Everything you have seen, heard, and read about this new Prime Video ‘version’ of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is true… and more. It’s unutterably, spectacularly wretched. Made in 2020 during the pandemic (evidenced by the fact that none of the cast interacts with one another in person), this travesty has been sitting on the shelf ever since, and that’s really where it should have stayed, even though it’s hard to imagine what any unsuspecting shelf could have done to deserve something as appalling as this sitting on it for any extended period.
War of the Worlds is a ‘screenlife’ film – basically, all the action and drama is played out and relayed on computer screens. That’s the least of its problems. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a surveillance and threat assessment expert at the Department of Homeland Security – although he spends an inordinate amount of his time spying on his pregnant daughter (he has cameras set up in her fridge), his conspiracy theory-obsessed son, and his girlfriend’s partner who – believe it or believe it not – is an Amazon delivery driver; this latter fact will be of considerable (and repeated) relevance as the film progresses.
Radford is trying to track down a mysterious hacker when showers of meteorites start to bombard the Earth. As panic ensues – all depicted via shakycam on Radford’s computer screen, about which he whizzes with dazzling speed, taking video calls, checking Facebook, watching news reports – huge Tripod machines emerge and start causing chaos and carnage. Radford watches video feeds of workmates (including the likes of Eva Longoria and Clark Gregg, who must have been desperate for a paycheck during lockdown) and even the President of the USA who, despite the fact that the world is falling apart around him, is sitting calmly in front of a video camera in the Oval Office.
War of the Worlds is a tortuous, endless 90 minutes of glitchy video clips, military stock footage, glad-to-be-doing-something actors running through the street waving a camera in front of their faces and pretending to be scared, and Ice Cube, looking increasingly disconnected from the whole thing, hurtling around his computer screen like a man who’s just remembered his wi-fi password. If you have the patience to stick with this abomination for its entire running time, you may well be delighted to see that the resolution to the ‘story’ (the aliens have come to Earth to steal data, apparently) involves ordering stuff from Amazon. Seriously.
War of the Worlds is absolutely appalling – an actual alien invasion would be preferable to watching this trainwreck again. This is a film that deserves a no-star rating but we’re being generous by awarding it one because the Tripod design (when we get to see it, which is only ever fleetingly) is quite cool and reminiscent of the designs from the 1980s BBC Tripods series. Otherwise, this is a ghastly, soul-destroying experience.
WAR OF THE WORLDS is streaming now on Prime Video. But don’t. Just don’t…
