Screenagers, I come to you only 20 mere minutes after watching War of the Worlds on Prime Video. I am going through what I can only describe as complete shock, or in some ways, the stages of grief. I cannot articulate the stage I am in, but I think it most resembles denial. I have an uneasy feeling in my chest that will not fade. I have sat at my computer with my head in my hands wondering simply how this happened, and how I even got here. I was supposed to just clean my dishwasher filter and do the laundry today. It was supposed to be a good day. How could this have happened?
When the reviews came out about this movie, all of us SAW writers were definitely talking about it. I jokingly said I would review it, and Karlston (bless him) said I should go for it. I thought, “Why not?” I enjoy, even love, bad movies. I’ve watched the Silent Hill movies multiple times. I enjoyed The Lawnmower Man. I thought I was prepared. How wrong I was.
I should start by saying I went into this movie completely blind. I hadn’t seen any images, trailers, and I hadn’t read any reviews. As a connoisseur of horrible movies, I expected this to be boring, horribly paced, and with some laughable acting from the main cast. After all, this was a direct-to-streaming movie … on Amazon. How much worse could it be than G20, a movie where Viola Davis beat up a bunch of crypto bro terrorists? This would be about the same, surely …
Instead, War of the Worlds is an assault on the human body. After watching it, I feel like I have spent hours in a mosh pit, and the band was just a chorus of screaming children at Chuck E Cheese. It’s almost violent in its pacing, with rapid jump cuts between characters and footage of the alien destruction. The story is horrible. There are no choices that work, and the longer the runtime, the more baffling everything feels. I spent most of the movie screaming “this is crazy” over and over again because I just simply could not comprehend what I was seeing.
If you want to watch this movie, do not. I have suffered enough for all of us.
War of the Worlds is a screenlife format movie, used in Aneesh Chaganty movies like Searching and Missing. If you thought that format was clunky in those movies, you are wildly unprepared for how it is used in this movie. This is director Rich Lee’s first ever movie, and he’s most known for music video direction for artists like Lana Del Ray and Maroon 5. The amount of zooming, zooming out, and general jumping around on Ice Cube’s computer screen is genuinely hard to look at, and I found myself pausing just to take a breather. Only five minutes had gone by.
Ice Cube works for DHS and immediately shows that he has access to a genuinely disturbing amount of surveillance. He jumps from listening in on a random person’s phone conversation on the highway to observing the text conversations of another. “This is illegal,” my partner who works for the government exclaimed, and while not everyone has the kind of general knowledge a couple of DC locals like us would know, it’s hard to suspend your disbelief. This man is straight-up hacking his daughter’s Smart fridge in the film’s opening moments, just so he can call her and regale her on the benefits of protein! But I digress …
Ice Cube needs this surveillance though, because he is tracking a hacker. The fact that the hacker is his son is revealed later, but it’s so obvious it might as well not be a twist. This is a movie about the government collecting data, and despite the hacker son’s criticisms, the movie mostly plays this completely straight. After all, how could Ice Cube fight the aliens without a network of drones at his beck and call?
We get a couple of false alarms before the real action begins. The aliens circa 1999 fall from the sky, and the way they resemble the droidekas from The Phantom Menace is genuinely distracting. But these are not regular aliens, they are data aliens. They’ve come from beyond, for our data! Without data, Ice Cube’s hacker son tells us, the world will be sent back into the Stone Age. And sure enough, planes fall limply and explode while tanks remain stuck in the mud. They need the data, and the data has been harvested. Even Ice Cube’s dead wife’s Facebook is gone.
I needed another break at this point, because I genuinely was beginning to wonder if this entire movie was the hairbrained ramblings of a conspiracy theorist. Ice Cube was taking all of this rather well, save for the occasional open-mouth expression of surprise one might show when their friends show up for their 36th birthday dinner at Benihana. I knew Ice Cube’s hacker son probably had some role in the solution, but I was starting to get a migraine and I had no idea how this was all going to play out.
Sure enough, hacker son has a solution: infect the data with a virus. He and all his hacker friends work together with Ice Cube to create the virus, and upload it to the data centers that the droidekas are still hooked up to. Sadly, it doesn’t work and all the hacker friends die except for Ice Cube’s son, who was the only one who thought to ping his location elsewhere. How sad.
As it turns out though, the aliens didn’t come here by accident. They came here because the government made a big bad super secret data project, and the aliens were hungry for it. Ice Cube’s boss Clark Gregg was behind it all along, explaining this is how the government takes care of its people. Uh-huh.
Like the green ending in Mass Effect, these aliens are both tech AND organic, and therefore cannot be stopped by just a virus. Luckily, Ice Cube’s daughter is a bioengineer and she’s working on a new Cannibal DNA to eat diseases or whatever. The hacker son puts the DNA into a computer virus so it can attack both the physical and the tech. Please don’t think too hard about any of this, the screenwriters worked very hard on it.
There’s a problem though. Ice Cube, being DHS, doesn’t have a thumb drive. But you know who can deliver thumb drives, even during a global invasion?! That’s right, you guessed it. Our corporate overlord Amazon employs Ice Cube’s daughter’s pathetic boyfriend, who is able to successfully steer his little drone past the droidekas and on to victory! But what’s this? The droid has flipped on its back and can’t flip over? No problem, just give a homeless man a $1000 gift card to Amazon and he’ll flip it over for you. Once again, the day is saved by Amazon, the only one who can really help you during a global catastrophe (apparently).
From there it’s a foregone conclusion. Ice Cube sacrifices himself to plug in the thumb drive that kills the aliens, except he’s actually fine. In the end, he quits DHS to be a hacker with his son and goes on Joe Rogan. The end.
I am just at a loss here. I left out a lot of details here (including Amazon boyfriend making a tourniquet out of packing tape) but I hope you’ll understand why. This is a summary of an hour and half movie that has eight new things popping up every few seconds. Getting through it was an exercise in mental fortitude. I thought about quitting several times, and even though I have a terrible headache now, I’m glad I finished it so I could come out on the other side. A messenger warning of things I cannot unsee.
This is not just an insult to H.G. Wells’ original story, it’s an insult to filmmaking. It’s an insult to the art we all enjoy. I’m glad this movie is getting the poor reviews it deserves, but I fear the hate-watching crowd (of which I am ashamed to be a part). Please, don’t watch this movie. There are better bad movies, even ones starring Ice Cube. I promise, you won’t have a nice time.