Steven Spielberg has finally realised his long-cherished dream: an adaptation of H G Wells's Martian invasion novel, The War Of The Worlds. Spielberg's take on Wells's story is likely to become one of this summer's blockbusters when it opens in the US on June 27 and here in the UK on July 1.

Spielberg almost made War of the Worlds (his version drops the first "The") back in the mid-1990s. But having just finished Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, he was beaten to it by Roland Emmerich, who ripped off Wells's alien invasion idea with Independence Day and made a lot of money. Spielberg watched it clean up at the box office, huffed and went back to work, knocking out Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World and another of his "serious films", Amistad.

Sufficient time has now passed since Will Smith kicked alien butt, it seems, for Spielberg's interest in Wells to reawaken. With a working script by David Koepp (who penned two Jurassic Parks) long since in place, Paramount Pictures originally had Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds slated for release in summer 2007. A seismic shift occurred in Hollywoodland, however, and Spielberg ? who had yet to make a "nasty aliens" film ? found his own slate clean, as did his would-be star, Tom Cruise. With Tinseltown's most successful director and its most popular actor ready, willing and able to work together, Paramount granted WotW a top-priority green light.

Spielberg finished the project in record time (72 days filming), shooting the big battle scenes first to give the CGI boffins the maximum amount of time to generate the 500-plus special effects. How those turn out we'll have to wait and see (the teaser trailer gives nothing away, probably because the effects aren't yet completed). But we do know that Spielberg and Koepp have updated Wells story, which was originally written and set in the green and pleasant land of late nineteenth-century England. Their film is set in present-day New Jersey, and where Wells described a nation of common folk combining forces to battle the Martian menace, Spielberg and Koepp describe the effect of the invasion on one ordinary family, of which Cruise's estranged parent is the patriarch. With the attending domestic shenanigans that story outline suggests, WotW looks to be a very Spielbergian take on the original novel.

It's not the first adaptation of Wells's book to take liberties with the source material, however. George Pal, the science-fiction movie mogul of the nuclear age, produced the first version of The War of the Worlds in 1953. That too, transplanted the action to America for the very sound reason that it was actually an adaptation of Orson Welles's nation-terrifying radio broadcast, itself only loosely based on the Wells original. (Interesting fact: when Wells was holiday in Texas, he bumped into Welles while asking for directions. The two men got along famously.) There was also a short-lived late-1980s American TV series that worked as a sequel to the 1953 film and a second (or rather third) film version has been completed this year by someone called Timothy Hines, who may be looking to hitch a ride with the Spielberg/Cruise juggernaut.

Wells' science-fiction has provided more fodder for filmmakers than, arguably, any other author (and I'm not even touching on his later comic social novels, such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly). Since Georges Melies's 1902 Wells/Jules Verne adaptation, Le Voyage dans la Lune, film versions of Wells's work have appeared almost every decade. The Time Machine, for example, was made for television in 1949, for cinema in 1960 (by George Pal), again for television in 1978, went back to the big screen in 1992 and yet again in 2002 (which Wells's great-grandson, Simon, directed). It even went soft porn with that same year's The Erotic Time Machine.

The reason Wells's science-fiction stories are so regularly adapted for the screen is because the spectacles he describes in them are suited to the visual medium. Wells was the first with his spectacular ideas. He was the first novelist to write about time travel, alien invasions, genetic manipulation (The Island of Dr Moreau four filmed versions to date) and nuclear war (The World Set Free, published in 1914).

Just as First Men in the Moon provided the pioneering Melies with an excuse to open his box of magic tricks, so, too, did James Whale's 1933 version of The Invisible Man (the first of too many to count) advance the effects of the era.
And just as George Pal spent two-thirds of his considerable $2m budget on the effects for his version of The War of the Worlds, so, too, will Spielberg be realising Wells' ideas on a truly grand scale.

The only question that leaves is, which Wells story will be appropriated next? I'd like to see an adaptation of When the Sleeper Awakes, Wells's follow-up to The War of the Worlds, which bears a horrifyingly prescient social message and is the only one not, as yet, adapted for the screen.