Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic
I happened across the first teaser trailer for the upcoming War of the Worlds movie (directed by Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise), and was delighted to see that the voiceover narration consists entirely of a slightly abridged and slightly modified version of the first paragraph of the original book, up to and including my favorite line, slightly modified to: "Yet across the gulf of space [. . .] intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded [our planet] with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." Late-nineteenth-century prose, almost unchanged, being used to advertise a twenty-first-century action movie—cool beans.
The second teaser trailer suggests that this'll be a fairly standard-issue action movie: Tom Cruise as the (divorced?) blue-collar worker who must save his young daughter from the marauding aliens. Oh, well.
For a different sort of adaptation, see what appears to be the complete radio script from the 1939 Orson Welles production. It's a fair bit shorter than I would have expected—under 9000 words total. But I guess it was only a one-hour production, and there were sound effects and music and such mixed in.
