War of The Worlds | Review by: Benjamin Garrett

When’s the last time you watched a movie that truly delivered on its potential, exceeding your every expectation? I’m talking about a one of a kind experience that gave you exactly what you were looking for, right when you needed it most - kind of like the way Amazon Prime delivers packages quickly and efficiently to millions of people around the world, every day.

Yeah, War of the Worlds is not a movie that delivers anything, on any level. Actually, it’s barely a movie at all. This embarrassing adaptation must have H.G. Wells spinning in his grave. Very loosely based on his original novel, and blatantly stealing from past adaptations, this movie shows us a side of the story nobody asked for. We get to see the whole thing play out from a government official’s desktop computer and webcam.

In a career worst performance, Ice Cube reacts to stock footage and glitchy shaky cam video for a full hour and a half. The highlights include watching him chat on Microsoft Teams, lurk people’s Facebook profiles, and place an order on Amazon Prime (more on that in a moment). There is some semblance of a plot, which is riddled with holes and oh-so-stupid twists in equal measure. The timeline of events in particular, is an absolute mess. When we do get glimpses of the actual invasion, the CGI has a level of polish equivalent to a high school computer class project. Keep in mind, this movie sports a 20 million dollar production budget, that, for the life of me, I cannot fathom how it was spent.

The result is something that closer resembles a 90 minute commercial for Amazon, and a handful of other big tech conglomerates, than it does a real film. The number of times characters say “Amazon cart” is hilariously and blatantly obvious. The writers must’ve thought they were creating a Pavlov’s dog situation, that would have us all subconsciously opening Prime to do a little shopping. All of that pales in comparison, though, to the aggressive Amazon Air advertisement that plays a pivotal role in the movie’s climax.

The invasion isn’t the only disaster on display in War of the Worlds, because the movie itself is catastrophically awful. It’s not often that a film this poorly conceived comes along - a real phenomenon that has to be seen to be believed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go fill my Amazon Cart.

0/5

Review by: Benjamin Garrett

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