War of the Worlds (

2025

) ½

Throughout the decades, the alien invasion shown in War of the Worlds has been a useful cipher for examining contemporary anxieties while keeping them at a safe psychological distance. The original novel was essentially a horror story for the colonial powers of Europe, asking its audience to consider the possibility of them being colonized by a technologically advanced alien society just as they had colonized their technologically inferior fellow men. There is, after all, nothing people fear so much as to be made to suffer the same inequities that they forced others to endure. The classic film War of the Worlds (1953) reflected the period's rising fears over nuclear war, giving the aliens death rays that could reduce entire battalions of soldiers to Hiroshima Silhouettes in an instant of searing heat. The Steven Spielberg adaptation War of the Worlds (2005) used imagery lifted directly from 9/11 to wrestle with the feelings of powerlessness that Americans felt in the wake of those attacks. The latest adaptation of War of the Worlds uses H.G. Wells' venerable tale to tackle feelings of paranoia over governmental surveillance and data collection.

Right off the bat, this is an odd fit for the story, as at its core, War of the Worlds is about aliens coming to earth with gigantic three-legged war-machines and destroying vast swaths of human civilization before themselves being felled by terrestrial diseases. This is a fine metaphor for colonialism, or nuclear war, or even terrorist attacks, but it becomes difficult to spin it into a story about the invasion of privacy. The aliens are not just invading our privacy; they are invading our planet! It's not that this isn't a worthy theme for a film, but if you're going to adapt a classic English sci-fi story that has already had a well-regarded cinematic version from the 1950s, surely 1984 would be the better choice! The premise revolving around the surveillance state also feels strange when the film in question is being financed by Amazon, a huge corporation that hoovers up vast amounts of data about its users and cheerfully describes its own culture as “data-obsessed.”

I shouldn't rag on the film's concept too harshly. Yes, it's a stupid idea that should have been tossed out in the planning stage. However, there was no reason why a War of the Worlds as a metaphor for Big Data and NSA spying couldn't have been a unremarkable 3/10 snoozer with some clunky messaging castigating the lack of privacy in modern life. The metaphor probably wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, but it would work well enough for the people folding their laundry or cooking dinner while the movie plays in the background. However, as you can tell by the rating at the top of this review, what we got is something altogether different. No matter how stupid this movie's concept is, it cannot compete with its brain-dead execution.

This movie feels fake. It's like the trailer for a film that would play during one of those ten-second advertisements that pop up periodically during Robocop (1987), or as some idiotic blockbuster that Seth Rogan was thinking about green-lighting on The Studio. This is a short parody of a bad movie that would play for 30 seconds in the middle of another movie to give the audience something to laugh derisively at. Somehow, this fake movie within a movie escaped its framing narrative and grew to feature length. It left me wondering how a film like this can even exist, let alone be given a budget of $65,000,000. Were there really no better movies that Amazon Studios could fund with that money? Even if the goal is to lose money for a tax write-off, there had to be more worthwhile uses for all those resources!

Our story follows Will Radford, a government hacker in the employ of the Department of Homeland Security. Right off the bat, seeing Ice Cube step onscreen as a government nerd strains my credulity, but maybe that is just a result of listening to Straight Outta Compton a few too many times in my youth. Mr. Cube is, after all, an accomplished thespian, and playing an NSA hacker is not the biggest stretch in his filmography. No, the bigger problem with his performance is that he seems to be reading each of his lines for the first time as he delivers them! Since the script has him sitting in the same room for almost the entire run-time (finally a realistic depiction of the habits of real-life hackers), it becomes obvious that we're dealing with a Cameron Mitchell performance; Mr. Cube came for one or two days of filming, did one reading for each line, and spent most of his time sitting down. This kind of thing is funny when it's a small character played by an actor the shitty movie otherwise couldn't afford, but seeing it done by the lead in a comparatively big-budget film is just depressing.

Radford divides his days between chasing a cyber-criminal called Disrupter and grossly abusing his access to America's spy infrastructure to monitor his daughter Faith and his son Dave. Seriously, at one point, he hijacks a security camera to make sure that his daughter is getting a healthy breakfast. That has got to violate some due-process legislation! His powers as a hacker are absurd; he can easily hack cars, private cameras, cellphones, and virtually every device in the world. It is nearly as absurd as the deliberate parody Hacker-man in Kung Fury (2015). Since his powers are so vast and so poorly defined, there is seldom any tension in the film, as you can always rest assured that Ice Cube will be able to hack his way out of the problem. It would probably have added a considerable amount of tension to have him occasionally encounter things he cannot hack around, like mechanical locks, and force him to find creative solutions to the problem. However, even something as mundane as that would require more creativity than the script was capable of delivering.

His daily routine is interrupted when an army of alien war-machines descend on Earth as meteors and promptly transform into the iconic Tripod walkers. Let's not mince words, these things look like shit. They look worse, by far, than the 20-year-old CGI tripods in War of the Worlds (2005) to say nothing of the gorgeous 70-year-old miniatures from War of the Worlds (1953). The effects here are on par with what you would usually see on one of those crappy sci-fi channel original movies back in the early 2000s. We seldom see the aliens up close; instead, they appear in the background of news broadcasts, which seem to use real footage, which makes the whole thing a little sleazy. Even I find it a bit insensitive to use actual footage of people fleeing disasters and war and use that as a canvas for your shitty alien invasion movie, so I can only imagine how the real pearl-clutchers will feel about it.

The aliens are remarkably easy to defeat. Once the president gives the order to counter-attack, the joint NATO and Chinese forces (the Russians apparently weren't invited) start knocking down tripods like they're bowling pins. While I understand that this version of War of the Worlds wants to focus less on the physical threat posed by the aliens than its predecessors, it does undercut the menace of the alien invaders, knowing that a couple of modern artillery shells can cripple their space-faring war machines. However, the tide quickly turns when the aliens breach the big government data centers and start sucking out all the data housed there. Suddenly, jets are falling out of the sky, naval vessels are accidentally beaching themselves, and coalition forces are fighting a desperate rear-guard action to avoid being annihilated by the alien invaders. This all seems extremely stupid, because hacking and electronic warfare are not exactly foreign concepts to modern armies. Most high-tech weapons systems are built to operate at least somewhat independently of their support systems. It's not like if the F-35 doesn't check in periodically with the server, it will stop working like a video game with shitty DRM.

Seeing that the aliens are targeting data-centers leads Will to conclude that the aliens have come to earth not to steal our natural resources, drain our oceans, or impregnate our women, but rather to abscond with our data. What data in particular? You might ask. The film says it doesn't matter if it is data then the aliens want it. Earlier in the review, I mentioned that the War of the Worlds plotline is not very well suited to serve as a story about the erosion of the right of privacy. However, I still expected the filmmakers to make some attempt at reworking the plot to connect this. I wasn't expecting them to shrug and say, “I dunno, the aliens invade to steal our data.”

It's difficult to articulate just how stupid this is. It would make a degree of sense if the aliens were after specific information that would allow them to better subjugate the planet or counter human defenses, you know, information about our weapons, infrastructure, environment, or even politics. I would even be willing to accept that the aliens have come to earth to steal a specific scientific invention, though what we could invent that a space-faring civilization couldn't manage on its own is hard to fathom. However, the aliens are specifically targeting the data being collected by Project Goliath, a DHS program that is hoovering up data about Americans, up to and including the contents of their Amazon shopping carts. While this data may be of some use to the aliens if they are creating an anthropological study of Earth, it has precious little utility for their immediate goal of conquering the planet.

It also raises the question: if any old data will satisfy the aliens, why are they even bothering to invade Earth at all? They just need to hook up a random number generator, tell it to run continuously, and write its output to a series of .txt files, and boom, they have an unlimited supply of data that is just as useful to them as the fact that I bought a used copy of The Caves of Steel two weeks ago!

Now, I have seen plenty of movies with shitty acting, insane plots, and sci-fi channel original movie-level special effects, but what really makes War of the Worlds stand out is the product placement. This movie never lets you forget that it's an Amazon-backed production. For starters, we have Faith's boyfriend Mark, who is an Amazon delivery driver and who appears clad in Amazon-branded hazards whenever he's onscreen. This alone is rather glaring because Faith is a biomedical researcher; there is no way that she would date a delivery boy. It gets considerably worse when, at the film's climax, Radford realizes he needs a USB thumb-drive to stop the alien attack, but unfortunately, thumb-drives are prohibited at the DHS headquarters (honestly, the most believable technical detail of the entire film). Mark can fly him one with his Amazon-branded delivery drone, but first, Radford has to go to Amazon.com and order one. Were this scene to appear in its entirety in a short comedy sketch, I would say that it was altogether too absurd a parody of corporate product placement to elicit any laughs.

To return to my original point, each adaptation of War of the Worlds captures a different topical anxiety. I think that, oddly enough, that still may be true here. While War of the Worlds does not do a comprehensible job of tapping into fears around data-collection and surveillance, it does, by its very existence, articulate a different topical fear: The fear that our entertainment is devolving into AI-generated, low-effort slop. Now I cannot say for certain that any part of this film's script was written by AI, nor can I say for certain that any of its visuals were generated by AI, but it does give off that general impression. Indeed, I would think more of the writers and the effects artists if they told me they did outsource most of this film's production to ChatGPT.

Sure, this film was singled out for scorn and ridicule, with the only audience it was able to attract being a group of bad-movie aficionados who came into the endeavor with the same attitude as a 19th-century urchin spending a nickel at the circus to “go and see the freaks.” However, all the issues with War of the Worlds, from the nonsensical script to the disinterested actors, to the shoddy visual effects, to the rampant product placement, are things that are present in most major blockbusters, albeit to a lesser degree. Film audiences are not yet ready to accept slop as poisonous as War of the Worlds, but as evidenced by this year's box office numbers, they are more than willing to chow down on films like Minecraft (2025) that are only marginally better. How long until standards drop entirely? In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only slop and the laughter of proprietary AIs.