The War of The Worlds
Starring Ice Cube
M
2/5
Put simply, The War of The Worlds is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.
Department of Homeland Security officer Will Radford (Ice Cube) must protect his children using his computer during an alien invasion.
Nearly unrecognisable from H.G. Wells’ source novel, The War of The Worlds somehow has a breakneck pace despite being painfully dull.
The film is presented entirely through computer desktops, webcams and shaky phone footage; this disorienting visual soup renders the alien invasion distant and uninvolving (with the bursts of action almost impossible to make out), and undermines almost any suspense the film attempts.
The War of The Worlds is full of clunky, contrived dialogue, bland characters, subpar effects and blatant Amazon product placement.
So much of the run-time is Cube’s grumpy face filling the frame, and his performance is flat and stilted; moreover, Will is a rude, intrusive jerk.
The film is almost childish in how it treats data like magic (The line ‘DNA is a lot like computer code’ is so stupid), and the Disruptor hacker and Goliath surveillance system are nebulous background threats in a film of nothing but background.
The War of The Worlds has a highly malleable narrative: the original 1898 novel is set in contemporary Victorian London, but the 1953 and 2005 films are both set in America, with the latter being heavily influenced by 9/11.
My favourite adaptation is Jeff Wayne’s magnificent 1978 rock opera concept album.
With actors interacting through Zoom windows and rarely ever in the same room, this adaptation feels like a relic of the socially-distanced lockdown days (indeed, production began all the way back in 2020).
Streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, The War of The Worlds is a uniquely incompetent movie that deserves all the scorn it’s received and more.
