Somehow, War Of The Worlds Is Even Worse Than You Think
And yet, it’s #6 on Amazon Prime Video’s top ten.
It’s no secret that more and more of people’s lives happen on screen. That’s where people connect, how we communicate, and even how you’re reading these words right now. That shift has been reflected in Hollywood as well through the rise of “Screenlife” movies, stories told entirely via the computer screens of the characters. Look at 2015’s Unfriended or 2018's Searching, both terrifying thrillers that take place mainly in the online space.
Unfortunately, this gimmick can’t be used for every story. This year, one of the most iconic alien invasion tales ever got adapted into a Screenlife movie that’s so bad, it’s hard to imagine how it even came to be in the first place.
War of the Worlds focuses on the computer screen of Homeland Security officer Will Radford (Ice Cube) as he monitors a laughably huge network of surveillance videos to keep the country safe. However, we quickly learn that Will is much more concerned with the welfare of his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson) and his son Dave (H. Hunter Hall). Our introduction to Faith is Will calling her to complain she’s having a muffin for breakfast — he pulls up a camera feed from inside her fridge and tells her she needs more protein. When she questions how he knows this, he says, “Let’s just say me and your fridge is pretty tight.”
It seems like just a normal day on the job until an alien invasion hits Earth, but instead of evacuating or heading out to the front lines to help, Will spends the 89-minute runtime bouncing from app to app, making the same bewildered face and stressing how important the crisis is from his ergonomic office chair.
That’s the main issue with this movie. H.G. Wells’ original War of the Worlds story doesn’t take place on a computer for a reason: it’s a story of a Martian invasion that takes place in a community and on the streets, it’s about the very immediate consequences of a tragedy. Producer Timur Bekmambetov, a pioneer of the Screenlife genre, compared the choice to Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of the novel that tricked audiences into thinking an invasion was truly happening. “Back then, he used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real,” he said in a statement. “Today, that medium is the screen of our devices.”
But if an Orson-Welles-style immersive thriller was the goal, then this movie falls woefully short. There are shots where the green screen stand-in for the computer screen is reflected in Will’s glasses. At one point, he learns some shocking information, and the camera — which we are supposed to believe is a computer webcam — does a dolly zoom, an effect only possible with a movie camera. And the product placement... Oh, the product placement.
This movie isn’t an Amazon original; Universal Pictures merely released it onto Amazon Prime Video, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. Faith’s boyfriend, Mark (Devon Bostick), has one personality, and it seems to be “Amazon.” He’s a delivery driver for the conglomerate, a fact that comes in handy when Will needs a thumb drive for nonsense plot reasons and Mark flies one to DHS headquarters somehow through “Amazon Prime Air.” But that’s just the tip of the capitalist iceberg. Will uses Facebook, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Tesla, and Zoom, and that’s not even counting the heartfelt Gmail monologue.
A real frame from War of the Worlds: the Radfords hailed as heroes by Joe Rogan.
Sure, there are some creative moments in the story, like alien cyborg bugs that feed on data, but even that leads to hamfisted “emotional” moments like Will watching the Facebook videos of his late wife get deleted one by one. It’s more of a cautionary tale about cloud storage than a scene that makes us relate to this character. It’s clear this movie is barely about an alien invasion. Instead, it’s about how a helicopter dad learns to let go of his obsessive surveillance of his children. He just happens to come to that conclusion by saving the world from aliens.
I wish I could say that was the last notable thing about the movie, but that would be ignoring possibly the most egregious element: the strange right-wing turn. After the aliens are defeated, the Secretary of Defense video calls him to give him a new mission that would protect citizens’ privacy. But Will turns down the job, saying, “I’m done watching us. From now on, I’m watching you guys.” All of a sudden, he’s now a libertarian who has lost all trust in the government. What’s more, where there usually would be a series of news clips showing what happened to each of these characters, there are instead posts from Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, presented entirely as definitive voices of truth.
Ultimately, this movie’s worst sin is that it doesn’t even circle back to “so bad it’s good.” War of the Worlds is a distillation of everything that’s wrong with movie-making today: an obsession with technology, a love of brands, no emphasis on nuance, and a strange conservative bent. This isn’t one for your bad movie night — it’s just bad.
