The War of the Worlds (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]

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. DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration • New alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, created by sound designer Ben Burtt • Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Joe Dante, film historian Bob Burns, and author Bill Warren • Movie Archaeologists, a new program on the visual and sound effects in the film featuring Burtt and film historian 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 adaptation of The War of the Worlds from 1938, 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 • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing • PLUS: An essay by film critic J. Hoberman