The Orson Welles War of the Worlds Scandal (2007)

Artwork from DVD Release

There are many reasons for making a movie, many, many, many.  But sadly, I can't figure out exactly what the purpose here is.

I can simply surmise that the director intended to make some money off of the famous (my wife claims infamous) Orson Welles.

I say he is both.

There's a fine line between brilliance and madness, and it is often the maddest that are also the most brilliant.

This documentary on the other hand, reaches for both, and falls pathetically short, in all respects.  The voice-over is shallow.  The script is unimaginative.  The revelations are, for better or worse, shallow and often times wrong, and with no experts or dissenting opinions, one can't argue otherwise.

So wrong as a matter of fact, that halfway through, after they started talking about "the human need to not feel alone in the universe," and the decades old search for extra terrestrial life, I simply turned it off.

Enough was enough.

Instead, not having had my Orson Welles fill yet, I turned to an old Radiolab broadcast (NPR).  A sort of deconstructive radio documentary on the subject, and boy was it brilliant.

It inhibited all the reactions, in my wife and I, that the documentary failed to do.  And it did so in a much more succinct way.  Managing to cram three different versions of the broadcast from around the world as well as a criticism of media and where this has led to, as well as the old adage:  Can it happen again?

Skip this documentary, even if, like me, you are obsessed with Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds broadcast.  Instead head to Radiolab and listen to a much better and more informative documentary.