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News Tip: 'War of the Worlds' Reflects New Technologies, Anxieties

The new movie version of "War of the Worlds" that opens this week is likely to reflect the culture of our times and make use of the latest technology in retelling the story

The new movie version of "War of the Worlds" that opens this week is likely to reflect the culture of our times and make use of the latest technology in retelling the story, say two Duke University professors.

In this way, the new movie is similar to the 1939 radio version and the 1953 film version of H.G. Wells' original story about aliens invading Earth.

"The medium meets the historical moment," said Daniel H. Foster, assistant professor of theater studies at Duke.

The radio show is famous for panicking people across the country with its fake news format. Foster said one reason people were so receptive to that message was because they had been following the rumblings of war in Europe through such radio reports.

In its most frightening moments the radio simply goes silent. The 1950s movie version, which reflected Americans' Cold-War mentality, fills in the silences with the latest special effects of the era, Foster noted. The ending, in which a common bacterium kills the invaders, stresses Americans' faith and the fact that one of God's tinier creations is the invaders' downfall.

The ending of the new movie is what intrigues Priscilla Wald, an associate professor of English at Duke who studies how science is portrayed in popular media.

She notes that many contemporary film remakes have substituted the old Cold-War fear of nuclear annihilation with a new one: Genetic mutation. In many films, genetic experimentation is both the source of and solution to the threats to mankind.

"What interests me is how many echoes there are of the contemporary moment in the new movie," she said. "Is this virus going to be actually engineered? Will science play a more direct role this time?"

(Director Steven Spielberg has been quoted as saying that the ending in the new version is a compromise that "neither strays from nor mimics the original book.")

"I have seen in pop culture a much stronger need for reassurance that, in the end, science will save us. Science combined with the human spirit," she said. "In the original 'War of the Worlds,' it's just an accident."