Superhero Media: War of the Worlds Goliath

Although War of the Worlds Goliath is on Netflix, you've probably only heard of it if you're big into Victorian Science Fiction and/or Steampunk, as I first became aware of it on the Lead Adventure Forum. War of the Worlds Goliath advertises itself as being "Teddy Roosevelt, Tesla and the Red Baron fight the martian invasion". Hell yes, sign me up for some of that please. The truth, however, is far more bland and generic. Taking place fifteen years after the Martian invasion depicted in The War of the Worlds, the world has united somewhat, though is teetering on the edge of the Great War, until the tripods return and I guess no one gives a fuck about the Baltics anymore. The story follows a group of generic soldiers that crew a human-made tripod, the titular "Goliath", as they fight in the new war, failing to make any real impression on me as I watched. Yeah, War of the Worlds Goliath is pretty bad, and probably not worth watching, to be honest. 

The animation quality is poor, looking like it was made in Flash, the voice acting is weak and the CGI vehicles don't blend well with the hand-drawn style. There are a few decent sequences, but all are heavily borrowed from better films, like the Red Baron dogfigting Martian ships in a canyon, almost shot-for-shot from Independence Day, or Teddy Roosevelt getting into a bar fight, but the whole package is still bland at best. I don't really understand how the concept got boiled down to so much cliche beyond just having bad writers behind it all, there are good ideas, but they're buried like diamonds in a septic tank. Why take such a brilliant and iconic novel and strip away the personal horror, techofear and hubris? Do people not get The War of the Worlds? H.G. Wells isn't all that deep an author in the grand scheme of things, he wrote a book about the horrors of mechanised warfare and it seems we can't get past ideas of it being a fun excuse for a scrap. I enjoy the Martians turning up in a game as much as anyone else, but they're really not the generic antagonist people seem to want them to be. 

Another bugbear of mine that pops up a lot in this revisionist nerd media, what the hell do Americans think globalisation looks like? Seems to me that when American authors imagine a united world, that world works basically the same as the USA does now. This really irks me, as the USA doesn't even have the metric system or a decent version of democracy, a Northern European Parliamentary approach would be my pick for world government (other than technologically-supported communalist anarchy, but that's a whole different article). Hell, in the 1960s, British science fiction envisaged a more European system for global governance. I don't think when the world unites that it will be behind the USA as it has ever presented itself. There we go, War of the Worlds Goliath is so bad, it set me off on a political rant. Why do they have infantry if they have no effect on the tripods? Why do they have man-portable Machine Guns? It doesn't even make sense if they're the product of cannibalized Martian technology, Martians don't have machine guns! I'm going to go watch something better.