The War Of The Worlds [1953] [Criterion] (Blu-ray)

The War Of The Worlds [1953] [Criterion] (BLU)

Byron Haskin

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SHIPS FREE in U.S.

Synopsis

A mysterious, meteorlike object has landed in a small California town. All clocks have stopped. A fleet of glowing green UFOs hovers menacingly over the entire globe. The Martian invasion of Earth has begun, and it seems that nothing—neither military might nor the scientific know-how of nuclear physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry)—can stop it. In the expert hands of genre specialists George Pal and Byron Haskin, H. G. Wells’s end-of-civilization classic receives a chilling Cold War–era update, complete with hallucinatory Technicolor and visionary, Oscar-winning special effects. Emblazoned with iconographic images of 1950s science fiction, The War of the Worlds is both an influential triumph of visual imagination and a still-disquieting document of the wonder and terror of the atomic age.

Special Features

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
New alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, created by sound designer Ben Burtt and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Joe Dante, film historian Bob Burns, and author Bill Warren
Movie Archaeologists, a new program on the film’s visual and sound effects featuring Burtt and visual-effects supervisor Craig Barron
From the Archive, a new program about the film’s restoration featuring Barron, Burtt, and Paramount Pictures archivist Andrea Kalas
Audio interview with producer George Pal from 1970
The Sky Is Falling, a 2005 documentary about the making of the film
The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio play of The War of the Worlds from 1938, adapted by Howard Koch and directed and narrated by Orson Welles
Radio program from 1940 featuring a discussion between Welles and H. G. Wells, author of the 1897 novel The War of the Worlds
Trailer
An essay by film critic J. Hoberman