War of the Worlds isn’t one of those films that unravels, revealing its dreadfulness as it begins to fall apart. Instead, it begins by falling apart, and then just gets worse and worse and worse.
Amazon Prime’s latest movie could so easily have been a modern take on H.G. Wells’ all-time classic novel, employing found footage and gonzo documentary-style reporting to revive the spirit of Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio production of the story. There’s the sense that at some point, somewhere during production, this was the intent. It is, after all, cobbled together from video feeds, cell phone calls, surveillance footage, webcam views of people’s faces, and all the other sorts of very modern lenses through which we now parse reality. There’s an imagined version of this film that has the vibes of the original Cloverfield if its events had been perceived by people with more agency, more expertise.
But that’s not the film we get. Instead, what we have here looks like an in-house corporate video, complete with perfectly lit footage of perfectly made up people, slickly delivering Amazon commercials in between the potential end of the world, with the most atrocious script you could ever imagine.
The immediately credulous plot begins as government worker Ice Cube sits in front of his monitor for a day’s…staring at all of the surveillance camera feeds in central DC? He leaps between cameras placed at various recognizable landmarks, listening in to three seconds of a random person’s phone call, before bouncing off to stare at a nondescript stretch of road to listen to about seven words of conversation someone’s having in some randomly chosen car, in between zooming in on a police officer stationed outside the White House to receive the improbable information that this cop has never exhibited any suspicious activity and has no known “breaches.” It’s Watch_Dogs levels of improbable nonsense, but performed by a bored man sipping coffee, flitting across an entire city as if this scattershot invasion of privacy could or would achieve anything, ever.
This one man doing the watching—his name is William Radford—appears to be responsible for monitoring activity at the Pentagon, the White House, an airport, all roads, pregnant ladies who walk through parks, and the NSA. Incredible. However, midway through his morning blitz, Eva Longoria calls him from NASA. I know she’s at NASA because of the model space rockets on the table beside her, and the (I swear) giant NASA logo on the side of the stairs outside her window. She’s calling to ask Radford if he’s seen the crazy weather that’s going on. “Any noise about it on your end?” she asks, while showing him crisp 4K videos of a ludicrously busy electric storm, then jumping to a mega-tornado of the sort that would make Twisters jealous. “Nope,” says Mr. Cube. “I watch people, not weather.” Duh, Eva Longoria. Who—and again I’m not making this up—is credited on the movie as “NASA Scientist Sandra Salas.”
“I’ve never seen global storms like this,” NASA Scientist Sandra Salas says to William Radford, not pausing to explain what a “global storm” could possibly be. “We can’t figure out what’s causing this atmospheric phenomena.”
That was enough to bring Radford around. “All right, that’s crazy right there,” he says, having watched a montage of exquisitely well-shot and streamed thunderstorm videos, which are apparently affecting everywhere in the world except for Washington DC. (It wasn’t even raining on his surveillance feeds.) And then come some lines that made me certain I was going to be in for a riveting ride.
“All of NASA’s satellites are blind,” says NASA Scientist Sandra Salas. “We haven’t been able to see anything for two days.”
I have only awe. Someone convinced Amazon to give them enough money to make a movie, albeit a desperately cheap-looking one, cast proper actors like Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, and Iman Benson, and yet was cool with NASA just beginning to worry something might be wrong after two days of none of their satellites working.
Oh, but bad news, Radford’s lost interest. “Yeah,” he sneers. “Well, I got bigger fish to fry than watching clouds.” DHS Dir. Briggs has just messaged him on Microsoft Teams, “FBI team on standby for Disruptor raid.” Some hacker is about to maybe do something, see.
We are three minutes and twenty-one seconds into this film.
While simultaneously spying on both his adult son and pregnant daughter, to the level of monitoring what food his daughter orders in cafes (his surveillance tools can do this automatically, including listing the protein content of the ordered food), Radford gets on with his proper job: trying to bring down baddies. We find out that the evil terrorist action he needs to thwart is this mysterious hacker, Disruptor, who’s planning to reveal a secret government surveillance program called Goliath. The one Ice Cube is using? Incredibly, no, it’s a different one. A worse one, one capable of doing more spying than being able to listen in to any call, take over any phone, track all card purchases, and profile any human from their face. Disruptor has posted a YouTube video saying he will soon release the proof, so Radford begins tracking his possible locations by—hold on tight—right-clicking and looking at the page source for his YouTube video, copying out a random string of letters and numbers, and then pasting those into an IP search. Like I said, awe. And then meteors start raining out of the sky.
People, the aliens are coming. The meteors–they’re used to take out our satellites and create those dreadful storms, all so the beastly beings can sneak up on us for their invasion. As in the original story, the creatures crash to earth in spherical rocks that break open to reveal the tripod aliens within. Unlike in the original story, this doesn’t take days of tension-building mystery to occur, but instead (genuinely) about two minutes. Crash, crack, skyscraper-sized aliens.
We perceive all of this through Radford’s computer, and it really should be fun that Ice Cube uses a huge array of familiar programs and applications, from a large range of companies. It’s a Windows operating system, but he uses both Teams and Zoom, messages and calls his kids with WhatsApp and FaceTime, loads live news feeds from CNN, Fox News, and the BBC via Chrome…That sort of real-world inclusion usually gives disaster movies a grounding in our own reality, showing us outrageous fiction through the framing by which we understand our own world. But here, it’s so crass, so obviously phony, that it all looks like commercials. It probably is.
And god damn, the plot holes. We learn from news reports that all satellites were out for two days before the attack, but we see Radford use a live CIA satellite feed of Earth, seen from space. Radford, a man whose job appears to be spying on individuals, is somehow suddenly the person advising the actual president on the military response to the attack. A hacked Tesla he remotely controls to save his injured daughter needs to go on a one-mile journey, but only has battery for, um, two miles, so there’s a panicked sequence to set it to a super-low-battery mode. And, desperate to help his daughter, Ice Cube shrieks that he’s coming to save her, runs to the door of his office, gives it a gentle pull and declares, “Dammit! Locked in!” And just goes sit down again. It was a glass door. I mean, I’m not claiming to be father of the year, but I’d maybe give it a slightly more energetic wobble.
It’s a constant treat to see how time functions in this movie. Radford advises the president on his military response, after which the world’s governments unite to fight back, then we see footage of this new strategy, troop deployment, and their new tactics taking down tripods all around the world—and then we cut back to the Tesla. Yup, all that happened during the car’s one mile drive. .
The script is so adorably abysmal. There’s no room for nuance, nothing left for subtext. When Radford can’t get out of the office, his daughter literally says out loud, “The irony. You wouldn’t leave your office when you could, and now you can’t leave…” At another point his son says, “You know, for someone who spends their life watching, you sure do miss a lot.” A revoltingly mawkish plot about Radford’s dead wife is told via the medium of writing it on a baseball bat and repeatedly smashing it into your face, but in case you couldn’t understand that a man might be sad about losing his kids’ mother, people make sure to say it out loud too.
But that’s all as nothing compared to the movie’s twist on War of the Worlds’ themes. Look, I need to pause to be positive for a moment, because as awful as this film looks in almost every scene, the alien tripods are amazing. The CG is great, they have that ideal mix of robotic and organic, and they look truly menacing as they stomp through the streets in the various news clips. Like in the book they kill indiscriminately, adding to their malevolence, and somewhere out there there’s an SFX team who got screwed by having their fine work put into this garbled drivel. But to ensure it’s more woefully wasted, the big original concept here is that the aliens aren’t after our water, but instead our new most precious resource (I know it’s our most precious resource because at least two different voices describe it as our most precious resource), data. Yes, they eat data. Because…because they do!
This is demonstrated by Ice Cube looking at his dead wife’s Facebook page, only to see a message declaring that his “memories” are being deleted, and then watching as the jpegs disappear from the screen one by one. The last voice note she left him, the banal message about the garbage, corrupts and vanishes. You know, because of the way websites are live feeds of images being endlessly beamed from a server, such that when the server is drained, the pictures go away. That’s how it works! The alien invaders are desperate for our Facebook jpegs, all their killing just a distraction from their true goal of draining data centers, because of all that yummy binary code. And so Goliath?! That extra bad surveillance tool? That’s gotta be the tastiest data ever!
It’s tempting to really lay into Ice Cube’s acting, because it is quite spectacularly terrible. His faux-horrified reactions play out like a Lonely Island sketch, that under-performed awkwardness making everything sound completely insincere. At one point he says, “DNA? Oh my God,” and it could absolutely be Just 2 Guyz. Except, you know, he’s trying his best. But at the same time, everyone’s terrible in this. Andrea Savage, who was utterly perfect in the incredible I’m Sorry, flounders like she’s never seen a camera before. Iman Benson, whose performance in Midnight Club was breathtaking, just seems bored. And Clark Gregg, who is Hollywood’s most reliable government man in a suit, sounds like he’s reading out loud for the first time.
A lot of this might be because everyone is mostly alone when filming, speaking into the camera, obviously not having any real dialogue with the other actors. The result is stitched together, and badly. No one comes off looking good, not even stalwarts like Michael O’Neill.
And yes, there’s that Amazon drone commercial. Radford’s daughter’s boyfriend is an Amazon delivery driver, see, and we frequently see him in his van, with his Amazon shirt. Right at the crucial moment, when all is lost unless Radford can get a thumb drive, he whips out an Amazon Air drone from his bag and declares, “It’s the future of delivery.” Then, beyond all credibility, adds, “I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone.” Apparently, despite all the rest of the internet having been eaten by aliens, Amazon’s website is still fine, jpegs and all. It does seem something of a self-own to suggest that Amazon is so gross that not even data-hungry alien invaders would want to touch it.
Nothing in the entire film makes a lick of sense. It’s sewn together from plot holes, something established in one scene is entirely forgotten in the next, and it has the most outstanding fairy tale ending imaginable. Look, spoilers, but during this film nearly all of human data is deleted (apart from Amazon), the global stock market and all of banking is erased, millions upon millions are killed, all power is wiped out around the world (apart from when it isn’t), and entire cities are leveled, but after our friends successfully upload a virus (because it didn’t have a better idea than copying Independence Day), that’s all better! Seriously, everyone’s happy and sharing photos online again and life’s immediately back to normal! Incredible.
This is truly one of the most terrible films I’ve ever seen. Even awful low-budget amateur horror flicks try to have some sort of central conceit that’s consistent from scene to scene. But this is gibberish from start to finish, despite a solid team of B-list actors and Amazon money behind it.
I swear, I’ve typed out and deleted so many other glaring plot issues, because I needed to get them out of my system more than I needed for you to read them. It seems fully credible that this disaster of a movie might genuinely only exist to contain the Amazon adverts within, despite also heavily featuring products by Microsoft, Google and others, and everything else that happens in the other 80 minutes of a mercifully short film is an aside.
What upsets me here isn’t that someone made a shitty movie—that happens all the time! What is so bothersome is that the ingredients and the money were there for something far better. A film that portrays a terrifying alien invasion through the lenses and applications with which we currently interpret our world could offer an uncanny and chilling vision. Found footage, live-streamed video, news broadcasts, all of it, that’s a great medium for this story. But perhaps to deliver that, someone involved would have had to actually want to say something. Instead, this is incoherent hypocrisy, a film about how wildly invasive surveillance is good but also bad, and how we should think twice about how we share our data, but also we should order from Amazon and be grateful that our data can save us from aliens.
This isn’t “so bad it’s good,” but it is “so bad it’s fascinating.” It’s hard to wrap my head around how anything can be this dreadful. I cannot wait until enough time has passed that the inside stories come out, and we can learn how something so awful came to be. In the meantime, maybe read the book. It’s available on Amazon!
