There’s a micro-genre of film called “screenlife movies,” where all of the action takes place on a desktop computer. In 2014, Unfriended made a horror movie out of video chat and text messages, and it was successful enough to inspire a sequel. The more thoughtful Searching from 2018, in which a father attempts to find his missing daughter, felt novel and a bit more promising for the genre, even if an hour and a half really tested the amount of time you could look at a scrunched John Cho and Mac OS X.
Amazon Prime Video’s new War of the Worlds reboot is different from those screenlife movies, in that it mostly takes place on Microsoft Windows and is basically unwatchable. There are rumors that it was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic and shelved because it was so bad. If Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds was a high-budget spectacle, this reboot of the same IP two decades later couldn’t be more opposite: cheap, tacky, and lazy. That said, if you’re a certain kind of viewer — the sort that delights in something that is consistently and unintentionally very funny — it might be worth streaming.
(Some plot spoilers to follow, though “plot” might be generous.)
Ice Cube plays William Radford, a security expert for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with access to the country’s entire surveillance dragnet. (Usually, we refer to characters by their name, but for this article, it feels more appropriate to keep calling him Ice Cube.) The film opens with him logging on to his work computer. Though the DHS is one of the country’s largest employers, with nearly a quarter million people on its payroll, Ice Cube appears to be the only person in the building. In the establishing minutes of the film, he shows off his powers, able to hack into any camera, phone, or drone around the US to spy on people. Menus get right-clicked a lot, as Ice Cube alternates between mundane options and things like commandeer drone.
He uses these huge violations in privacy mostly to violate the privacy of his two kids. His daughter Faith (Iman Benson) is a celebrated biologist, who has engineered something called a “cannibal virus.” Somehow, despite having incredibly deep personal data on every US citizen, Ice Cube actually has no idea what she does for work, and instead, uses his DHS powers to scan what’s in her refrigerator and then calls her on WhatsApp to yell at her for not eating enough protein. Thankfully, in the world of this movie, women love being told what they can and cannot eat. After doling out nutrition advice, Ice Cube checks on his college-age son’s computer hard drive and sees that his other kid has been playing video games. He remotely uninstalls the game, explaining that this will help him focus on school.
A lot of the movie is like this, even once the inevitable alien invasion begins — Ice Cube calling his kids, shouting at them, and then hanging up. What he is supposed to be doing is tracking down a notorious hacker called the Disruptor, a shadow-y anti-government figure that is spouting conspiracy theories about a giant data set of personal information called Goliath. (It is unclear how Goliath is supposed to be worse than the constitutional infringements that Ice Cube is already doing on a daily basis.) But his pursuit of the Disruptor is interrupted by meteors that crash land all across the world. (It’s also unclear why no one sees the meteors coming.)
Aliens begin emerging, and Ice Cube follows along by watching clips on CNN and Fox News in his browser, most of which resembles generic stock footage. When he first sees an alien, he says “goddamn,” followed by an even less convincing “oh, my god.”
It was around this point that I started jotting down all of the apps that Ice Cube has on his computer: Spotify, GitHub, YouTube, WhatsApp, Teams, TeamViewer, Steam, Facebook, Acrobat, Chrome, Zoom, and Ring (though there are probably more that I missed). Along with authentically logo’ed screen elements, using brand-name apps and services lends a sense of realism to the screenlife genre; but in War of the Worlds, it also feels like a lot of product placement, especially for Amazon.
At one point, a character purchases a $1,000 Amazon gift card for a man who is unhoused. Faith’s fiancé Mark (Devon Bostick) is even an Amazon delivery worker. The film’s climax involves Ice Cube ordering a USB drive from Amazon, then having it sent to him by drone, in a dizzying first-person sequence that involves the USB-carrying drone navigating the DHS building. The logo for Amazon’s “Prime Air” is visible during this whole scene. (Among all the flagrant product placement, there was a notable absence of Alexa devices — likely because it would suggest to the viewer that Homeland Security worker Ice Cube could spy on them through it.)
It turns out the aliens are hungry for “data.” Read that previous sentence as literally as possible. The aliens actually eat data, which the film repeatedly calls “our most precious resource.” In case it is not clear enough what is happening, the movie reemphasizes this by declaring that “all systems have been data drained” and that “every system has been penetrated and drained of data.” Watching the aliens devour a government database, Ice Cube says, “They’re in hyper download. They’re being emptied.” Things get personal when he opens the Facebook page of his dead wife and watches as all the images on her profile begin disappearing, with him holding back choked tears while I was trying not to choke on my seltzer from laughter.
I don’t often indulge in a “so bad it’s good” recommendation, but if the details I’ve laid out so far are funny to you, then there are plenty more of them crammed into this 90-minute movie. The density of bad dialogue, plot holes, and shameless plugs in this dreck could rival a neutron star.
I’ve seen reviewers call this the future of movies, one where tech companies generate huge ads for themselves. Though I imagine Amazon will take more care with its Denis Villeneuve-helmed James Bond film, there are already rumors circulating that Jeff Bezos is pushing for his wife, Lauren Sanchez, to be Bond girl. But if it’s just as easy to watch War of the Worlds and see it as an oblivious, self-condemnation of Amazon itself. And it’s not just critics that feel this way. The movie has a dismal 2.7 user rating on IMDb, a site also owned by Amazon. If War of the Worlds represents anything, it’s a strong rebuke — a signal that viewers know garbage when they see it.
But if you wanted to watch a good movie, the 2005 War of the Worlds holds up pretty well, too.
