MOVIE · 1953

The War of the Worlds

ActionAdventureSci-FiThriller87 min

A blazing object crashes near a small Southern California town, and the excitement around a fallen “meteor” turns to panic when it opens into the first wave of a Martian invasion. Gene Barry is nuclear physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester, racing to understand the attackers as the military throws everything it has at their hovering machines, only to find that even the atomic bomb is useless. With Ann Robinson near the center of the spreading emergency, the film turns a local encounter into a vision of global destruction, bringing H. G. Wells into the Technicolor anxiety of the 1950s.