War of the worlds and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures
Directed by Rich Lee
When word starts going around about a really awful movie, and not for blatantly hateful reasons like those Pureflix movies and their ilk, I’m the kind of guy who will go out of my way to give it a fair shot. Some of it is that I don’t enjoy adding fuel to the Internet Outrage Machine, but the truth is that I genuinely enjoy looking for the good in things and find that a lot of the canonical Bad Movies have at least some value to them that goes against its negative reputation. Needless to say that a War of the Worlds remake with horrifically bad word of mouth is the kind of thing that’s right up my alley, and I went into this with the hope of finding a way to like it. After all, I’m a huge fan of Searching which also used a computer screen gimmick, and I even liked Unfriended 2 despite its hokey plot and hilariously bad jump scares. Does this manage to rise above the reputation that it’s garnered since its release, or was everyone right to dunk on this as mercilessly as they did? Let’s find out!!
Will Radford (Ice Cube) is your typical overprotective dad, except he also works as Homeland Security and has access to all sorts of spy software that makes it all the easier to micromanage his kids’ lives. During a routine day at work, however, his skills at looking through hidden cameras and hacking electronics become all the more necessary as an alien invasion sweeps the globe and both his son and daughter (Henry Hunter Hall and Iman Benson) find themselves caught in the crossfire. With the world falling apart and his children in danger, can Will find a way to stop this alien threat without losing his family in the process? Why are the aliens here in the first place, and can the man who can see everything uncover their secrets even as he’s oblivious to the ones in his own life? Are we sure this isn’t just some YouTube prank? Not the video footage of the aliens, I mean the movie itself. Are we sure Logan Paul isn’t somehow behind all this?
From the moment I booted it up, and after watching ads from Amazon, it was clear that this movie is an absolute mess; the kind that simply must have a fascinating story behind it for any of this to have made sense to anyone. I suppose the simple answer is that it’s another COVID film and the limitations of the production were imposed upon it, but an entirely screen based movie doesn’t have to be a compromise; it can be a genuinely engaging lens from which to tell a story. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like anyone behind the camera knew what it took to make one of these and the end result is a jarring mashup of half-baked and poorly executed ideas pushed through an obnoxious gimmick. The thing about a screen based movie is that it has to feel real for the illusion to work. If the audience is unable to connect the actions onscreen with how they interact with a computer, then there’s nothing to grab onto and the constraints of the movie feel artificial. The constant zooming in and whipping around the desktop screen, the unnaturally smooth mouse movements, it never comes off as a convincing facsimile even if you don’t know anything about computers, and we’re stuck with it for the entire runtime. If anything, it comes off as a way to cover for the even worse filmmaking everywhere else, as the overall vibe of the movie is cheap and rushed. The special effects for the invasion are about on par with The Asylum, though at least they try to make their trashy effects fun, and the movie feels utterly empty despite the world shaking implications of everything; a lot of telling us through stock footage instead of showing us anything interesting.
But okay, the movie isn’t nailing its gimmick and the effects aren’t all that good. So what? We can live with subpar production values if the story is good and the performances work, right? Theoretically, at least, but the way that a movie is made will ultimately affect the performances within it, and since the filmmakers of this clearly do not have a grasp of the techniques they are working with, the actors look lost and without guidance on reacting to webcams and special effects to be added in later. Still, I’ll give the movie its biggest points for at least some of the character work, as Ice Cube is competently sketched out and goes through something resembling an arc. It’s at least an interesting conceit to have an overbearing yet completely oblivious Movie Dad be a computer nerd and not an action hero or C-Suite douchebag, and while Ice Cube is not giving us a good performance, he at least brings a certain amount of charisma and gravitas to his scenes. Still, it’s the only string the movie has to its bow, as the rest of the cast are floundering for something to do other than react or exposit in Ice Cube’s general direction.
And yet, despite everything that is wrong with this movie, I was still gonna hold my tongue. It wouldn’t get a good review out of me, but I wouldn’t excoriate it either. What pushed this movie over the edge into being a truly terrible train wreck, and possibly the worst movie of the year, is the third act which is both a smug conspiratorial screed and a shameless corporate exercise. I guess it’s not too surprising to think that capitalists would jump on board to sell their own conspiratorial actions back at the people who probate them, Alex Jones kept getting sponsors after all, but the utter mindlessness and crassness of it felt particularly gross in a movie that could already ill-afford any additional bad vibes. I’d almost call it a satire of the Dark Web aesthetic if the film displayed even the slightest bit of wit or self-reflection, but a movie that follows up a call to fight the power with hardcore Amazon shilling gets no credit from me for wherever it thinks its politics land. It’s a shame because you can see the ideas at play being used for an interesting reinterpretation of War of the Worlds, but in the hands of these creatives who were either too incompetent or too incredulous to put any real effort into it, it just comes off as inauthentic nonsense; an appeal to the youth from an overpaid boardroom.
I don’t want to hate this movie, but it left me no choice. Whatever bright spots I could find were smothered under the sheer contempt it has for anyone who bothers to watch it, so I will return the favor in kind and hold this movie in similar disregard. It’s not the worst movie you could see, and perhaps you’ll get a few chuckles out of its utter incompetence, but it’ll leave you with a bad taste in your mouth that no amount of 2-day shipping mouthwash can rinse out.
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