PLOT: A grounded sci-fi film in the vein of District 9, that touches on themes of privacy versus surveillance
REVIEW: I’ve always been an ardent defender of the “screen life” style of found footage films. I think they’re a unique way to present a story and can be very creative in how they utilize the gimmick. But what doesn’t work in any way is combining it with a mass surveillance system that allows us to see everything from all sorts of angles anyway. It makes the whole “seeing everything on a computer screen” feel very pointless. And that’s simply a good way to describe this new iteration of War of the Worlds: pointless.
Ice Cube plays a threat analyst named William Radford who spends his time spying on citizens of the United States, including his own kids. Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, and Andrea Savage all show up in supporting roles, but this is really the Ice Cube show. He’s the man behind the computer, so he’s the one with whom we’re spending all of our time. And it’s not like he’s particularly bad; he’s doing his best from a desk. But it gets to a point where I couldn’t help but question why on earth he wouldn’t just leave his computer and go try and protect the people he cares about. He’s proven to be more than capable of doing the impossible with technology, yet he’s somehow stuck in his government office building.
War of the Worlds follows the typical alien invasion plot structure, but this time, it’s entirely presented on a computer screen. The whole narrative is presented in such a silly way that I kept questioning how on earth they would have the information that they ended up getting. The timeline is so sped up that nothing has the proper time to breathe, and it makes it feel like the story is on fast forward half the time. The movie always weakly explains it away with “government surveillance is everywhere!” but it comes across as poor writing. And it only gets worse once the reason behind the invasion is revealed.
It’s pretty funny seeing these FBI agents FaceTiming each other during raids and acting like it’s perfectly normal. It’s already been established that they already have access to other cameras and body cams, making the calls completely pointless. It’s made even funnier by the fact that the call is mostly in selfie mode and does not show anything outside of the agent’s face. Why would that ever be useful, especially during an alien invasion? Maybe just make a phone call and save on battery power. Also ironic that the cell towers are still working despite all this chaos. And it’s good to know that, even during the midst of an alien invasion, tech support will still be available.
The Special FX in the film are The Asylum levels of bad, with everything looking like they could have been done on a consumer level PC. They often try to hide the FX with digital artifacting and it never really works. Even funnier is how all the shots of people are so crystal clear, but then they mess up once they’re actually showing something of interest. The massive creatures feel like something from Portal mixed with the classic War of the Worlds tripod designs.
I’m actually shocked that this film was distributed by Universal, as it is just about as low-quality as you can get. There has to be some kind of story as to how all of this came about because it’s genuinely baffling that something like this could be distributed by a major studio. Sure, it went to streaming and was all but dropped out of nowhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a COVID movie that simply sat on the shelf for years. But it’s still baffling how they managed to get all these decent actors involved, especially when their characters are making such boneheaded decisions. If anything War of the Worlds just made me appreciate when other screen life films stick to the gimmick and do it right.
WAR OF THE WORLDS IS STREAMING ON PRIME VIDEO ON JULY 30TH, 2025.
