The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds (1953) is Byron Haskin's science-fiction landmark you can watch online on iFILM. Adapted from H.G. Wells, it opens with a fireball crashing into the California hills — and a curious crowd that has no idea what just arrived.

Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) and Sylvia van Buren (Ann Robinson) are caught in the first hours of an invasion from Mars. The aliens' manta-shaped war machines glide under glowing shields and incinerate everything in reach. Nothing stops them. Rifles fail, the army falls back, and a direct atomic strike leaves them untouched. Within days the world's cities are rubble and the survivors are scattered, running with no shelter left to reach.

Producer George Pal moved Wells' Victorian England into Cold War America, turning the faceless threat from above into a stand-in for nuclear dread. The film took the Academy Award for its visual effects, and those hovering destroyers became an icon of the genre. For anyone who loves pre-digital sci-fi, it's essential viewing — dated in its science, still uneasy in its mood. Stream The War of the Worlds (1953) online on iFILM.