The Product Placement-Crazed Amazon Prime Ice Cube War of the Worlds Adaptation is a Laff Riot! Fortunately, or Unfortunately, It's Not a Comedy
If you love unintentional laughter, product placement for Amazon and Ice Cube sitting and scowling, boy have I got a movie for you! It's called War of the World and it sucks.
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 and filmed during the early days of the pandemic, 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 we see 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 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.
In a performance several vast universes away from his incendiary star-making turn in Boyz n The Hood, a sleepy Cube plays Will Radford, an analyst at the Department of Homeland Security who never got over the death of his wife a few years earlier.
War of the Worlds clumsily conveys his grief by having him leave yearly birthday messages for his wife that she cannot read because she’s pushing daisies six feet deep on account of being deceased. Will compulsively plays a message she left him before dying.
Will’s wife’s message feels like it was created by AI through the prompt, “What is something that a human woman would say to a human man she married?”
“Remember to take out the trash and be nice to the kids,” Will’s dead wife implores from beyond the grave. This would be ridiculous and arbitrary even if his “children” weren’t both adults.
The prickly protagonist’s daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), a biomedical researcher, is deeply pregnant but does not invite her pops to her baby shower because he sees and judges everything she does by hacking all of her electronic devices.
In the hoary tradition of garbage like this, the father of Will’s grandchild must prove himself worthy by helping save the world by using Amazon’s miraculous products.
The Amazon delivery driver and true believer in all things Amazon and Amazon Prime gushes, “Prime Air? It’s the future of delivery!”
I wonder if there are deleted scenes where Will is trying to use his computer genius to save the world, but he keeps getting distracted by all of Amazon’s great bargains and groundbreaking original programming.
Later in the film, the heroes coax a stranger into helping them by offering him a thousand-dollar Amazon gift card.
I wish I were joking.
Lines like, “At only $14.99 per month or $139 per year, Amazon Prime is a steal! You can’t afford NOT to subscribe! I bet the aliens came down here specifically for out-of-this-world deals!” were undoubtedly cut at the last minute.
Will may be the kind of creep who tells his pregnant daughter to eat a hard-boiled egg rather than a muffin—for her own good, mind you—but he’s a hardass because he cares, as he confesses in an email he spends the film writing when he’s not attending to an alien apocalypse.
Defeating 100-foot-tall killer aliens and ensuring that his children understand that he harbors no ill will towards them for not inviting him to the baby shower, because he knows he can be a bit much, are of equal importance to Will and the movie.
That doesn’t ground the action; it maddeningly gives the mundane and the apocalyptic equal weight.
Will soon finds himself having to worry about more than having a mildly dysfunctional relationship with his genius adult children when giant meteors rain down and massive alien weapons emerge from their rubble.
War of the Worlds is closer in quality to the 2005 Asylum version than the legendary Orson Welles radio broadcast and the 2005 blockbuster.
It pains me to report that the filmmakers here are not as gifted as Orson Welles or Steven Spielberg, but what the writers and directors lack in basic competence, they make up for in their zeal for product placement.
This is the second film in a row that I’ve seen revolving around a widower and featuring a plot point involving a self-driving Tesla. The key difference is that the sequence in The Naked Gun is funny and satirical, in a movie whose many laughs are intentional, whereas War of the Worlds takes itself seriously, resulting in an unintentional laugh riot.
There are chuckles aplenty to be found in War of the Worlds. For better or worse, that was not the filmmaker’s intent.
We spend so much time looking at Ice Cube’s face as he cycles through two or three expressions that it feels like a one-man show, but there are some actors of note also doing substandard work.
Eva Longoria is ostensibly one of the stars as top NASA Scientist Sandra Salas (everyone here is a super-genius or an Amazon employee), but her role is so unnecessary that every time she briefly appears onscreen, I thought anew, “Oh yeah, Eva Longoria is in this.”
They could easily have cut her scenes without losing anything of value, but she’s a name actress who spent two or three days reading words into a webcam, and the film wouldn’t want to let a goldmine like that go to waste.
Will’s nemesis, before the beings from beyond make everything go sideways, is a hacker collective in the vein of Anonymous that threatens to expose a government spying program called Goliath, so top secret that not even Will, who spies on people (mainly his children) for the government for a living, knows about it.
In a deeply unsurprising development, it turns out that one of the main brains behind Goliath is Dave (Henry Hunter Hall, the progeny of writer-directors Vondie Curtis-Hall and Kasi Lemmons), Will’s son.
Will is surprised and displeased. “I love you, but you’ve got to leave this conspiracy shit at the door,” a character played by Ice Cube, a noted anti-vaxer, antisemite, and conspiracy theorist, tells his son.
The grouchy future grandpa soon sees the light. Stop reading if you don’t want this terrible movie ruined.
It turns out that there has been a massive conspiracy involving the government (boo!) Aliens have been visiting us for decades, but the feds covered it up because they want the masses ignorant and vulnerable.
The monsters from outer space are digital/organic hybrids that crave sweet, sweet data. That’s right: these sick fucks want to know what’s in our Amazon carts. Incidentally, when I refer to sick fucks who want to know what people are ordering from Amazon, I’m referring to both the aliens and the government.
Everybody is obsessed with Amazon because it is such an amazing company that supports President Bush and his America First agenda.
The puny man-animals end up defeating the baddies from beyond in the most cinematic and exciting manner possible: by unleashing a computer virus that infects and destroys the invaders from outer space.
Will learns that an evil government operative, played by Clark Gregg, introduced a massive domestic spying program called Goliath, so sexy and thrilling that it drew the alien invaders to our planet.
Our cranky hero, whose job involves spying on people for the government, is shocked to discover that the government has been spying on people in an even more invasive way than he imagined, so he switches sides and becomes a world-saving hacker on the side of the people.
I know what you’re all thinking: was Will ultimately invited to his daughter’s baby shower? War of the Worlds tries unconvincingly to make us believe that Will died saving the world alongside his son and Amazon, but pulls back to reveal that he managed to finally finish his email to his children about how much he loves them, save the world, AND score an invite to a baby shower no one in the world could possibly care about.
War of the Worlds was filmed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. This should lend it contemporary resonance. A mere half-decade ago, we faced a global threat like none other, one that changed the way we lived, behaved, and thought about ourselves and our neighbors. Yet this insipid exercise in idiocy could not feel more irrelevant or pointless.
Music video director Rich Lee’s feature film directorial debut is at least terrible in a distinctive, memorable, and entertaining way. If you love flamboyantly awful movies, you’ll dig it, but if you are one of those snobs who prefer films to be good, then you’ll want to steer clear of this uniquely misguided take on a classic tale.
One Star out of Five