DVD & Blu-ray: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953) - Criterion Collection

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Product Description: 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.

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Movie Details

Available Formats (Purchasing Links)

Video

Audio

Subtitles

Special Features & Extras

Trailer and Clips

Pictures

MOVIE DETAILS

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Director: Byron Haskin

Starring: Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne

Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Runtime: 85 min

Rating: G

Language: English

Studio: Criterion Collection

Home Video Release Date: July 7, 2020

AVAILABLE FORMATS (click links to order from Amazon):

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DVD - Criterion Collection

Blu-ray - Criterion Collection

VIDEO

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DVD

Codec: MPEG-2
Resolution: 480i
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Encoding Format: 16:9
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)

Blu-ray

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Region: Region A/1

AUDIO

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Dubbed:

DVD: None
Blu-ray: None

Audio Formats:

DVD: Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital Mono
Blu-ray: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, LPCM Mono

SUBTITLES

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DVD: English SDH

Blu-ray: English SDH

SPECIAL FEATURES & EXTRAS

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New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, created by sound designer Ben Burtt and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
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 Burtt and film historian Craig Barron
From the Archive, a new program about the film’s restoration featuring Barron, 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 fil
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 Welles and H. G. Wells, author of the 1897 novel The War of the World
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by film critic J. Hoberman