This is one of the worst fucking excuses for a film I have ever seen. What a shameless insult to the good name of H.G. Wells. What a deplorable piece of rubbish. What a... ah, wait a minute. I forgot to summarise the plot of the film first, before I saw it along the ankles. Ok, here we go: Homeland colonel Will Radford (played by Ice Cube for some reason) lives chronically online through a surveillance programme, monitoring everything from mobile phones to his daughter's fridge (?) to find an Anonymous-scented hacker called Disruptor, but the hacker has to wait when suddenly meteors are hitting the world - and from these hatch alien tripods that start... eating data (?).
This is the premise of Amazon Prime's latest science fiction film, which at the time of writing is in second place in Sweden and I can only offer my condolences to all Swedish viewers who were fooled by the enticing title 'War of the Worlds'. For this is hardly a film, and certainly not a fair adaptation of H.G. Wells' beloved book. This is a shameless Amazon Prime advert in feature film format, where the Prime Air drone and a $1000 Amazon gift card become crucial instruments in defeating the insidious aliens. And to see the doomed aliens - who, by the way, are made in MS Paint - we have to stare at Ice Cube's strained brow as he switches between different MS Teams meetings for 90 minutes. 90!
The reason you barely get to see the three-legged machines is because the computer effects are downright embarrassing, like something out of a Garry's Mod server or something. Instead, we get to see this invasion through Ice Cube's computer screen, where he drives the plot forward by spying on everything and everyone while his NASA buddy (an incredibly out-of-place Eva Longoria) links him photoshopped videos of severe storms. The height of tension in what can generously be called a 'film' is thus based on what we see on the rapper's computer screen, which thus becomes the film's main stage. It's just as boring as looking over someone's shoulder while they're working remotely, but even sillier.
God, it's so exciting to see Ice Cube frantically switching between different Zoom meetings. It's equally nail-biting to watch him log into Gmail to write an email to his daughter, while aliens clamber around outside his office. Don't you love hearing constant notifications from Teams or Messenger while humanity is being destroyed in the background? Is this a long overdue April Fool's joke? Has poor H.G. Wells just become a punching bag in the licence swamp? First the 2019 Epix hoax, then the BBC's passionless miniseries and now Amazon Prime's mistreatment. The energy generated from Wells' spinning tomb should be able to sustain an entire capital city for years to come!
By the way, scratch that bit about humanity being destroyed, because that's not what this shit is about. It's really about how far we've taken the surveillance of our private lives and how this is tearing an already fractured American family apart. It's a cheesy family drama that happens to be edged by an alien invasion, but this cosmic concept hardly seems to affect the characters. News headlines gossip about the end of the world, but it doesn't feel like it at all. The military overturns the machines like cows. Murderous aliens are only a minor inconvenience because the real threat is the US surveillance programme! Everything about this script is pathetic, just like everything else in this sham of a film.
This could have worked as some kind of Super Bowl advert, or at least adapted the premise to some kind of story about cyberterrorism or something. It wouldn't have been very good then either, given the amateurish production, but you could have been a little more forgiving. But slapping H.G. Wells' name on an obviously crap product to cheat people out of valuable time? Amazon Prime's War of the Worlds is a waste, a fraud, and self-torture on every possible front. Leave poor H.G. Wells alone now.