The War of the Worlds (1953) is a great film. The story is engaging from start to finish and it looks great — especially the special effects. Gene Barry and Ann Robinson make a nice couple and have great chemistry.
There are even politics in the film that I quite like. The politicians, military leaders, and scientists are all presented as serious people who are trying their best to solve the problem at hand. It’s the mob that gets in the way and stops any possibility of the scientists finding a solution.
This is so refreshing for a viewer in 2026 where the mob has taken over, done its own research, and decided it is best to put people in charge who are as unqualified, foolish, and uncaring as they are.
Pastor Collins
But the film’s use of religion is anywhere from problematic to repulsive. Consider Pastor Collins. To start with, he is a complete reverse of the curate in the book. The curate is hysterical and ultimately self-destructive. He is very much a “pray to God and do NOT row to shore” type.
In contrast, Collins is rational and calm in his faith. He is presented as Christlike with a martyr’s death. On one hand, that’s fine. The film presents all the major characters as faultless. But there is a contrast here to other films of this time (eg, The Thing from Another World) in which the idealist is a scientist. Those characters are presented as naive if not evil. But Collins is presented heroically, shot from above as if God himself were looking down lovingly.
None of this would matter without context. I have nothing against heroic depictions of the religious. And I admire Collins. I can see myself doing the same thing for different reasons. But any science fiction film of that time would present me in a negative light. Sacrifice for traditional religious reasons is good. But sacrifice for idiosyncratic beliefs or idealism is bad.
But Pastor Collins’ death is in a very specific context — one where humans are useless and only saved by prayer. So acording to the film, he was not only heroic; he was right!
Christian Nationalism
There is no deep theology here. This is Cold War Christianity: 99% anti-communist, 1% primitive “Jesus Loves Me” theology. It is, in fact, Christian Nationalism.
My mother’s side of the family are part of this movement. I’m no longer in contact with them, but I have no doubt that they are big MAGA supporters. Even when I was a kid, I marveled at the fact that beyond their constant claims of Jesus’ love (often used as a threat), they really only cared about the right-wing politics their pastors had fed them.
And they see the world as being divided into the good people (right-wing Christians) and the bad people (everyone else).
In the third act, we see all the bad people panicked and behaving very badly. (Interestingly, this is a reflection of the curate in the novel.) All the good people are in churches. And this includes all the scientists! Because even they know that ultimately, it’s all about God. No atheists in a Martian Invasion, am I right?!
Antisemitism
But consider all the bad people. There is only one of them whom we see for more than a second. It is the man who is trying to buy his way onto a truck out of town. He has a suitcase full of cash and valuables. He is coded Jewish and played by the great character actor Ned Glass, who just happens to be Jewish himself.
(To make matters worse, the character — not in the credits — is referred to on IMDb as Well-Dressed Looter. There is no indication he is a looter. Rather, he looks like a man fleeing the Holocaust with as many of his valuables as he could carry.)
I’m not suggesting that the filmmakers intended to be antisemitic. I just think these kinds of stereotypes are so deeply wired in the culture that they just show up. But it is telling that this scene is in a film that places all the good people in church. See?! Even the Jews are godless, which is why they are outside church with the bad people!
God vs Evolution
The 1953 filmed version The War of the Worlds reverses the ending. The final narration reads:
After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed, and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in his wisdom, had put upon this Earth.
This is more or less what Wells wrote in the novel. But it takes an idiom and turns it into meaning. After this line in the book, Wells explains what he means:
These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things — taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many — those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance — our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.
So it was evolution in the book. But in the movie, the final line of dialogue explains that it was a miracle from God. The great scientist says, “We were all praying for a miracle!”
The War of the Worlds in Modern America
And this, I suppose, brings us back to today. The War of the Worlds tells the viewer
- Ordinary godless people are horrible.
- Elites are well-meaning but impotent.
- Our only hope is God.
This is not what people believe today, of course. They’ve kind of flipped the first two. Now it’s the ordinary people who are well-meaning but impotent. And the reason for that is because of the godless elites. Of course, they do believe in elites. It’s just that they are arbitrary. Since no one is trustworthy, they can elect any yahoo with a spray-on tan to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.
But the modern world has largely given up on God too. He really isn’t too evident. But the Abrahamic faiths are really authoritarian. And if they can’t get input from the strong father in the sky, they will get him with despots here on Earth. So they can throw out all the scientists, and military leaders, and politicians — at least the ones who don’t follow the Dictator.
But today, even a dictator has to watch out. Remember how Trump had one big success during his first term: Operation Warp Speed. But when Trump took credit for it, his followers hated it. So he just stopped talking about it. When your power depends upon the ignorance of your followers, your power depends on the ignorance of your followers.
I don’t think any of this is surprising. Tell people that “others” are monsters and elites are useless. And you get ignorant, hateful people who think they are knowledgeable and good. And all they think they need is an authoritarian “leader” who is as ignorant and hateful as they are.
We can see The War of the Worlds as a Cold War allegory. But I think even at the time, we missed it. We thought the Soviets were bad because they were godless and, well, bad. We didn’t learn the real lesson that authoritarianism itself is bad. But you can’t exactly blame us. We were poorly educated by every conceivable information source. Including The War of the Worlds.
See also: Library DVD Love for a review of the film with a lot of interesting background material.
The War of the Worlds (1953) poster via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
But Old Dracula was released before it. It was doubtless also conceived and produced before it. Ebert knows how movies are made. He can’t possibly have thought that the producers of 
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