I have a hunch: Upon hearing the new War of the Worlds adaptation received a rare 0% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, was your first thought, “I had no idea there was a new War of the Worlds movie coming out”? I thought so.
That’s because the direct-to-streaming debacle starring Ice Cube was released on Amazon Prime Video last week to virtually no fanfare. (To be fair, the Rotten Tomatoes score has gone up to 4% at the time of publication.) There was no press tour, no fancy premiere, just a modest announcement on Deadline four days before it came out. It’s clear that someone — maybe Universal Pictures, maybe Jeff Bezos, maybe the unfortunate actors who somehow got roped into this — knew how colossally bad this modern take on H.G. Wells’s classic novel is and did their best to completely bury it.
It’s unclear why this is being released at all. Helmed by music video director Rich Lee, the movie was filmed in 2020, during peak COVID lockdowns. It’s also a “screenlife” movie — meaning all of the action unfolds on a computer, phone or tablet screen, utilizing video calls, text messages and the like to tell the story — and it was filmed entirely remotely, with each actor in a different location. It sat on a shelf for five years, and then eventually someone at Amazon decided that the world needed to see 90 minutes of Ice Cube squinting at grainy footage of the alien invasion via FaceTime. (If you love the 2005 Tom Cruise version of this sci-fi classic but wish it had more stock footage of the military with soldiers’ faces blurred out so they don’t have to be paid for the use of their likeness, boy, are you in luck.)
Somehow, the fact that none of the actors — including Eva Longoria, as a NASA employee whose exact job is never really mentioned or explained — are ever in the same room together is the least egregious thing about War of the Worlds. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security employee who spends most of his time spying on his pregnant daughter Faith, a biologist; her boyfriend Mark, an Amazon delivery driver; and his son Dave, who is (spoiler alert) later revealed to be a hacker named Disruptor. When the alien invasion begins, DHS headquarters goes on lockdown and Will is unable to leave the building. (This is the explanation for why he can’t meet up with anyone in real life; the fact that he’s apparently the only one in his entire office is explained away with a line about how he’s “working the Sunday graveyard shift.”) So he hops on a Zoom with the secretary of defense and other government officials, as one does when every city in the world is being pelted by meteors carrying alien lifeforms.
What ensues can only be described as a movie-length commercial for Amazon Prime. (It’s also worth mentioning that even Prime members who have Prime Video are forced to sit through two solid minutes of commercials before watching War of the Worlds, as well as another block of ads midway through the movie.) Eventually, Will learns that the aliens are attacking locations that house top-secret government servers because they feed on data. Do Ice Cube and Eva Longoria both switch back and forth between pronouncing it “day-tuh” and “dat-uh” in the same scene? You bet they do.
The aliens start eating all the world’s data — “our most precious resource,” according the movie — and chaos breaks out. Planes start falling out of the sky. Never mind that they have countless backup systems in place, or that pilots are trained on how to safely glide in the event of a loss of power — they just start free-falling. Financial data is erased, “making the earth’s population totally bankrupt.” I’m no accountant, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works. Facebook deletes Will’s photos of his late wife one by one, along with a voice message where she says, “Remember to take out the trash and be nice to the kids,” but not before sending a notification that reads “Your memories are deleting.” Will watches all of this happen on the internet, which is inexplicably still working for him despite the worldwide outage.
His hacker son sends him some top-secret files that reveal the government has known about the aliens since the 1940s, when they first started crash-landing on Earth. (It’s unclear what kind of “data” they were feeding on several decades before the internet was invented.) It turns out the government knowingly launched a secret mass-surveillance system called Goliath despite knowing its data would attract the hungry aliens, and now these same officials have decided the only way to save humanity is to bomb everything within a five-mile radius of D.C. with just eight minutes’ notice because the DHS office is where Goliath is located. (“Oh hell naw,” Will exclaims upon learning this news.)
Absolutely none of this makes sense. Why bomb the entire D.C. metro area instead of just the DHS building? Why not bother to evacuate government employees, like Will, who may still be in the office first? It’s almost as inconceivable as what happens next: Will, his NASA buddy Sandra (Longoria) and his kids decide that to save D.C., they must kill all the aliens in the eight minutes before the army starts bombing. To do this, they use a “cannibal code” that Faith has been developing in her lab that somehow causes the aliens’ cells to start eating themselves, or something. (It’s possible that I was dissociating when the movie attempted to explain how this works.) The only problem? Will doesn’t have a thumb drive to use to input the cannibal code to Goliath. But never fear: Mark has his Amazon Prime Air delivery drone on him! After an excruciatingly long sequence of Mark ordering a thumb drive on Amazon (yes, we even see him add it to his cart), the drone is on its way.
But, oh no! The drone gets flipped onto its back, so they track down the phone number of a cowering passerby in a matter of seconds and text him, telling him that if he turns the drone right side up, “The government will give you free internet for a year.” (Don’t question the logistics of this.) He refuses, insisting that the government will use said free internet to track him, so to sweeten the deal, they offer him a $1,000 Amazon gift card. He immediately agrees — risking his life for a shot at said gift card, no questions asked — and the drone is back on its way. Prime Air to the rescue! The drone somehow makes it inside the locked-down DHS building, Will shoves the thumb drive in and the aliens all immediately die. Somehow, the fighter pilots on their way to bomb D.C. get word of this in a matter of seconds and abort their mission. Humanity is saved by same-day shipping.
The point of all of this, if there actually is one, seems to be that the government is full of bad actors spying on you against your will, while Amazon is a literal life-saver. Don’t trust the government with your data, War of the Worlds pleads. Trust the $2.4 trillion corporation with it instead. It makes just as much sense as a DHS surveillance professional leaving his computer’s camera on in between Zooms and FaceTimes, staring at his own visage while he watches the world burn from the comfort of his clearly green-screened office.
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