Imagine if a technologically advanced alien race invaded Earth to steal our most valuable resources, and the only way to defeat them was to order something from Amazon Prime.
This is, quite literally, the plot of the newest adaptation of H.G. Wells’ seminal sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, which translates the author’s vision of planetwide Tripod-induced bloodshed to the screen—specifically, to screenlife.
If the computer-tab-and-FaceTime-window subgenre seems like an odd choice with which to visualize a disaster story of extraterrestrial proportions, just wait until you see the movie’s star Ice Cube—yes, Ice Cube—capital-R Reacting to stock footage of explosions while briefing the President of the United States about alien Armageddon.
Director Rich Lee’s feature film debut War of the Worlds has only gained popularity (notoriety?) since it was released on Prime Video. It was #2 on the service when I finally watched it, after days of seeing clips posted all over social media, each seemingly more fake than the last. But they’re all real!
One thing you can give this movie credit for is that it is, indeed, a movie, with a plot, and actors, and a semi-coherent ending that, to its credit, never actually feels overlong despite how terrible it is. That’s because it’s also, aside from maybe The Naked Gun, the funniest movie of the year.
Produced by screenlife pioneer Timur Bekmambetov (Unfriended, Searching, Profile), War of the Worlds appears to have been filmed during or towards the end of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, possible thanks to the low-budget nature of screenlife, which doesn’t require any of its actors to be in the same room, or even the same city. And War of the Worlds is certainly low-budget, with obvious greenscreens throughout and Tremors-level special effects. Its crazed pacing and maze of webpages, sidebars, and video calls stretch the screenlife aesthetic to its absolute limit.
We’re introduced to DHS officer and helicopter dad Will Radford (Cube), who, while using government surveillance technology to spy on his medical researcher daughter and hacker/gamer failson, gets a video call from “Sandra NASA” (Eva Longoria) about weird electrical storms happening all over the world. A bunch of meteors then fall to Earth and giant alien machines hatch out of them, laser blasting everything and everyone in their path.
Radford, conveniently locked inside his office, can only watch, hands clutching head, as scenes of worldwide destruction scroll by in a sea of visual chaos. Every now and then the president or the DHS director (Clark Gregg) will text him “Emergency Zoom meeting NOW” and he’ll be forced to attempt to put all of this information into coherent sentences.
Every line of dialogue is stuffed with so much clunky information dumping the whole thing might as well be a radio play. (Bad writing? Or a subtle, clever reference to another infamous War of the Worlds adaptation?) That is, every line of dialogue that’s not just Ice Cube yelling “That’s crazy right there” or “We gotta go old school” or “Take your intergalactic a--es back home!”
There’s always something rivetingly stupid happening, which is more than I can say for most other bad movies of this type. The Tripods’ goal is apparently to steal all of humanity’s data, whatever that means, which is the kind of totally dumb twist that leads to soundbites from breathless newscasters saying stuff like, “We are in utter chaos without our most precious resource: our data.”
The movie vaguely gestures at commentary on our world’s reliance on data and surveillance tech—Radford routinely commandeers drones, smart fridges, and even a parked Tesla, and I don’t even have time to get into the hacker subplot. It would all be a fine way to modernize such classic source material if the climax didn’t hinge on Radford literally ordering an essential item from Amazon Prime just so that the company can show off its drone delivery technology.
The movie would be bad enough even without this, but such a naked attempt to turn a piece of entertainment into a glorified commercial left me with a terrible taste in my mouth. A plot about freeing ourselves from the shackles of data culminating in a pat on the back for one of the very companies that routinely harvests its own customers’ personal information assumes a level of stupidity that its audience, based on the reaction to this movie, fortunately does not have.
And yet, we’re all watching it! Is this what we deserve? Is this the only outrage-bait future Hollywood can strive for?? At this point, an alien invasion would be the least of our problems.
