The Great Martian War: 1913–1917 (2013)

What an audacious, perfectly clever, and perfectly realized project.

Waves and waves of Martians!

The beast King Kong in RKO’s 1933 blockbuster film titled King Kong was termed “The Eighth Wonder of the World!” Well, move over King Kong, here comes The Great Martian War: 1913–1917. Frankly, this mock-umentary is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The utmost skill and craftsmanship have delivered this merging of faux archival-style (scratched, battered) footage (appearing as though from The Great War) with an endless CGI army of ruthless Titan alien machines. (Its sometimes needs mentioning that before World War II, the conflict we now call World War I was called The Great War, since in those early days, the thought that there would soon be a second war of global proportions, was not uppermost in most people’s minds.)

June 11, 2022. I am amending this blog site to include the Internet Archive site where, I only just discovered, the entire 2-hour movie can be watched.   https://archive.org/download/TheGreatMartianWar19131917.Mister.X 

😂

This impressive 2-hour TV movie produced by the BBC and the Canadian branch of The History Channel comprises three types of material flawlessly blended together: (1) actual archival footage from the period but not from battles, per se, (2) brand new footage of interviews, war scenes, and connecting and framing material, and (3) CGI of the invading machines. All the new footage that purports to be actually historical in nature is then aged appropriately ... but not all the same. Since the images of battle would have been shot at different times on different film stock in different cameras by different photographers and then likely stored in different places, the quality of these separate elements would necessarily be different.

 A three-minute YouTube collage.

The interviews of elderly survivors were supposed to have been filmed years apart, again implying that the film stock for each of the separate interviews would have aged differently. Plus all the numerous modern interviews with historians, museum curators, and the like needed to appear modern. Thus, after the CGI had been created and integrated with the live action material, all but the most modern sections of the film had to be aged, but each separate element needed to be aged differently—different degrees of blurriness, different dust particles, different scratches, different tears, different color balance, different hand-cranking styles, on and on, so that in the end what you have is absolutely ironic: super-scientific cutting-edge war machines appearing in century-old scratched news footage.

The Great Martian War 1913–1917 is a consummate TV mock-umentary created with unparalleled skill showing how the Martians were the real enemies during the era we think of as World War One. These photos were aged and blurred intentionally. 
Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

L. Ross Raszewski (blog.trenchcoatsoft.comblog.trenchcoatsoft.com) describes this clever counterfeit footage well:
 

“The interview footage is really convincing.... What sells it is the audiovisual texture.... Remember, this is purporting to be a documentary made a century after the fact ... so this is all archive footage dated from the ’60s to the ’90s. The sound is flat. The video is grainy—and it’s grainy in different ways. Interviews dated to the early ’80s have film grain, and those from the ’90s have VHS artifacts. Some of it is in 4:3. Other parts are widescreen but have that slightly-wrong look of having been cropped and enlarged. The colors are either oversaturated or faded depending on the vintage.”
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The filmmakers made a point of never using actual battle footage from World War I out of respect for the all-too-real sacrifices made by so many during that terrible time. When necessary, they shot new war footage with actors. Also, they respected the real events and histories of historical personalities by having fiction and real life intersect when appropriate. For example, in both reality and in the film immense numbers of young men died in battle in vain due to the ineptitude or ignorance of their commanding officers; no-man’s land was all too real—in fact, on the first day of the Battle of Sommes, for example, more than 12,000 French and English soldiers perished, but nothing could be done to help the wounded who lay in the mud, shattered and moaning; by the end of the Battle of Sommes more than 1.2 million men on both sides had been killed; the film raises the death toll in the equivalent battle to three million. 

This is another YouTube mashup using music from Jeff Wayne's Musical 
Version of The War of the Worlds (see a previous posting).

And I haven’t even mentioned the story or plot or the quality of acting. As for the plot, there is no point paraphrasing the description that appears on The History Channel’s own website (www.history.co.uk/shows/the-great-martian-warwww.history.co.uk/shows/the-great-martian-war):

 

"Europe was on tenterhooks in the 2nd decade of the 20th century, everyone was expecting a Great War between the major European powers. But then, in 1913, something crashed into the forests of SW Germany. Troops were sent to investigate but were wiped out. Martian fighting machines began making their way across Western Europe and the countries of Europe combined forces to resist them. With aspects taken from 'The War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells and from WWI itself, this dramatization presents a documentary style look at events as they unfolded and the effect they had of our world today."

The acting never seems like acting. The aged survivors and all those who were supposedly interviewed never seem to be anything but what they appear to be. The CGI Martian war machine designs (there are four distinct types) are all incredibly clever (staying true to Wells but with a steam-punk flavor), and their behavior and movements always look 100 percent authentic. Indeed, the entire film seems authentic, and to have pulled it off so satisfactorily reflects uncommonly well on The Great Martian War’s creative team.

 

An FYI:  Timothy Hines, of Pendragon Picture, in 2005 released a very-long-in-production straight-to-video War of the Worlds that was truer to the original novel in terms of time and location than anything to come before or since. For various reasons, Hines released four versions, cut mainly due to length issues. However, his last version was majorly different and was called

War of the Worlds: The True Story. It is a clever mock-umentary. Today is August 9, 2022. In a conversation a few weeks ago he said that he had taken his finished The True Story mock-umentary to The History Channel to raise interest. Nothing came of that, but later the History Channel released 1913-1917, which does have similarities.

 The Great Martian War 1913–1917 (2013 TV movie)

Canada/UK. Entertainment One Television, Impossible Pictures, The History Channel, BBC. C & B&W. 1.33:1 & 1.77:1. 120m.

CREW: Director Mike Slee. Script Steve Maher. Original Concept Steve Sarossy. Producer Mike Slee. Score Mark Korven. Director of Photography Christopher Romeike. Production Designer Andrew Berry. Casting Larissa Mair. Special Visual Effects Intelligent Creatures.

CAST: Narrator Mark Strong. Jock Donnelly Jock McLeod. Nerys Vaughan Joan Gregson. Hughie Logan Ian Downie. Duncan Mitchell-Myers Thomas Gough. Kim Lafonde Ashley Bomberry. Lawrence Hart Daniel Matmor. Alice Hale Hazel Douglas. Howard Klee Howard Jerome.

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