Film / The Great Martian War 1913–1917

HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR, IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE FATHERLAND, AND THE GERMAN PEOPLE, BEGS FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF HIS BROTHER NATIONS. GERMANY IS UNDER ATTACK FROM ASSAILANTS NOT OF THIS WORLD.

— Telegram sent from Berlin on July 9, 1913

"Hell was not beneath us. It has fallen from the sky."

— Diary of William Payne, British Expeditionary Force, August 2, 1913

The Great Martian War 1913–1917 is a 2013 Made-for-TV Movie that presents an alternate version of The War of the Worlds In the Style of a documentary from The History Channel.

A hundred years after the Martian invasion that devastated Europe and cost hundreds of millions of lives, a commemorative documentary raises disturbing questions about whether Mankind has truly defeated the invaders.

---

This film has the following tropes:

• Accidental Truth: Gus Lafonde compares the Martian war machine to the wendigo which gets larger the more it eats, yet only grows hungrier. It's suggested that he somehow sensed the true nature of Victicite.
• Adaptational Badass: The larger Martian fighting machines are protected by energy shields, making them impervious to the artillery shells that brought down one of them in the original novel. They also command a swarm of smaller attack drones.
• Alien Invasion: Obviously; but what's not so obvious is who the ultimate culprit is behind the invasion.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • An event similar to what took place in Tunguska is the first sign of the Martian invasion, with an impact in the Bohemian mountains.
  • A plan for invading France is instead used to save it, when a flanking maneuver by the remaining German forces swing through Belgium to reinforce the front line, with the troops fraternizing once they meet up.
  • The word blitzartig is used for the German attack, as opposed to the later blitzkrieg.
  • Mysterious lights in the sky over the battlefield is an effect caused by the launch of massive war machines from Martian-occupied territory, to land in the ocean where they can attack the Allied supply routes.
  • An attack on shipping brings the United States into the war, creating conspiracy theories as what really happened.
  • A Heron is captured after the detonation of a massive underground mine beneath the enemy lines.
  • Glanders is used as a weapon of biological warfare (which the Germans did in World War One to destroy the horses needed by their enemies for cavalry and transport). It causes a massive pandemic that kills millions of humans.
• Alternate History:
  • World War One never happens because the Martians invade the year before. However because they strike the German Empire first instead of Britain, events have an uncanny similarity to the Great War because the Martians are coming from that direction.
  • Because the Martians haven't invaded the United States, President Woodrow Wilson sends aid but refuses to declare war. When the Martians launch attacks on American shipping, he's forced to resign and Theodore Roosevelt is brought back into office.
• Anachronism Stew: The war is run from a command centre fifty feet below Westminister, apparently a version of the Cabinet War Rooms in World War Two. This is despite the fact that no government would have any reason to construct such a shelter at a time when air power was not regarded as a serious threat.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Victicite is the name given by the Allied scientists to the highly adaptable sentient liquid metal used by the Martians. They quickly use it to upgrade human technology to even the playing field.
• Army Scout: Corporal Gus Lafonde was a First Nation soldier in the Canadian army who repeatedly infiltrated the Martian lines, and would 'count coup' by salvaging alien material and noting down their language. What he records in his war diary becomes the key to unraveling the Martian Code.
• Bait-and-Switch: A massive mine is detonated to knock out a Heron, and a specially trained unit is supposed to rush across No Mans Land to recover it before the Iron Spiders can get there. They succeed at the first goal, even capturing a couple of Martians, only for seven Spiders to swarm them...and then raise their Ribbons of Death in the air in surrender. The human soldiers aren't familiar with drone warfare and don't realise at the time that the captured Martians were controlling them—fortunately they were too stunned and demoralised by the explosion to consider fighting to the death.
• Cassandra Truth: The Westminister Heron may not have been launching a one-man attack on London, but trying to pass on a warning about Victicite. Unfortunately the pilot died and his message was untranslated for a hundred years until the Martian Code was broken.
• Combat Tentacles: The Ribbons of Death used by the Iron Spiders to kill infantry. The Martian submersibles use similar weapons to capsize ships.
  "They snare us, entwine us, stab us, skewer us, strangle us, tear us in half still alive."
• Deadline News: Footage is shown of an Iron Spider appearing to notice a camera filming it, turning towards it and lashing out with its tentacles whereupon the film ends.
• Death by Irony
  • The Martian pilot of the Westminster Heron is saved by mounted police from being lynched by outraged citizens. It then dies of a disease it picked up from the police horses.
  • Hughie Logan survived the war only to have his wife die of the Martian Flu. He was one of the soldiers who took part in Operation Trojan Horse, so he always wondered if he brought back the virus that killed her.
• Eagle Squadron: Two of the interviewees are veterans of the Frontiersman, a volunteer force from the United States raised by Teddy Roosevelt.
• The End... Or Is It?: When the Martian Code is translated, it's revealed that the Martians were once invaded by an alien force that used the same living metal that the Martians became dependent on, and now the same thing is happening all over again with humanity.
• The Enemy Weapons Are Better: After the failure of the mass attacks of 1915, Allied strategy changes to capturing and studying alien technology so it can be appropriated for their own use.
• False Flag Operation: Right when the Allied Forces are facing collapse, three US navy destroyers are sunk in the Gulf of Mexico bringing the United States into the war. Hart points out there were no reports of Martian war machines in the Gulf, though Allied U-boats had the range to make the trip.
• Human Resources: Averted; everyone assumes the Lice that swarm out into No Mans Land every night are harvesting the dead. Turns out they're harvesting the metal from the shrapnel, barbed wire, unexploded shells and weaponry—all of which is reproposed for the Martian war machine. The corpses of the Vanished were disintegrated under this harvesting and the remains churned into the mud.
• In Spite of a Nail: The war on the Western Front plays out in a similar way to what happened in World War One.
• Martians: Since astronomers see the invasion being launched from there, it's what the public and Press call the invaders. It turns out to be a fatal misnomer, as the Martians may have been mere puppets of the real culprit.
• Monumental Damage: Albeit an accidental version when a single Heron breaks through the lines, crosses the English Channel and makes its way up the Thames River. While firing at an attacking aircraft, a shot misses and hits Big Ben.
• Minovsky Physics: A plot-point with Victicite now a foundation of many human technologies, including the Space Race.
• The Narrator: Mark Strong does a documentary-style narration.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: While they don't exclusively attack at night, the Martians recognise the psychological benefit.
  Arnold Tockelt: The worst were the night raids. The Spiders would sneak across the no man's land and hover over us, and the Ribbons would descend. I knew we couldn't move, because any movement would be certain death when the Spiders are around.
  • The Lice exclusively come out at night, with the following day revealing that everything in No Mans Land had been stripped away, including the bodies of their fallen comrades.
• Nicknaming the Enemy: 'Martians', 'Herons', 'Iron Spiders', 'Lice'. Justified as no-one knows anything about the alien invaders.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The fate of The Vanished is this for many years, as it's assumed (as per the original novel) that the Martians are harvesting them for Human Resources.
  Diary entry of Allied soldier: Not one of us can sleep; not when those fiends are moving beyond the wire. The mere thought of them, of what they're doing to our dead and wounded, fills every living man with dread.
  Dawn breaks. The Lice retreat like a black tide. And everything is gone! Every shell, every last shard of battle, and every one of our dead. My fallen brothers are taken. Their bodies stolen. For food? For fuel? We hardly dare imagine why, but this is why those devils are here. They came for us.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When finally translated it's implied that much of the Martian 'code' consists of personal diaries written by Martian soldiers who are just as horrified and disillusioned by the war as the humans they are fighting.
• Operation: [Blank]: Operation Trojan Horse involves actual horses carrying the means of destruction to a seemingly victorious enemy. Presumably whoever thought up the name figured that invaders from another planet would not be familiar with The Odyssey.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Faced with the impending collapse of Allied forces, Allied Command use biological warfare regardless of the risk to end the war once and for all. The battle alone costs two million soldiers, and the disease mutates into The Martian Flu, an airborne pandemic that kills another 100 million.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Lampshaded by Lawrence Hart regarding Victicite, a sentient metal that subtly encourages other species to help it replicate and spread to other worlds.
  "Victicite has long been recognized as a form of life in its own right. So ask yourself this: What is a form of life that takes possession of another species, that modifies its host behaviour to dispense itself in even greater numbers? What else if not a parasite? But that is precisely what Victicite is."
• Secret Weapon: Operation Trojan Horse, herds of glanders-infected horses sent in an Animal Stampede towards the advancing Martian forces to infect them. It ends up having Gone Horribly Right when it jumps species to infect humans as well.
• Send in the Search Team: An eight-mile wide impact crater in the Bohemian Forest is the result of the first Martian vessel landing. The Kaiser Wilhelm II is promptly accused of testing a superweapon, so he sends a military expedition to find out what happened. None of them return, and within days the Martians are laying waste to Imperial Germany.
• Setting Update: From the original novel's setting in the last years of the 19th century, to the early decades of the 20th century.
• Schizo Tech: Captured Martian technology is used to equip biplanes and landships with energy weapons. Unfortunately this only causes the Martians to launch an all-out offensive to defeat the humans before they can make proper use of the technology.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The stalemate on the Western Front is a deliberate ploy by the Martians to encourage the Allies to commit more and more resources in mass attacks, providing the material resources that the Martians will use for their war machines once the Lice harvest them.
  • The greatest attack in human history is nothing more than a cover for Operation Trojan Horse. The Allied forces attack, drawing in massive Martian forces to fight them off, then conduct a Tactical Withdrawal to allow the Martians to advance to where vast herds of glanders-infected horses have been corralled behind the Allied lines.
  • At the end of the film, Hart suggests that Victicite is this—a tremendously useful, adaptive, self-replicating and sentient living metal that any species can use to make vast increases in technology and the population it can support, thereby encouraging its users to spread it further across the galaxy in wars of conquest. Even if the invaders are defeated, the victors adopt Victicite for themselves and the whole process begins again.
• Spider Tank + Tripod Terror
  • The Herons are Humongous Mecha armed with slow-firing but powerful energy cannon, clouds of Deadly Gas, and a protective forcefield generated by dark energy particles. Their role is to create destruction and chaos, driving the humans out into the open so the Iron Spiders can kill them.
  • The smaller but more numerous Iron Spiders are Attack Drones (a concept unknown to humanity until a controlling Heron is captured) that use Combat Tentacles as their primary weapon.
• Starfish Language: The so-called Martian Code remains untranslated for a century until the notes Gus Lafonde made during the war are rediscovered.
• The Swarm: Lice are robotic harvesters that swarm in their thousands out into No Mans Land (and presumably everywhere else the Martians have conquered) to harvest useful materials.
• Synthetic Plague: When a captured Martian dies of glanders, an animal disease caught from the horses of its mounted police escort, scientists rush to weaponize it into a plague that will kill more Martians.
• Total Party Kill: The Big Push is launched in the spring of 1915, even though Allied Command knows the Martians have brought up reinforcements. Three million men are sent over the top and are never seen again, not even as wounded.