As I watched Ice Cube grunt and scream at his work computer while laser-shooting aliens destroyed Earth, and Amazon somehow became humanity’s last hope, I lamented the state of cinema.
There are so many ways to adapt H.G. Wells’ 19th-century alien-invasion novel, War of the Worlds. Orson Welles’ radio dramatization, aired in 1938 over the CBS Radio Network, had listeners believing that aliens were truly taking over Earth. The 1953 adaptation, directed by Byron Haskin, is arguably the most critically successful, having won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1954. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation, starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, was a dark, post-9/11 attempt to bring the story into the modern age. The novel has been turned into TV shows, video games, and, at one point, a deck-building card game. Wells’ sci-fi classic is a story of surveillance, external threats, and the horrors of survival against a seemingly unbeatable threat, and for a modern-day audience that is constantly worrying about being watched and about being caught in an ever-looming war, its themes have never felt more urgent.
But instead, we got an Amazon ad.
Ice Cube — who, let’s face it, has a pretty hit-or-miss filmography — stars in Amazon Prime Video’s War of the Worlds as Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security officer who spends his days crouched at his desk, monitoring the world’s security cameras for any potential cybersecurity threats. But he’s using his work desktop for so much more than that: Will’s also stalking his pregnant daughter-slash-biologist Faith (Iman Benson) and cancelling his son Dave’s (H. Hunter Hall) video game purchases. Will also spends a lot of his time texting FBI agents (is their chat even end-to-end encrypted?), his overzealous son-in-law Mark (Devon Bostick), and his NASA bestie Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria). While Will is hunting down a hooded hacker known only as “Disruptor,” things take a sharp turn when aliens land on Earth and begin wreaking havoc.
All of this takes place from the comfort (or confines?) of Will’s desktop screen, mainly because the movie was shot at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and much of its footage was pieced together from clips that feel less like movie scenes and more like pixelated, laggy Zoom calls. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the screenlife genre, and when done right, like in the 2018 thriller Searching or in the 2020 horror Host, it lends itself to some great, suspenseful storytelling. That just wasn’t the case with… whatever this movie was supposed to be. A lot of War of the Worlds sees Ice Cube scowling at his screen, screaming “HELL NO!” every time an alien shoots an iMovie-level laser beam, and way too many heavy-handed Amazon references.
There is so much wrong with this movie — from its bad acting to its poor cinematography — but let’s focus on the fact that it was a less-than-thinly veiled attempt to show viewers how Amazon can save the day. Without giving anything away from the movie’s flimsy plot, Ice Cube needs an important piece of code to defeat the aliens. The only problem is that it’s on a USB thumb drive miles away. The solution? Mark, who is conveniently also an Amazon delivery driver, uses his Amazon Prime air drone to deliver the USB to Ice Cube. At one point, the drone crashes into a man’s tent, and Ice Cube and his crew offer him a $1,000 Amazon gift card to flip the Amazon drone over and send it on its merry, Amazon way. It’s Amazon to the rescue, and Amazon Prime Video never lets us forget it. As Variety’s Peter Debruge put it, War of the Worlds amounts to “a full-length feature commercial for all things Amazon.”
Still, the one silver lining to War of the Worlds might be its chance at becoming the next “so-bad-it’s-good” movie of our times. Good Bad Movies tend to age like fine wine, and Ice Cube delivered such an over-the-top and ridiculous performance that he just might end up being our generation’s Tommy Wiseau. Only time will tell if War of the Worlds gains a strong cult following, but even I can foresee some of its lines going down in history as timeless quotables: see Ice Cube screaming, “I don’t have alien insurance!”
