In 1938, Orson Welles hosted a radio version of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” that reportedly sent listeners into a panic by treating the alien invasion as a breaking news broadcast. Skip forward to today, and a witless, straight-to-streaming adaptation of Wells’ novel seems highly unlikely to alarm anybody, confining the global takeover by aggressive extra-terrestrial tripods to one man’s desktop as it does (amusingly enough, that man is Ice Cube, playing a surly domestic terror analyst with access to all the country’s surveillance cameras).
“War of the Worlds” marks the latest — and least convincing — screenlife thriller from “Searching” producer Timur Bekmambetov (this one clumsily orchestrated by vfx pro and frequent Eminem music video director Rich Lee). The project might be scarier if the company that’s releasing it, Amazon, hadn’t already achieved world domination. Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon.
Ice Cube plays Will Radford, who works for the Department of Homeland Security in what appears to be a post-DOGE version of the U.S. government (production designer has furnished him with a state-of-the-art office, but no co-workers). Will sits alone in front of his computer, grimacing into the camera as he proactively monitors the many systems put in place to surveille American citizens. But mostly, he just tracks his two kids, scolding his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson) for not eating better and chiding computer-savvy son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) for wasting his time on video games.
The day starts out routinely enough, with Will coordinating the arrest of a hacker known only as “Disruptor,” who’s threatening to expose a secretive government program to collect data on American citizens. Juggling video calls with his boss (Clark Gregg) and Agent Jeffries (Andrea Savage) in the field, Will tracks Disruptor’s signal, shares the location with his colleagues and monitors the raid in real time. Meanwhile, editors Charles Ancelle and Jake York rapidly zoom around Will’s screen, asking audiences to multitask alongside their protagonist as he shuffles windows and spouts things like, “Not on my watch!”
It’s not entirely clear what to make of Ice Cube in a job like this. The rapper has two expressions: a resting scowl and nuclear overreation, neither of which suggest the sort of individual the government would trust with the technology to eavesdrop on anyone he sees fit (Will uses it to monitor Faith’s fridge and infiltrate his kids’ computers). He reads like an uncouth street version of Ving Rhames’ “Mission: Impossible” super-brain, sporting black-rimmed glasses (specs make everyone look smarter, or so Hollywood costume designers seem to think) and cussing up a storm.
If “War of the Worlds” has a point, it’s not about aliens or data privacy or any of the film’s conspiratorial talking points. Instead, it’s about parenting: As a dad, Will is a control freak with entirely too much access to his family’s private information. Both Faith and Dave are capable young adults, and it’ll take a global catastrophe to teach him that he should give them some space.
Cue the global catastrophe: Roughly 20 minutes in, fireballs streak across the sky, smashing buildings and causing chaos everywhere. NASA something-or-other Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) had warned Will that something was off, but “I watch people, not weather,” he growled back. Now he’s seeing people wiped out by an unprecedented meteor shower — but only when they’re conscientious enough to point their cameraphones in the right direction.
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What should have been a spectacular, Roland Emmerich-style montage of destruction instead comes off blurry and unconvincing, as Will clicks through short, lo-res videos of the attack. Then come the news reports, which supply updates on the global military response (basically, stock footage of soldiers doing soldier-y things, like loading missiles onto jets and jumping out of planes). The one cool moment in this otherwise corny movie comes when the first asteroid cracks open and a gleaming three-legged fighting machine unfolds, laser firing.
Will’s job description isn’t clear, but it’s safe to assume that in an emergency like this, he’s expected to do something more than trying to ensure that his own kids are safe. While countless people are being snuffed off-screen, Will scrambles to reach Faith and Dave by phone — and also Faith’s boyfriend, Mark (Devon Bostick), who drives a Prime delivery vehicle and gets on Will’s last nerve by calling his future father-in-law “Pops.”
Granted, that’s often how characters in disaster movies react, prioritizing their family members over the greater good, but that trope proves especially tiresome here, since screenwriters Kenneth A. Golde and Mark Hyman (who shares story credit on “Meet the Fockers”) have given us so little reason to care about the Radford clan. Even sending Faith into labor mid-invasion falls short, when Will’s participation amounts to keeping an eye on her heart rate while juggling calls from the American president.
How many people will watch this nonsense long enough to get to the part where the Prime delivery guy saves the day, telling Will, “I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone”? The script has a couple clever tricks up its sleeve (such as updating the kind of virus that could foil the invasion), but it’s really only worth watching to see Ice Cube jump out of his chair and shout, “Take your intergalactic asses back home!” When it comes to customer satisfaction, does Amazon’s refund policy apply to stuff like this?
From Variety US