christian priest, and the drippy liberal journalist. Oh, and the British Empire apparently runs half the world while being governed by nitwits and defended by fools. Yay! They're all so fundamentally dull and unlikeable that by the time the Martians got around to actually doing something, I'd decided I was on their side; the sooner these muppets got wiped out, the better.

The third problem came in the second and third episodes, where it turned out we were 'enjoying' flash-forwards to eight years after the main action. This mostly seemed to be providing an elaborate setup to series two; and as far as I'm aware there is and never was any intention to produce such a thing.

The upshot of all of that was that there was a curious lack of tension throughout. About the only interest I could find was in trying to pinpoint when the various entirely predictable deaths were going to occur.

Oh, and I suppose I was bitterly amused by the fact that they very obviously ran out of story ten minutes before the end of the final episode, and therefore we were treated to them desperately trying to pad it out.

But mostly what I don't understand is why, if you're going to do a period adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" you'd bother to semi-accurately adapt the time period (albeit the wrong period, by about a decade), and then throw out almost everything from the book. Did the writers only have access to the Speilberg/Cruise version or something?

It's yet another real shame. When I heard the BBC were doing another version of "War of the Worlds", I found myself really looking forward to it. When I heard it was being done as a period piece, that was even better. And when it was then delayed a year, that further ramped up my anticipation. But it looks like the reason it was so delayed is that somebody realised they'd really messed it up.

And now it's on to "A Christmas Carol", which I should be looking forward to...