OK, yes, it’s awful. But this HG Wells adaptation featuring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria is not, as online wags are claiming, the “worst movie ever made”. It briefly had an ignominious 0 per cent rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes (it has since climbed to 3 per cent), but there have been worse movies made this year (Smurfs) and last year (Rebel Moon: Part Two).
On paper, in fact, the concept is watertight. It’s a global invasion movie that’s told only through the news updates and fragmentary narrative bites that appear on the desktop screen of the homeland security agent Will Radford (Ice Cube). This type of Zoom generation genre, well established by now, is called “screenlife”, and the best examples include the lockdown horror Host and the terrorist drama Profile. Passing War of the Worlds through the screenlife template has bold, if not hubristic echoes of Orson Welles in 1938, casting his alien takeover story as a mocked-up radio broadcast. The format takes precedence and, in theory, validates the action.
That’s the good news. And the bad? Everything else. The casting is horrific, the newly adapted premise ridiculous and the execution slapdash at best. It was filmed during the pandemic, in late 2020, but held back until now. So it hums with that strangely compromised energy of so many pandemic-era projects (think Michael Bay’s Songbird, or Locked Down), when genuinely terrible movies were green-lit and shot simply because the film-making community had to prove to itself that it wasn’t beaten. Covid couldn’t win while movies, no matter how execrable, were being churned out.
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Radford is one of those homeland security agents who can access all the digital devices of anyone on the planet at any time he wants simply by nudging his glasses, clacking his keyboard and muttering: “God-dayam!” He spies on the Facebook page of his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson), he hacks the FaceTime calls of his layabout son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) and he surveils the digital activities of his BFF, the Nasa scientist Dr Sandra Salas (Longoria).
“Something is way off,” Dr Sandra says, anxiously scanning scientific readings during a FaceTime call with Radford just before the aliens attack. Dr Sandra then chews her fingers very oddly, in the manner of someone who has just been told by a director off camera to act more nervous. “I can’t. Figure. It out,” she says, haltingly, in between greedy finger chomps.
The performances are giggle-inducingly poor. Ice Cube, so effective in Boyz n the Hood, so funny in 21 Jump Street, is alarmingly ill-equipped to hold the camera in unforgiving close-up for nearly 90 minutes armed only with a series of lumpen exhortations, such as “Hell yeah!”, “Man that was close!”, “We gotta go old school!” and “These things eat data?” Yep, in this novel if fantastically illogical update of the original, the aliens here have come to earth to, well, eat data. In a screenplay that’s co-written by, ahem, “Hollywood script doctor” Marc Hyman, there’s no dastardly plan. They’re not doing it to formulate an even greater strategy of universal takeover. They simply like the taste.
Never fear, though, Amazon’s here. Yes, as the director Rich Lee fills Radford’s desktop with endless shaky-cam montages of low-budget planetary destruction (think the apocalypse via TikTok), Radford’s son-in-law Mark (Devon Bostick) has a genius idea. And it involves (no spoilers) the reliability, effectiveness and professionalism of Amazon, coincidentally delivered at the climax of an Amazon-funded movie. Again, this might have passed in 2020, when the choice was essentially between watching endless suboptimal content on your laptop or hoarding another eight-pack of toilet paper. But now it seems breathtakingly crass and typical of an innately lazy project that consistently scrapes the depths without ever truly hitting bottom.
★☆☆☆☆
16, 89min
Prime Video
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