I’ve been a writer now for almost a decade, self published and traditionally published but I’ve never had the opportunity for any of my work to be made into eany other medium. By this adapted for screen, either small or large or stage and after seeing the debacle that the BBC did with HG Wells’ War of the Worlds I’m sort of glad.

To be able to reach an even wider audience would be a remarkable experience but it has it’s pitfalls that are inherent. Mainly these lie with how the work is adapted or by whom. Marvel Movies seem to have done not too shabbily out of it even though they’ve changed certain things from the original source material and I understand that changes have to be made for the adaptation to fit the new medium but not all adaptations work as well as Marvel’s seem to have. The Warner produced DC movies have their own sets of troubles with picking the right balance with how they’ve adapted their characters to the big screen and \i could go on listing other works that have failed to reach that happy balance. even George Lucas has expressed his concern over how the new trilogy of his Star Wars has turned out so this is a huge problem and it was glaringly obvious last night to me while I watched the second episode of the BBC’s new War of the Worlds.

Before I go any further I must confess to not having read the original novel and to some reading this that point alone might invalidate this entire article but bear with me while i explain.

A brief look at how the writer of the new production changed it from the original novel is enough to know they made a mess of it. There was a post I read last night about the six main things they changed from the book. I said earlier that I understand that things need to change for the adaptation to fit in with modern society but the BBC said their new production was supposed to be faithful to the book and clearly it wasn’t. Changing a minor character into the lead simply because she was a woman is not an anti feminist opinion it’s an insult to the writer and the time it was set in. If you go about to write an historical novel or play you have to get your facts right and the period it was set in. For a woman to act like this character did, take the leading role, to be the action hero whilst her husband to be was turned into a whimpering wreck was an insult to Wells’ memory. Wells wrote the book in the period the book was set, but from a little research it seems he set it slightly into his future at the beginning of the 20th century so how his characters acted were true to the time. I’m not against strong female characters, I write many myself, my argument is remaining true to the source material. Another deviation from the book which is possibly the largest were the scenes of the red planet which turned out to be Earth after the war with the Martians. The story kept flipping from when the story was set to the future, after the war, which was not so much confusing because linear story telling nowadays seems to be old hat and everything seems to need to have either a flashback or flashforward. All this does is slow the pacing down and with an action driven story like War of the Worlds where the entire planet is in jeopardy, pacing of the story is crucial, Wells knew this and that’s why his novel was a fast paced action driven story.

With the addition of these red planet scenes of Earth after the Martians defeat it leads me to a conclusion about the ending which I sorely hope I’m wrong about which would completely ruin this even further for me, if that was actually possible. I’ll wait until the final episode airs to see if I’m right or wrong but that is the only reason I will be watching otherwise I’d have given up half way through episode two, or maybe even one. There is no sense of urgency about any of this and if the Earth was being invaded by anyone, let alone a species from another planet there would be some semblance of rising threat level, this just drags on with endless conversations about this can’t be happening, and there’s nothing to worry about and my favourite, ‘We are the masters of warfare, we will prevail, you have nothing to fear’

Going back to my original point, I’ve been an author for almost a decade with over fifteen books already published but I would have to think extremely hard if I was ever offered the chance to have any of them adapted for the screen. Yes the money would be a huge enticement but I would hate for my work to be butchered, but not only that, disrespected as badly, as HG Wells’ War of the Worlds has been.