The War of the Worlds (1953)

[Akijama]

https://www.criterion.com/films/2994...-of-the-worlds

SPECIAL FEATURES:

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, created by sound designer Ben Burtt and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
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 Barront
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
New cover by Patrick Leger

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.