The Criterion Collection

The War of the Worlds

Edition no. 1037

Paramount 1999 DVD (USA) Paramount 2005 DVD (USA) Imprint 2020 Blu-ray (Australia) The Criterion Collection 2020 DVD (USA) The Criterion Collection 2020 Blu-ray (USA)
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  • Release Date: July 07 2020
  • Country of Release: USA
  • MSRP: $39.95
Buy At: Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Licensor
Paramount Home Entertainment
Directed by: Byron Haskin
A mysterious, meteorlike object has landed in a small California town. All clocks have stopped. A fleet of glowing green UFOs hovers menacingly over the entire globe. The Martian invasion of Earth has begun, and it seems that nothing—neither military might nor the scientific know-how of nuclear physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry)—can stop it. In the expert hands of genre specialists George Pal and Byron Haskin, H. G. Wells’s end-of-civilization classic receives a chilling Cold War–era update, complete with hallucinatory Technicolor and visionary, Oscar-winning special effects. Emblazoned with iconographic images of 1950s science fiction, The War of the Worlds is both an influential triumph of visual imagination and a still-disquieting document of the wonder and terror of the atomic age.
  • Year: 1953
  • Time: 85 min.

Technical Specifications

Format: Blu-ray
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Audio: English 1.0 PCM Mono , English 5.1 DTS-HD MA Surround
Resolution:
Subtitles: English
Region: A
Discs: 1 Disc |  BD-50

Supplements

  • Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Joe Dante, film historian Bob Burns, and author Bill Warren
  • Movie Archaeologists, a new program on the visual and sound effects in the film featuring Ben Burtt and film historian Craig Barron
  • From the Archive, a new program about the film’s restoration featuring Craig Barron, Ben Burtt, and Paramount Pictures archivist Andrea Kalas
  • Audio interview with producer George Pal from 1970
  • The Sky Is Falling, a 2005 documentary about the making of the film
  • The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds from 1938, directed and narrated by Orson Welles
  • Radio program from 1940 featuring a discussion between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells, author of the 1897 novel The War of the Worlds
  • Trailer
  • An essay by film critic J. Hoberman

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Restoration Information

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Release Notes on Restoration