"Rick Carter, production designer for Steven Spielberg's upcoming /www.dreamworksfansite.com/waroftheworlds/"">War of the Worlds movie, told SCI FI Wire that the movie aims for a hyper-realistic look and feel for its fantastical events, based on the novel by H.G. Wells.

The idea of this version of War of the Worlds is that it really takes place in our world, Carter said in an interview at WonderCon in San Francisco. So it's not as though we created a new world the aliens come into. It's our world.

The film begins in New Jersey, where star Tom Cruise's character is a dockworker. The choice of location is in part an homage to Orson Welles, the director whose 1938 Halloween radio production of War of the Worlds set off a national panic.

But it's [also] really about setting it somewhere that we think we recognize in any of the movies that we might have seen over the last years, or even just real life, Carter said. He added: It's a multiethnic area, and I think it's designed so that people feel this could happen, maybe even has happened somewhere in your psyche, that an event like this could happen here. ... Imagine it as a big pond. And someone from above who's been watching us starts throwing stones into it. And now you watch all the fish start to scatter, and then step by step it just increases.

Conceptual artist Doug Chiang, who worked closely with Carter, agreed. For me it really gets down to sort of the core essence of what science fiction meant for me, which is, ... this is a real story with real events, he said. Typical science fiction recently has a tendency to kind of make it too fantastic and sort of detach itself from reality. [But] for this story, ... what really appealed to me was that it was a real story, and it was a very serious take on the whole thing. What would really happen if aliens came down, and how would we address it?

Source: /www.scifi.com"">SciFi.com."