Young, sappy cultures devise myths about creation. Cosmos, according to the ancient fables of the Greeks, emerged from the uterine gulf of chaos. Or perhaps the God of Genesis personally ordained and organised our world, complimenting Himself on its goodness and stocking it with species which were commanded to increase and multiply. In the lore of the Australian aborigines, the earth is dreamed into existence by spirit-ancestors who walk across the land and sculpt it. We are too far from those fresh origins to take such -stories seriously: our urgent concern is to understand how the world will end, not to imagine its beginning.
As ever, Steven Spielberg understands the communal mood. Having imagined aliens as benign cerebral angels in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET, he has now chosen to film a more fatally grisly account of the collision between cultures or species in War of the Worlds. '9/11,' as Spielberg has remarked, 'changed everything.' On the posters for his film, a rotating globe pauses to display the US, extended between its shining seas. But nothing shines: red prehensile suckers that belong to some unseen, unclassifiable life-form grip Texas, while the Midwest is a scorching maelstrom. As befits a summer blockbuster, the film piles up catastrophes, and its promised highlights include a crashing plane, a capsizing ferry, and the usual mobs of traumatised extras. The last hope of mankind appears to be Tom Cruise in a leather jacket and tactically ripped jeans.
In 1898, society prepared to confront a fin-de-siècle that seemed likely, as a witty nihilist puts it in a play by Oscar Wilde, to be the fin du monde. Man had recently killed off God; having destroyed its creator, could our species expect to survive much longer? Anticipating that terminus, HG Wells wrote an apocalyptic romance about it, The War of the Worlds. We have been retelling his story ever since. In Wells's novel Martians on skeletal tripods descend to trample or gobble up earthlings who seem, to their superior intellects, mere noxious insects. Our frail blue planet is overrun by mechanised conquerors from a world which is red, bellicose, unmerciful. Wells considered this outcome to be just and logical. European empires, enslaving or exterminating new worlds elsewhere on our globe, had been equally remorseless. His novel reminded Europeans that their tenure of power was insecure, and - quite apart from its critique of imperialism - pointed out that we live on an ailing planet in a moribund universe, doomed by the cooling of the sun.
Wells had no doubt about where the end of the world should take place. When he wrote, Britain was the global overlord. His Martians therefore bump to earth in the Home Counties. They advance into London and demolish it to clear a nursery for the red weed that sustains them, before expiring - brought low by measly bacteria, not by human force or divine intervention - in rancid heaps in Regent's Park. The book ends with the narrator looking down from Primrose Hill, delighted to see the chimneys of the reconstructed capital smoking again. His contentment seems absurdly complacent now, and also sadly provincial.
The course of empire soon moved westward, so when Orson Welles performed a radio adaptation of Wells's story in October 1938, he inevitably altered the setting. Now the Martian rocket cylinder lands in New Jersey, and its stilted warriors stalk across the countryside towards New York. They wade over the Hudson River, dwarfing the Manhattan skyline as they rise like a series of new, spiked towers; they stride down the avenues of the current imperial capital, and terrorised multitudes hurl themselves into the East River 'like rats'.
Welles's transmission breaks off as a reporter drops his microphone and collapses, asphyxiated by lethal fumes. 'This is the end now,' he gasps. Welles immediately explained that the broadcast had been a Halloween prank, with the Martians as those ridiculous revenants who are supposed to quit their graves on All Souls' Night. But by then, the damage was done; listeners unaware of the practical joke had panicked, and by spreading the news provoked a communal nervous breakdown. Welles exposed the psychological vulnerability of his society, which was ready to believe in the certainty of its own extinction. Welles was made to feel like Judas, as he said next morning. Every time The War of the Worlds is retold, God - the upholder of human supremacy, for we are supposed to be his pet species - is put to death again.
The myth made itself at home in 1938, and demonstrated its credentials as a prophetic fiction. Howard Koch's script found a contemporary relevance in the artilleryman Wells's hero meets on Putney Hill. Newly encountered near the Holland Tunnel leading into Manhattan, he becomes a gloating fascist who rejoices in the assault on the city and on liberal illusions about progress and democracy; barbarism, he predicts, will reinvigorate the world. By 1952, when Byron Haskin directed a film version, the war of the worlds seemed already to have happened. The prophecy had fulfilled itself, so the film used newsreels of European cities flattened by bombs during the Second World War to document the Martian advance. As if in retreat from the old, bankrupt, ruined continent, the action was moved further westwards. The Martian craft now land in California, and the city they topple is Los Angeles.
Early in the Cold War, the story turned into a trial of competing technical and military might. HG Wells's Martians cannibalise humans, but in 1952 they rely on radiating weapons that reduce men to grey piles of ash. A scientist in the Haskin film suggests that they belong to a superior culture. That, for the Pentagon generals who manage reprisals, is reason enough to destroy them, and an atomic bomb is lobbed at their mother ship; they repel it by raising an electronic umbrella. The conflict turns into a holy war against what Reagan - whose geopolitical world-view was formed by such vacuous Hollywood products - would surely have called an 'evil empire'. The menaced citizens of Los Angeles hole up in their churches, and fervently pray for deliverance; the comeuppance of the Martians is a consequence of atheistic hubris, when one of them smashes a stained glass window and instantly lunges out of the sky. It's still microbes that vanquish them, but the film's narrator, piously altering Wells's bleaker text, assumes that God created those germs for exactly this purpose. The deity remains a loyal American. It's apt that Tom Cruise - aware that he had signed up for a crusade - insisted on installing a Scientology tent on Spielberg's set, so he could proselytise for his cult between takes.
Wells's story satirised the lazy rapacity of men by exposing them to a race of even more implacable predators. In successive retellings, it grew blunter and began to pander to the very complacency it first condemned. Jeff Wayne's rock opera The War of the Worlds - recorded in 1978 with Richard Burton narrating and David Essex among the singers - cosily redeems the Hitlerian artilleryman who fantasises about revenge in the Welles broadcast. Now, as he huddles in the sewers, he sings a rousing anthem about the 'brave new world' men will build below ground, with railway tunnels to the coast so they can have holidays at the beach. Poverty, he casually promises, will be abolished. Not even the Martians can resist the optimism of music.
Wayne's adaptation did have a serious point, and a computer game developed from it interprets The War of the Worlds as an allegory about the fight to sequester our planet's diminishing resources. If you play on the home team, you battle to conserve supplies of steel, coal and oil; the Martians want copper and human blood, their favourite tipple. Still, to reduce this eschatological war to a game implies a jaunty incomprehension of its meaning. Interestingly, Haskin's 1952 film mocked such frivolous profiteering: the hicks in whose town the Martians land plan to open their own amusement park, with enchiladas for sale at the site. 'We've got a goldmine in our backyard,' they gloat just before they are atomised. During the 1980s Spielberg planned to transform The War of the Worlds into a roller-coaster ride for the Universal Studios theme parks in Los Angeles and Orlando. At that stage he too thought of it as a ludic fantasy; now, after 9/11, he sees it as a baleful premonition of the end.
In 1996 Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! announced a change. The film was based on a set of bubble-gum cards in which Martians with heads full of green guano make miscegenated love to nubile female earthlings. Its farcical mayhem strays far from the story told by Wells, yet it is closer than any other adaptation to the pessimistic spirit of the original book, because it refuses to assume that the human race has any automatic right to prevail. Just who, in this film, are the monsters? Not, surely, the extra-terrestrials; I'd sooner vote for Danny DeVito as a gambling midget, Rod Steiger as a demented general, Jack Nicholson as the vain, dumb, useless American President, or Tom Jones as himself. For once, the rampages of the invaders are not to be regretted. Annette Bening, as a blissed-out hippy, says that the human race doesn't deserve to live, and Sylvia Sidney, playing a dotty tribal elder, whoops with hilarity at the latest atrocity: 'They blew up Congress! Hahahaha!' When Sarah Jessica Parker, an air-brained chat-show hostess, says that the Martians look gross, the professorial Pierce Brosnan sucks on his pipe and reminds her that we probably look just as repellent to them. The invaders in his film are immune to the usual microbes, but have a fatal allergy to the country and western yodellings of Slim Whitman.
If civilisation is saved by the ululations of a forgotten folk singer, is it worth saving at all? For Spielberg's screenwriter David Koepp, the story trips up that triumphal civilisation. His Martians, he claims, are merely conducting the belligerent foreign policy of the US, even though this time they happen to be stomping into New York. What stops the armoured, insensitive global power is 'a local insurgency'; the film, he says, is his commentary on the Iraq war.
We may at last be getting back to what Wells had in mind a century ago. The War of the Worlds is not about a combat with aliens: actually it dramatises the self-destructiveness of our own small, over-heated, apopleptic planet. We delude ourselves if we expect our world to have a happy ending.
· War of the Worlds is released on 1 July
