GLOBAL WARNING

WATCH THE SKIES! EARTH IS UP FOR GRABS AGAIN IN INVASION – AND THIS TIME IT’S TRULY A WAR OF THE WORLD…

- NICK SETCHFIELD

To alien eyes, Earth has been a desirable piece of real estate ever since a strange cylinder hit Horsell Common in 1898’s The War Of The Worlds. It was only the first strike among many, as science fiction prepared to fight a rearguard action against extraterrestrial aggression – a fight that’s still ongoing, over a century later. Apple’s Invasion may offer a new take on the genre but, creatively at least, the red weed of HG Wells’s world conquerors is embedded deep in its soil.

“Someone brought to me the notion of doing a limited series based on The War Of The Worlds,” says Simon Kinberg, co-creator of the 10-part tale. “It’s a book I’ve always loved but the one thing that isn’t in the book – and wasn’t in the Spielberg adaptation – was a sense of the world, the sense of it being truly global. And so I got excited about doing a global alien invasion, and certainly the title The War Of The Worlds promises that.

“We kept that title for a little while because it was a big title. But the more I started really imagining it, creating the characters and thinking about how we would tell the story, the more I realised I was completely diverging from the book. It would have been false advertising to title it The War Of The Worlds because it is its own original thing. So the first spark was The War Of The Worlds, and then the world part of it took over, and for me that started to dictate what the show would be.”

ALIEN CONCEPT

Co-written with Hunters’ David Weil, the international sweep of