I’ve long been a fan of H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi novel “The War of the Worlds”, having gone so far as to visit Horsell Common where it begins, but it’s fair to say that its adaptations almost all fall far short (excluding Jeff Wayne’s fantastic musical). But still, as a fan, I felt compelled to watch the new version, which was secretly dropped on Prime Video on Wednesday, July 30 (though it wasn’t made by them, as Universal was behind it).
This movie, called just War of the Worlds, stars Ice Cube as a guy sitting in front of his computer; the movie was produced by the same person who made Searching and like that movie, almost all the story is told through a guy’s computer screen as he goes on video calls, watches social media footage and does his job. The movie’s 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes tells you just how well that works.
Ice Cube plays a Department of Homeland Security officer who’s hunting for a mysterious hacker and watches as aliens begin to land across the globe and murder everyone while humanity responds. Near the end of the film he suddenly has to do something beyond using his powers to stalk his children.
So it’s an alien invasion movie in which we only see the aliens through blurry vertical phone clips (which is for the best, given the poor CGI when we do see them) and spend most of the time watching Ice Cube mope on his PC. Not exactly what H.G. Wells was expecting, but he was probably expecting it to be a 90-minute commercial even less.
I’ve never seen a movie with more product placement, or with more egregious product placement. The movie has copious and heinous products shoved down your throat incessantly: at once point Ice Cube commands his daughter to get into a Tesla which he’s hacked, and remotely pilots, constantly we’re seeing various Microsoft, Google or Apple apps, and a particularly galling example (that’s been torn apart on social media) sees the character’s Amazon delivery driver son-in-law uses a drone to fly a USB drive past loads of aliens and into a secret base to deliver Cube some information.
It feels like a 90-minute advert (except longer than that, because by default Prime Video viewers have to watch extra commercials for several minutes before the movie even begins).
At some points, War of the Worlds tries to make a point; something about how mass surveillance is bad. But Ice Cube eventually uses the mass surveillance to save the day, and at the end the government decides to make a different mass surveillance system that they pledge won’t be used for evil. So… mass surveillance is good!?
Having fun
I don’t think Rotten Tomatoes is a good way to quantify the quality of a movie but in this case it’s totally right; War of the Worlds is an absolute mess. Yet I still had a great time watching it.
That’s because I didn’t go into the movie alone, but with some friends, some wine and party later on that I needed to pre-game for. And that helped me see it for what it truly is: a new “so bad it’s good” classic.
Drinking games are easy to make up for a movie like this, and that’s how we got through it (not that we’re recommending drinking games, but a glass of wine might help on this movie!).
One I quickly regretted suggesting is: “drink every time there’s a product placement“. I said this early in the movie before it became clear how many there would be, and when you start looking out for them, there are countless. I’ve mentioned Amazon and Tesla but there are also mentions of so many other brands, and basically every computer app under the sun. Double drink if the reference is so egregious and unexpected that it gives you whiplash, like the aforementioned Prime Air one.
Another rule: “drink every time it’s clear Ice Cube didn’t have a script“. This isn’t an insult to the musician and actor, and he’s been great in quite a few things he’s been in. But lots of the time we see him in the movie, it’s just brief cuts when we see his reactions to various events, and there are plenty of examples where his expressions don’t match up to the events. Instead, it feels like the filmmakers shot a load of random reactions and then plastered them into the film; most of the time when we see him observing some mass act of destruction, he just looks confused about whether the camera is rolling or not.
Some of the most embarrassing moments are when he does react: “take your intergalactic asses back home”, he muses like he’s half-watching a sports game played on a TV on the other side of a bar. Many of his expositional lines sound pretty dispassionate too.
Here’s a third: “drink every time a known actor randomly turns up“. Though Ice Cube is our main protagonist and we see quite a bit of his children too, there are brief segments with Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, and a few other “hey, is that X from Y?” faces. It looks like these were all filmed in the actors’ homes (or on a golf course, in one example, presumably shot while he was waiting for someone else to tee up) and lots of the time it sounds like they’re reading the script as they deliver their lines.
There’s a lot more about the movie that is pretty hilarious, from the baffling timeline of it (somehow, Earth assembles all its military forces, fights the aliens and wins lots of battles in the time it takes Ice Cube’s daughter to drive to a nearby medical facility), the mind-boggling reliance on stock footage, the fact that there are about eight title-drops in five minutes, the total lack of commitment to the ‘screenlife’ format through vast swathes of the movie, or the headache-inducing editing style that forced even my non-drinking friend to reflect that they felt nauseous. There are plenty of other drinking rules if you’ve got the tolerance, though for your liver I’d recommend sticking to just three.
And I’m not saying you have to drink to watch War of the Worlds — people always say that you don’t need to drink to have fun — but I’ve no idea if I would’ve enjoyed the movie at all if I wasn’t drinking. My teetotal mate liked it least of all of us. But I was enjoying a bottle of wine and I had great fun laughing at the movie.
Missing the point
As a fan of the original book, War of the Worlds makes me sad at just how far we’ve come from the core text.
The original novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, was thematically of its time: you can easily read into it themes of pre-war tension (the Great War was brewing at the time), of colonization and imperialism during the tumultuous end to the British Empire, and a conflict between rural and urban Britain. That first theme in particular would be particularly prescient today, when social media is convinced that the world is about to erupt into a new war. So the theme of mass surveillance is bonkers as a choice.
That’s not all that’s bizarre; a core part of many adaptations of The War of the Worlds is the idea of a journey; in the book the narrator travels from the town of Woking to Primrose Hill in North London; a journey you can drive in an hour or make via rail in 75 minutes nowadays but wouldn’t have been so easy in the Victorian times.
Through this journey the narrator meets various people and witnesses events in the Martians’ war on Earth, the voyage reflecting changes in the world around him (that’s those themes again!). And that’s an idea that some of the better adaptations have, even Spielberg’s War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise.
There’s not so much of a journey you can do when your main character is getting back problems behind a desk. Even the scampering about of Cube’s children can barely count when the geography to it is impossible to follow.
Let’s not even mention the famous ending of the novel, when the aliens succumb to Earth diseases and die without our intervention. That is a fascinating reflection of our powerlessness in the face of war and destruction when only random chance and luck can save us, but not here. Instead, Ice Cube needs to upload a virus into a specific USB port to save the day and kill the aliens. Boring.
Wells’ book, like many classics from the country, has something ineffably British about it; from the place names and themes to the narrators’ being an observer instead of an active participant (we don’t need to be heroes). Like many other American adaptations of classic British works, War of the Worlds strips out all the charm and cultural identity.
This isn’t anything new; Amazon’s own The Rings of Power did what Peter Jackson avoided in botching The Lord of the Rings while Hollywood-made classic period dramas are filled with bonkers fantasies about pre-Industrial Britain and it seems that every new week there’s another US cable version of Sherlock which gets two steps further from the original. Don’t get me started on upcoming versions of Frankenstein, The Chronicles of Narnia or Amazon’s upcoming Bond plans.
I’m not saying that Americans can’t adapt British source materials, and there are probably good examples (I have to say this even though I can’t think of one off the top of my head; maybe the undetectability of good examples is a great compliment). But War of the Worlds is proof that the track record is poor, and the butchering of the book is an indication that the movie is fair game to criticize (if the fact it was made by a huge studio instead of a bunch of determined indie filmmakers wasn’t enough).