THE WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY Decoded. Extraordinary!

The first extraterrestrial rockets landed at 11:15 AM in the southwestern part of the country, where the local population gave a spontaneous and warm welcome to the visitors from Mars. The aliens, representing a culture of higher development compared to Earth, undertook the historic mission of sharing their knowledge and experience with humans. The War of the Worlds: Next Century.

The science fiction genre was never kind to Polish creators. A few co-productions with the friendly cinematographies of the GDR, Hungary, and the USSR, a few short television films, and the dramatic history of the superproduction On the Silver Globe – such a balance, drawn at the beginning of the 1980s, did not inspire hope for any development, not only in light of the hegemony of the masters of the genre from across the ocean. Even artists from the former Czechoslovakia, armed with equipment from the Barrandov studio and artistically guided by masters like Karel Zeman, surpassed Poles. The strength of Polish cinema came from Wajda, Zanussi, Hoffman, Kieślowski, Has, to name just the most outstanding figures. And pure genre science fiction was not within their creative interests. They saw no chance to say anything meaningful in a genre that the average person associated with little green men.

On the opposite end stood science fiction literature in the late 1970s. Stanisław Lem had already proven in works from the previous decade that important social, ideological, psychological, and moral issues could successfully be dressed in the guise of science fiction. Return from the Stars, Solaris, The Voice of the Master, The Futurological Congress foretold and displayed in huge magnification the current problems related to the development of societies in the face of increasingly aggressive methods of top-down control and their influence on the moral choices of individuals.

The second half of the 1970s in Poland, when the golden mountains promised by the Communist Party turned out to be an illusion bought for billions of dollars, and the tense socio-political situation associated with this, resonated widely in the artistic environment. The exposé films of Wajda, Kieślowski, Zanussi, Holland, and Falk, illustrating the individual’s resistance to the ruthless system, initiated the trend of cinema of moral anxiety. Native SF cinema (if it can be called that) seemed to disregard this wave of rebellion, except for Andrzej Żuławski, who was driven out of the country before finishing On the Silver Globe. Marek Piestrak, for example, made the ideologically neutral Pilot Pirx’ Inquest. At the turn of the decades, however, novels began sprouting like mushrooms after rain, which, in the guise of SF, contested the uncomfortable reality. The literary works of Janusz A. Zajdel, Marek Oramus, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński, Wiktor Żwikiewicz, and Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg depicted a world corrupted, ugly, devoid of human values, which the heroes of their books fought for. It was then that a young director named Piotr Szulkin appeared, whose first science fiction film Golem (1979) awakened hopes among the genre’s fans. Two years later, his next film, The War of the Worlds: Next Century, was released.

The title of the film, referencing H.G. Wells’ classic novel about the Martian invasion of Earth, should not signal to the genre’s fans that they can expect a classic science fiction film. Piotr Szulkin repeated Wells’ idea in a very subversive form. On December 16, 2000, Martians land on Earth. However, our planet is not a Star Trek-like land flowing with milk and honey. It resembles a grim police state, where television plays a key propagandistic role. This is where the main character of the film, presenter Iron Idem (phenomenal Roman Wilhelmi), works. His Iron Idem’s Independent News are independent only in name. The obedient Idem is controlled by the all-powerful boss (Mariusz Dmochowski), who orders the abduction of Idem’s wife (Krystyna Janda). Forced to collaborate with the apparatus of violence, which serves the bloodthirsty (literally) Martians, Idem encourages the population to give blood involuntarily on the TV screen. After being thrown out of his apartment, Idem sees, from the perspective of the street, the repression to which the brainwashed city dwellers are subjected. Iron Idem finally achieves a moment of rebellious grandeur. During the TV Super Show, a big concert to bid farewell to the Martians, Iron delivers a crushing critique to the same dark mass he had been brainwashing daily before the studio camera. The next day, after the Martians depart, Earth’s mass media flip the situation by 180 degrees. The visit from the Red Planet is presented as a criminal attack, with the main element being the person of… Iron Idem. Sentenced to death for collaborating with the invaders, Idem faces a firing squad. Shots are fired…

The War of the Worlds: Next Century was not accidentally made in the early 1980s. Piotr Szulkin, under the cover of science fiction, made an extraordinary film. The grotesque Martians, played by dwarfs painted with silver paint, dressed in padded winter jackets and Relax shoes, are merely a narrative pretext, a tribute to the SF genre. The film is not about an invasion from an alien planet. Far more terrifying is the dissection of totalitarianism, ruthlessly shown by Szulkin as Idem wanders through a degraded world, atop which he seemed to be. The gray crowd, obediently standing in line to give blood, helpless inhabitants of the homeless shelter, the impunity of the security services, the irritating indifference of bureaucrats – all this is shrouded in a thick aura of hopelessness and conformism in the name of… Well, exactly, what?

The film was made in the heated time between the Solidarity uprising and martial law. The attitude of Poles at that time was far from the image of sheep obediently walking to slaughter. The mass opposition to the impunity of the communist regime proved the vitality of the spirit in the nation. Meanwhile, Szulkin created an image that portrayed something exactly the opposite, as if foreseeing the arrival of martial law (Martians). The bearers of rebellion are only two characters, Iron Idem and the old man from the homeless shelter (Wiesław Drzewicz). Only the two of them had the courage to raise their hands against the apparatus. The old man had nothing to lose, which is why, at the beginning of the film, he throws bricks at the television screens. Iron Idem, on the other hand, had to survive his apocalyptic time in order to regain his dignity and proudly raise his head.

Do you know why you like me? The dumber my program was, the smarter you felt. They tell you to give blood – you give it. They tell you to crawl on all fours – you’ll do it. You’ll sell your dignity, you’ll sell your honesty to buy a bigger television. To get some pathetic scrap of power. How are you different from those you spit on?

The opposition of youthful idealism against the cynical conformism of the older generation was very vividly shown a few years earlier by Krzysztof Zanussi in Protective Colors. But instead of expertly handling dialogue, Piotr Szulkin focused on the image. The War of the Worlds: Next Century  is a sequence of episodes charged with negative emotions, which slightly push aside the traditionally conceived plot. Iron Idem’s path through torment takes him from the pacification of his own apartment, through humiliating rituals at the shelter, staged scenes of friendship with the Martians, the repulsive case of cannibalism, to situations where Idem finds his greatness – driving away the nasty lawyer (a great episode by Jerzy Stuhr), killing a Martian in the restroom, the aforementioned speech at the farewell concert, and maintaining dignity even in the face of inevitable death. Szulkin brilliantly sold the plot precisely through these individual scenes. One of the most characteristic shows a waterworks employee (Janusz Gajos), for whom happiness is a beer served in the freezing cold under the open sky. And how do you fight such a society? For a surrogate of normality, people are ready to sell their souls to the devil, unaware of this transaction.

The director used the central principle of science fiction, presenting contemporary issues in drastic exaggeration. The ideological mush pumped by the regime, laced with cheap entertainment, is supposed to dilute social problems. This is exactly what the government in Poland did, allowing media outlets that served exposé texts from bands like Lady Pank, Maanam, and Republika, and allowing an oasis of freedom, such as Jarocin Rock Festival, to exist for the youth. Szulkin threw this peculiar safety valve into a seemingly distant future, filling it with Martians to disguise the plot, and created a social drama whose intensity of impact cannot be compared to any work from the cinema of moral anxiety. Of course, if we accept such a distinctive convention. The sick, Orwellian world of Piotr Szulkin’s film is, after all, a certain kind of extreme, where there is no room for hope, although the open ending opens many paths for interpretation.

The character of the television director, Idem’s boss, stands out. He is the one pulling all the strings, he is at the head of the regime, and after the Martians depart, when the political line is abruptly reversed, it is also he who commands everything. Doesn’t this remind you of something? Szulkin, in all his pessimistic insight, could not foresee the Round Table, after which power in Poland was taken over by the solidarity opposition. But in hindsight, it is clear that the same post-communist clique still controlled Poland. That in essence, very little has changed. There is a free press, private television stations, supermarkets, and other achievements of civilized countries, but the old arrangements have no intention of leaving the politically corrupt arena. Stanisław Bareja, in the last scene of the series Alternatywy 4, placed the ousted Angel on a higher level of power. Szulkin also had no doubts about human nature. Despite the desire for normalcy, we still allow ourselves to be dumbed down by the same people. We are deceived by those whom we consider to be one of us before elections. But after tasting the impunity of the Parliament, every progressive reformer suddenly loses the power to clean up this Augean stable. Then, they are left with only demagogic slogans about thieves plundering the state, which thunder from inflated television debates. But nothing more than that. In the world of Iron Idem, hope has long died, or maybe it never existed. I wonder if Piotr Szulkin knew how prophetic his vision would be?

In the 1980s, the message of the film was unambiguous – here is an artistically filtered vision of communist reality. The audience of the time perfectly understood the allusive language of the director, and the situations and dialogues were an obvious, metamorphosed version of what was happening on the streets and in the media. Many years have passed since the premiere. Has The War of the Worlds: Next Century  remained only a chronicle of the times in which it was made? Was intrusive social engineering the exclusive domain of the previous era? In my opinion, no.

And here we approach the second chapter of the film’s most universal message. The intentionally grotesque television tricks in Iron Idem’s program (the Martian ship landing is a reversed launch of a rocket from the cosmodrome), the falsely smiling face of the presenter dressed in an absurd wig, reducing the news to reciting worn-out formulas, illustrated with static, posed photos, the street from the film’s prologue, merely a decoration supported by dirty scaffolding – all of this stings the eyes with its relevance. It’s enough to turn on the television on the well-known channel of ridiculous telemarketing or watch the brain-numbing show of Jerry Springer, not to mention the record-breaking stupidity of laundry detergent ads, to admit Szulkin a medal for his anticipatory ability (even though the idea was, of course, not new; here we bow to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451).