In 1895 two events occurred which would create what is known today as contemporary science fiction. The first was the publication of Herbert George Wells' first foray into what he described as "scientific romance", The Time Machine; a novel which brought the genre firmly into the realms of the modern industrial age. The second was the Lumiere brothers' exhibition in Paris of what would become the most important and influential art form of the following decade and beyond - the cinema. The importance of these two events is tightly intertwined.
Born in Bromley , Kent in 1866, Wells' immense influence on science fiction can still be felt worldwide. From 110 years ago to the immediate future, it's possible to trace the history of science fiction cinema through the interpretations and the influence of H G Wells' work (most of which was written in Folkestone). At this moment, audiences are now experiencing the long-anticipated summer release of another film adaptation of a Wells novel, War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg, two of the most successful and popular figures working in film today. In fact, the list of filmmakers who have been inspired by Wells' work (sci-fi or not), reads like a 'who's who' of some of the most important figures in cinema history - Georges Melies, Orson Welles, David Lean, Marcel Carné, and now Spielberg.
Wells himself described cinema as "more beautiful and intellectually deeper and richer than any artistic form humanity has hitherto achieved". The themes and ideas in his novels have, in retrospect, been described as "cinematic" and filmmakers have taken full advantage of the comfortable translatability of his texts into film form. His writing is filled with detailed descriptions of fantastical concepts: time travel (The Time Machine), scientific experiments (The Island of Dr Moreau, 1896), invisibility and mad scientists (The Invisible Man, 1897), alien invasion (The War of the Worlds, 1898), space travel (The First Men in the Moon, 1901), the monstrous mutation of nature (The Food of the Gods , 1904), futuristic civilisations (The Shape of Things To Come, 1933) and supernatural powers (The Man Who Could Work Miracles, 1936). These have since become the staples of science fiction cinema.
From the very beginning it is possible to discern the influence his extraordinarily popular novels were having on filmmakers eager to display their new cinematic techniques and tricks. Georges Melies, considered as the grandfather of fantastic cinema, explored a lot of similar themes as Wells, particularly to create new illusions and magical effects: invisibility, supernatural powers, mad scientists in their laboratories and, as exemplified in his most famous film, La Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon , 1902), space travel. Although uncredited as a source, Wells' The First Men in the Moon, written the year before Melies' Voyage, bares uncanny similarities. Throughout the silent era Wells' material can be found cropping up again and again. Invisibility was a major way of exploiting new camera tricks and scenes of comedy, space travel for set designs and types of animation, and scientific experiments were a platform for a kind of magician-like display of a variety of special visual effects. The first true adaptation appeared in 1919 with The First Men in the Moon (Bruce Gordon and J L V Leigh), a film that has, sadly, since been lost.
In the thirties a number of adaptations were made which are, quite possibly, the most successful: Island of Lost Souls (Erle C Kenton, 1933), adapted from The Island of Dr Moreau, and The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) are both exemplary pieces of science fiction horror. There have been two subsequent versions of The Island of Dr Moreau. A rather dull version by Don Taylor in 1977, and a more adventurous, but equally flawed and ridiculous, one by John Frankenheimer in 1996. The idea of surgical experimentation and genetic tampering has, of course, become a major area of science fiction, and it's arguably plausible to look at films such as The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) and Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) in the same kind of light.
The Invisible Man spawned a string of sequels from The Invisible Man Returns (Joe May, 1940) to an addition from Turkey The Invisible Man in Istanbul (Lutfu Akat, 1955), and filmmakers have returned to Wells' novel with each evolution in special effects technology, from the green screen inventiveness of John Carpenter's Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) to the visually stunning digital effects in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man (2000).
Wells himself joined in and wrote the screenplays for The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes, 1936), from one of his own short stories, and Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936). Despite his disappointment with this version of The Shape of Thing to Come, Wells' had intended to write another screenplay of the novel. He died in 1946 before completing the project. A classic such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), although made years before Wells would write The Shape of Things to Come, takes the futuristic city and the politics of a future civilisation (as explored by Wells in The Time Machine) to extraordinary and dazzling new levels. While it's absurd to say that Wells is the main influence of the totality of science fiction cinema, it's possible to claim that his themes have been the basis of much of it. If we follow Metropolis , all the way to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) and Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), the visions of the futuristic city have become an important aspect of science fiction cinema.
But possibly the best adaptation of Wells, and perhaps the most successful, came from a radio broadcast produced by Orson Welles. On 30 November 1938, as audiences tuned in to listen the latest Mercury Theatre on the Air production on the radio, the transmission was interrupted by a news flash: the aliens had invaded. Reports of the chaos that ensued as listeners attempted to flee the city (riots, traffic jams, and mass hysteria) may have been slightly exaggerated (Orson Welles was forced to apologise to the public on national television) but there is no denying the success of Welles 'real time' documentary-style adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
The influence of the HG Wells novel was heavily felt during the fifties. Science fiction cinema boomed during this decade, particularly in America . With the threat of the atomic bomb, the paranoia of communist infiltration and the cold war, and the US/USSR space race, science fiction was ripe with possibilities and material. One of the strongest themes was that of invasion, and this was nowhere more prevalent than in The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953). Although the film doesn't reach the power of the Orson Welles radio play, and it misses out on some of H G Wells' political themes, adding religious metaphors instead, The War of the Worlds is a bright and energetic romp filled with Technicolor science fiction spectacle. The scenes of the alien craft floating over the cities are stunning, while the chance meeting between the heroine and one of the aliens near the end of the film is a brilliantly shocking moment. Aliens have been invading and destroying cities since, and in larger, louder, and more realistic ways as technology and special effects advance, from They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) and Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) to Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996) and Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfield, 1997).
The 1960s saw another version of First Men in the Moon (Nathan Juran, 1964) and Village of the Giants (Bert I. Gordon, 1965), loosely based on The Food of the Gods . Gordon would go on to make two more (loose) adaptations of the novel: the excruciatingly terrible The Food of the Gods (1976), in which actual farmyard animals were shot (literally at times) in slow-motion scrambling over miniature sets, and Empire of the Ants (1977).
The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960) began a spate of time-travelling science fiction films in the sixties and seventies. Pal's film version was a colourful, if somewhat dumbed-down version of Wells' book, although only the first half is truly faithful to its source. The concept of time travel provided filmmakers for the next two decades with plenty of scope with which to experiment, including La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1963), Je t'aime, Je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1967), Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) and Time after Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979), in which H G Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) travels to the 1970s in his own Time Machine in pursuit of Jack the Ripper. In 2002 came another attempt at The Time Machine, directed by Wells' grandson Simon Wells. Although evidently a fan of the original Pal version, and obviously attempting to make a definitive version of his grandfather's novel, the film suffers from what seems to be the curse of other Wells adaptations throughout the century. The use of new digital technology, at times, takes precedent over the story.
Just as Melies and his imitators showed off the new techniques and tricks of the trade during their time, filmmakers seem to have found in Wells stories of new technologies, an excuse to show off their new effects. Of course, this doesn't mean that on occasion they don't get it right, but by merely focusing on the technology they are forgetting to listen to old Wells warnings of how technology can also take away from society. While waiting on the edge of your seat for Spielberg's War of the Worlds (not to mention A Scanner Darkly, Fahrenheit 451 or Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith), keep your fingers crossed that the machines don't take control.
Angus Macdonald
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