Every War Of The Worlds Adaptation: Ranked Worst To Best

5. The Documentary One

A year after the release of Timothy Hines's War Of The Worlds: The True Story, the History Channel aired The Great Martian War: 1913-1917, which is essentially the same thing only with much better production values.

Directed by Discovery Channel veteran Mike Slee and narrated by Mark Strong, a respected actor with a good track record in documentary narration, The Great Martian War was intended as an alternate history version of the channel's real documentaries and gets that feeling pretty well.

Combining archival footage of the Great War with CGI Martian tripods and interviews with "survivors" and "expert historians", the film plots a parallel course to the real war in which the Martians landed in 1913 Germany and the world united to fight them, including parallel versions of Great War events like the Christmas truce and a post-war "Martian flu".

It may lose a few points for originality in coming after The True Story, but The Great Martian War remains a fresh and engaging way of reworking Wells's ideas in a new format.