War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012)

A one-sheet poster.

"It’s like all colorful and fun holidays rolled into one!"

I love this movie. War of the Worlds: Goliath is a positively delightful and startlingly clever animated film. Incredibly skillfully done and rendered perfectly in 3D, it’s like all colorful and fun holidays rolled into one. It calls itself a steampunk adventure, and that is perfectly true. In every way the animation is up for the job. The 3D pops. The titles are wonderful, with sepia-tone images showing different eras—both terrestrial and Martian—appearing and dissolving, all to the lovely strains of  “Forever Autumn” in homage to Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

In fact War of the Worlds: Goliath is a perfect movie, making it one of the four Mars movies that are, in my view, perfect, in the same league as George Pal's The War of the Worlds (1953), Nigel Kneal's Five Million Years to Earth (UK title: Quatermass and the Pit), and The History Channel-Canada's The Great Martian War: 1913-1917.

 

 

 

Correction: Before I get into the story, I need to make this very important correction. In my book on page 192, I say, "If it wasn’t for the lame IRS subplot (thankfully brief), this would be a perfect movie."   This is in reference to a subplot about an Irish member of the team pictured in the poster above who has a brother with only one aspiration—to kill Englishmen, despite the Martians pounding and destroying all in their path. Initially I was troubled by this because I couldn't envision the IRA's priorities not shifting away from killing the English the very instant the Martians' heat rays started horribly disintegrating everything and everybody, clearly threatening our entire planet. However, due to a chance remark by my wife, and the resultant research, I've learned that during our real First World War (as opposed to the version that was about to break out in the movie and that was side-tracked by the Martian attack), when Germans were in fact mowing down English and French alike by the millions–quite literally—with their advanced machine guns and poison gas, the Irish Volunteers (from which the IRA later grew) took advantage of the distraction to kill and bomb and terrorize the English, creating a second front within the British Isles. My published remark was unfortunate because, had I realized that in this case that facts belie common sense, in my eyes this would have been then as it is now a perfect, completely satisfying movie on every possible level. Bravo, Mr. Pearson!  That said, here are some high-points of the story:

 

The conceit:  In 1898–99, as everyone knows, the Martians attacked earth and were defeated, and, of course, all their machines and other technology were left behind, which terrestrial engineers reverse engineered to remake the Earth’s future. However, there is always the fear that the Martians will return. In that event, earth’s nations have built an army of tripod war machines and huge zeppelins—A.R.E.S. (Allied Resistance Earth Squadron). Yet despite this universal dread, the nations of Europe are politically boiling over and World War I is about to begin. The A.R.E.S. international army is in the process of disbanding so that its individual soldiers can return to fight for their home nations.

 

The face of a Martian war machine.

But just then, the Martians do in fact arrive with super-souped-up war machines, A.R.E.S. stays together, and the machines royally battle it out. The earth’s greatest war machine, the Goliath, is put to the test. Fortunately, on the side of A.R.E.S. are Secretary of War Theodore Roosevelt, Professor Nikola Tesla, and a diverse crew of hero soldiers.

You know my opinion; now here are a couple of other perspectives (that are extracted from my book Mars in the Movies: A History by Thomas Kent Miller).

Enthusiast.

“From an animation and production standpoint, War of the Worlds: Goliath is a treasure trove, and very clearly a labor of love for the creators ... amazing, with the style best described as anime-inspired dieselpunk.”

—Sean Korsgaard on alternatehistoryweeklyupdate.blogspot.com

A glimpse of a Martian war machine.

 
Naysayer.

“[J]ust a few cereal commercials shy of a pointlessly cartoon marathon—violent, messily drawn and lifelessly dragging.”

—Martin Tsai in the Los Angeles Times  

(See the whole unnerving review here: http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/06/entertainment/la-et-mn-war-of-worlds-goliath-review-20140307

Martin  Tsai saw the same movie that Sean Korsgaard (just above) and I saw; how is it possible that Mr. Tsai could not recognize a true labor of love? How is it that he could actually go out of his way to diminish someone else's hard creative work?  I just don't get it.

War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012)

Malaysia, Japan, USA. Anderson Digital. Tripod Entertainment, Finas, MSC, Mavcap, Barking Cow Media Group. Animated. C. 1.77:1. 85m.

CREW: Director Joe Pearson. Script David Abramowitz. Story Joe Pearson. Producers David Abramowitz, Mike Bloemendal, Joe Pearson, Leon Tan. Executive Producer Kevin Eastman. Score Luka Kuncevic. Animation Director Young Hwan Sang. Editor Toby Risk.

CAST: Adrian Paul, Adam Baldwin, Mark Sheppard, Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Gracen, Jim Byrnes, Beau Billingslea, Joey D’Auria, Kim Buckingham.

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