It makes sense that the new Prime Video version of War of the Worlds was first conceived during the pandemic. That’s because it’s a lot like one of those half-assed, direct-to-streaming movies, assembled mostly from Zoom calls, whose production never required any two actors to be in the same room at the same time. I much prefer the pandemic-set movies of today, like Eddington, which not only benefit from some distance but aren’t required to be shot under pandemic conditions.
Now, five years later, that War of the Worlds film has arrived, long after the quarantines were lifted, but was still made as if they never were. We’re left with a gimmick—an alien invasion thriller, with a long literary pedigree, set entirely within Ice Cube’s computer screen—that it never transcends. A story this big needs to be opened up, not confined to browser windows.
In the film, directed by a music video/commercial veteran named Rich Lee, the special effects are surprisingly chintzy, the aliens look ridiculous, and the Zoom windows don’t allow for any real acting. The next good movie built from the “Screenlife” gimmick will be the first.
War of the Worlds is based on H.G. Wells’ late-19th-century novel that’s been adapted often, in various media, for more than a century, most famously in that Orson Welles radio play in 1938 that some listeners thought was a real alien invasion, although the actual size of the panic has been disputed.
There have been at least 10 movie adaptations of the novel since the 1950s, not including parodies and other sci-fi pictures inspired in part by it; Independence Day is a War of the Worlds adaptation in everything but name. Steven Spielberg’s version, 20 years ago this summer, was widely acclaimed; this one, as of now, has notched a rare zero critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s deserved, because this movie has got nothing.
Ice Cube plays a Department of Homeland Security functionary who has unlimited surveillance access to the location of everyone in the world, which he mostly uses to keep tabs on his son and daughter. Like Heart of Stone, the 2023 Netflix movie with Gal Gadot, War of the Worlds concludes that out-of-control government surveillance is positive, provided it’s in the hands of good guys and not bad guys.
Before long, the aliens arrive, which ties in throughout with a twisty conspiracy narrative. And since it’s referencing Wikileaks and the Snowden disclosures—along with Staples Easy Button jokes—I get the sense that the screenplay, or at least the ideas behind it, has been kicking around to some degree since the Obama years.
The war section, meanwhile, is mostly about Ice Cube watching the battles on YouTube and declaring, "Take your intergalactic asses back home!” And “I AM the government surveillance network!” and “You rang a dinner bell that traveled throughout the whole galaxy.” One scene consists of an unimaginative riff on The Conversation.
While Eddington treated the impending arrival of a giant data center as an effective metaphor for the encroachment of today’s Internet and how it enabled everything bad that happened in the plot before that, this film’s handling of big data is much less astute. And you’ll never believe which massive corporation ends up having a surprise role in the climax.
War of the Worlds looks terrible, has completely incoherent ideas about government surveillance and power, and wastes the talents of supporting actors like Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, and Eva Longoria.