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War of the Worlds - Oh dear...


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34 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Baffled.

 

33 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Garbage

 

32 minutes ago, Phil Bullock said:

Meandering nonsense! I always thought side 3 of the album lost focus but this was drivel...

 

 

have I missed it..?? Oh bother... :whistle:  :angel:

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Well... what a disappointment.

 

 

I am sure the events depicted could easily have been told in two hours.   Just bloated and boring.  A real missed opportunity.  I had been really looking forward to this but it was awful.

 

cheers

 

Ben A.

 

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Meanwhile.... BBC 4’s three-parter covering the events of 1641/2, the tumultuous seven weeks in which Charles 1 lost control of the country and left Parliament, or more correctly a faction within Parliament, effectively in control of the capital and heading a course for civil war, was absolutely engrossing. 

 

Probably why it was shown in three consecutive episodes at 10pm on a Sunday evening...

 

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1 hour ago, rockershovel said:

Meanwhile.... BBC 4’s three-parter covering the events of 1641/2, the tumultuous seven weeks in which Charles 1 lost control of the country and left Parliament, or more correctly a faction within Parliament, effectively in control of the capital and heading a course for civil war, was absolutely engrossing. 

 

Probably why it was shown in three consecutive episodes at 10pm on a Sunday evening...

 

 

Surprised that it got broadcast without being judged too politically sensitive!

 

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4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Baffled.

 

4 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Garbage

 

4 hours ago, Phil Bullock said:

Meandering nonsense! I always thought side 3 of the album lost focus but this was drivel...

 

 

 

I suppose I'll have to watch it before deleting the whole lot off the recorder, but I was hoping that all the sepia segments were a product of Georges demented imaginings as he wandered around a deserted London chanting "The Last Man Left Alive!!!".  Or at least a Dallas/Bobby in the shower plot device.....

 

The album.  Hmmmmm......  I get your drift.  I must admit that in preparation for the series, for which I expected so much, given the Edwardian setting, I re-read both The Book AND disinterred my copy of the Album to get into the correct frame of mind.  While the Album does creak and is a bit patchy nowadays, relistening didn't result in the almost desolate sense of disappointment that I've felt watching the TV series.

 

His Dark Materials, on the other hand, another cracking episode!

 

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7 hours ago, Ben A said:

 

Well... what a disappointment.

 

 

I am sure the events depicted could easily have been told in two hours.   Just bloated and boring.  A real missed opportunity.  I had been really looking forward to this but it was awful.

 

cheers

 

Ben A.

 

 

I was so disappointed (and annoyed over some of the political bull) I ordered a copy of the HGW book to read, it's been a good few years and I need to satisfy my need for martians.

 

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IF they had used different characters rather than those named in the original story (to follow a different narrative) it wouldn't have been so bad, especially if they wanted to tick more diversity and equality boxes. To use some of the same characters and introduce other weaker ones and to deviate from a well-known plot invites holes and criticisms. To then omit key events and introduce irrelevancies is then an insult to those who may watch a series because of prior interest, by Episode 3 it looked like they'd blown most of the CGI budget when there were events we would want to see. What's wrong with using a straightforward linear timeline instead of introducing a disjointed future? The trailers made it look promising but it ended up disappointing me.

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7 hours ago, Ben A said:

 

Well... what a disappointment.

 

 

I am sure the events depicted could easily have been told in two hours.   Just bloated and boring.  A real missed opportunity.  I had been really looking forward to this but it was awful.

 

cheers

 

Ben A.

 

Are you allowed to say that? It was a BBC programme. I agree with everything you say.  I also hated all the back and forward in time.

Probably the worst drama I have seen on the BBC in the last twenty years.

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43 minutes ago, Chris M said:

Are you allowed to say that? It was a BBC programme. I agree with everything you say.  I also hated all the back and forward in time.

Probably the worst drama I have seen on the BBC in the last twenty years.

 

Ha - last time I checked I could say anything I like about anything, barring specific and well defined rules around political opinions during the election period.

 

 

Besides, any disciplinary panel would need to watch the damn thing, and I am sure that would be enough to dissuade even the most ardently indoctrinated middle-manager...

 

 

cheers

 

Ben A.

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10 minutes ago, Ben A said:

 

Ha - last time I checked I could say anything I like about anything, barring specific and well defined rules around political opinions during the election period.

 

 

Besides, any disciplinary panel would need to watch the damn thing, and I am sure that would be enough to dissuade even the most ardently indoctrinated middle-manager...

 

 

cheers

 

Ben A.

 

Imagines a team of BBC management sitting in 'Frankie Howard' discussing a wayward news reporter who's made some adverse comments on the BBC's latest flagship Drama.

 

So that's all good then.......

 

Tom.  

 

 

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Thank goodness the cricket (due to rain delays) started earlier, so that I could turn over at 2130 and watch something more interesting, and with the New Zealand bowling, scarier, than the tripe on BBC1.

 

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Well I made it to the end . Do I get a medal?    It was OK but as others have said could have been so much better if they had directly adapted the book.

 

We could do with a bit of light entertainment though. Not a lot of laughs about. Telly getting very dark . I feel a DVD of Morecambe and Wise coming on

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Three hours wasted. Not just the sepia tones, but the blurry, echo effect movements really did not help (I thought my telly was on the blink). Then the currently politically correct speech about how the British Empire behaved in conquering the world, and this being our just desserts. It was just too contrived and out of place.

 

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The only resemblance to the book is the title!

The Martians were laughable, possibly tapping into peoples fear of spiders, but failing miserably.

The bit about the empire didn't add anything to the story and seemed out of place! A 21 century comment on 19/20th century events with no context.

It had the potential for a cracking piece of drama, but fell short of what we expect from the BBC

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1 hour ago, Ian Morgan said:

Then the currently politically correct speech about how the British Empire behaved in conquering the world, and this being our just desserts. It was just too contrived and out of place.

 

 

It was certainly contrived.  And, like much of the script, it was clunky.

 

I'd have followed the brother, Frederick.  Frederick understood that, when you are being hunted by blood sucking aliens, what you don't do is pause to wring your hands over a clunky analogy. George was, all in all, a bit of a berk.

 

Strangely, that does seem to mirror the book to some extent.  The narrator is largely passive and reactive. The younger brother (in the case of the book) is pluckier and more proactive. 

 

Was the 'Empire speech' justified, would Wells have agreed?  

 

Wells was a socialist, well, a Fabian, and anti-rascist and anti-nationalist, but he was probably restricted in terms of how explicit he could be in print.

 

The text of WotW certainly takes swipes at the Hobbit-like parochialism and complacency of the English of his day.  He includes their ignorance, xenophobia and unthinking racism, illustrated in the assumption that the Martians (despite travelling across the gulf of space) are an inferior species. Wells's English are rather like Betjeman's casually racist supplicant in Westminster Abbey.  There are some possessed by greed, which might be taken as a swipe at the rapacious side of capitalism, and an instance of religious delusion. To the extent that the Empire provided examples of these traits, I daresay he would have been unsupportive of it. Some of this is doubtless informed by his political leanings, but much of it is a reflection on the human condition more generally.   He developed a belief in World Government, but, when push came to shove, Wells knew that ours was a society worth fighting for and he supported Britain in the First World War.

 

Wells uses the Martians to force the complacent English to face a number of their less attractive assumptions and beliefs. It's not that he portrays them as particularly bad, but rather as guilty of lazy thinking.  They are presented as victims of their complacency, not judged on their Empire. His analogy is that of the Dodo.  Their extinction is not a judgment in the moral sense.  Rather, they are victims of complacency and the obvious analogy with Empire is that the stronger will always prey on the weaker. It has more to do with Darwinian inevitability rather than a moral condemnation and receipt of the wages of sin. Wells leaves the latter to the Curate, who is clearly mad, and, thus, the whole concept of the Martians as a moral judgment is rejected by Wells.  The BBC steal the idea back and place it on its head; their priest is equally delusional, but the nature of his delusion is that the defeat of the Martians is evidence of divine approbation.

 

Thus, I conclude that the BBC's mawkish wallowing in post-colonial guilt is bound to strike a false note, quite apart from being an absurd digression for the characters at the point of the story at which it occurs. 

 

According to Wiki, Wells stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward (two years after writing WotW) he considered a World State inevitable. He envisaged the state to be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to progress by merit rather than birth. Wells's 1928 book The Open Conspiracy argued that groups of campaigners should begin advocating for a "world commonwealth", governed by a scientific elite, that would work to eliminate problems such as poverty and warfare.

 

All this sounds rather like the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek universe.  As to whether that will ever come to pass .....

 

273859148_StarTrek.JPG.a24bc9fa5be6ced73d636045959948dd.JPG

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Well, out of respect for both H.G.Wells, and Jeff Wayne, who's efforts ( and versions) on the same story I have enjoyed, I gave this effort from the BBC time to watch - now I wonder why I bothered, total c**p.

 

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