Amazon Prime's War of the Worlds With Ice Cube as a Grumpy Grandpa is a Laff Riot. Fortunately or Unfortunately, It's Not a Comedy

It's H.G. Wells' classic tale of interplanetary warfare as you've never seen it before: Ice Cube sitting and scowling for 90 minutes

I was excited about seeing Together as my second new film of the weekend. I love horror, but I am terribly squeamish, so I spend substantial portions of fright flicks with my eyes closed or my hands in front of my face so I am not traumatized by explicit gore.

But when I saw that an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds starring a scowling and sedentary Ice Cube as a preeminent computer genius and over-protective father was debuting on Amazon Prime after five long years on the shelf, I got excited.

When I read that the film featured the President of the United States proclaiming, “This plan is humanity’s last chance. I see no other option but to initiate this war of the worlds to save us all!” I knew that I had to experience this abomination for myself.

I suppose War of the Worlds is a horror movie in the sense that it’s about enormous aliens laying waste to our pitiful little planet with weapons beyond our puny imaginations.

The stakes presumably couldn’t be higher, yet at no point in the film is there even an iota of danger or suspense.

The new, shitty War of the Worlds filters H.G. Wells’ classic tale of a world-threatening alien invasion through the newfangled prism of Screenlife, a digital-age subgenre where everything onscreen is ostensibly appearing on a computer screen, a surveillance camera, body cam, or some other modern gizmo.

It’s a style of film that got a big boost from a pandemic that made filming actors together prohibitively difficult, if not impossible.

This results in a blockbuster spectacle about what can only be deemed a war of the worlds that consists mainly of Ice Cube sitting down and looking equally concerned about humanity being obliterated and his daughter not inviting him to her baby shower because he abuses the limitless resources at his disposal to spy on his children and micro-manage their lives.