Runtime: 90 agonizing minutes
“Directed” by: Rich Lee
Starring: Ice Cube, Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, a bunch of random actors
From: Universal!
Well, this was even worse than what I’ve been hearing for the past 36 hours!
Thursday, this suddenly popped up on Prime, free for any & all members to see. The description promised “a fresh take” on the H.G. Wells novel; note that I’ve never read the novel nor seen any of the cinematic adaptations—what a grievous error I made in making this the first! It wasn’t until Thursday night that I not only saw the bad reviews trickle in on Letterboxd, but learned more about the film.
This was a “screenlife” movie; that’s one entirely or almost entirely seen on a computer screen a la Searching, Unfriended, or 2020’s Host. The key thing to note: this was to be released by Universal (!) and was made in the late fall of 2020 (!!) but for reasons that became obvious to everyone after this suddenly appeared on Prime, this sat on the shelf and was dumped to streaming as even in the months after the theaters opened up when the pandemic was still a huge threat, this would have been lambasted and destroyed to the point of ruining Universal’s reputation.
Now, I can’t say if the CG looks so horrendous because this was a “first pass” at it and once the decision was made to keep the movie locked up for years there wasn’t any further money spent to make it look better. That’s the better scenario, although why would anyone think this was OK even on streaming, especially in 4K HDR quality. Well, after viewing all the Amazon product placement (especially during a finale that was SO bad and stupid it even staggered me at what an illogical nightmare it was) that answered my question.
The crazy MF’er named Ice Cube is an officer for a Department of Homeland Security and besides him doing everything instantaneously on his desktop no matter how illogical it is, he’s a real abusive A-hole who constantly spies on his young adult kids (to the point of peeking in his daughter’s fridge and deleting games from his son’s computer despite him being a gamer!) and I really did not like his Will Radford.
As he and some others coordinate a mission to stop hackers releasing a MacGuffin, the giant robotic aliens that have been in every adaptation since the 50’s attack. They want… data. Yes, all the data that humanity produces; it’s even more illogical than described. Even worse, despite the movie revealing that the aliens knocked out satellites to surprise humanity, “cyberattacks” and “data drains” occur, and many other examples that should have stopped the omniscient powers of Ice Cube, of course it don’t.
Honestly, despite the cyber attacks crippling the world’s military forces and electric systems collapsing, Cube can still spy on news broadcasts and any camera in the world, communicate with his family & colleagues, etc. The plot is such a disaster even before “the big twist” is revealed; I could write paragraphs on how appallingly bad the plot is but that’s more effort than this megabomb is worth. Ice Cube can’t carry the film and elevate the movie by his presence-a problem as much of the film is just him on screen. That said, Meryl Streep couldn’t elevate a catastrophe like this!
Several jaw-dropping moments notwithstanding, not even a short runtime of only 90 minutes could make me recommend this even as a bad movie experience. The idea of such a movie filmed during a pandemic was doomed from the start; the execution was so poor the filmmakers should feel blessed this was ever released… or perhaps it should be “escaped.” A ½ star rating is almost never given by me; however, it was not hyperbole for me to dish this out for War of the Worlds. The film was also garish to look at visually, the editing poor, the “political commentary” pathetic. The dumbest moment is that it appeared Cube was the only person working in that DHS building! He’s the sole person attempting to save the world via methods that truly were staggering in its illogic.
Don’t watch this, bad movie fans! It’ll be a struggle for even you folks. Even worse, this is the first War of the Worlds adaptation I’ve seen! My apologies to H.G. Wells.
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