War Of The Worlds is fucking horrible.
No, I’m not talking about the original HG Wells novel. That’s a classic. No, I am not talking about the 2005 adaptation with Tom Cruise. Not what I would call a classic, but it had its moments. Nor am I talking about the Asylum equivalent, which I’m sure is about as high-brow as all the other Asylum films that have come and gone ’round these parts.
No, we’re talking about the Ice Cube starring vehicle that escaped the Amazon mines last year. Shot during the prevailing circumstances of 2020 when everyone was stuck at home and we had to make due with our own limited means, this new take on the novel involves lots of webcam footage, lots of screenshots of social media platforms, and also most prominent of all, endless Amazon product placement. And this was sitting somewhere in the Amazon warehouses until someone found it and decided to put up on Prime Video. And somehow I sat down and watched this thing.
And it sucks.
Everything is terrible. The acting is beyond atrocious, with bit players giving off listless, almost life-draining performances while the major characters are… well, I guess they’re happy to be getting paid and are only willing to do just the barest bare minimum of the bare minimum of effort one is willing to put into a work in order to justify whatever pay they earned from their participation. The editing is awful; everyone is doing Zoom calls, facecams, we get capture footage of people’s phones and social media. And whenever we have special effects of the invaders, they look like the cheapest of the cheapest cheap end of the old Lucasfilm table scraps that were abandoned long after the Phantom Menace wrapped production. And while we’re at it, let’s pump in every social platform under the sun and make sure it gets facetime. Let’s pump in Amazon’s presence. The product placement is dreadful and I hate it.
Some people have a tendency to call some of these bad movies “so bad it’s good.” In that you can find things to poke fun of and that’s usually where the entertainment comes from. And if a film can do that for you, then that makes it entertaining in a way that wasn’t intended by the filmmakers, but that’s on them. And granted, I’ve seen my share of bad films that I could poke fun of or at least draw out some morbid entertainment value out… but when it comes to this… thing that Amazon dared call a movie, there’s no entertainment to be found here. This was probably the closest I ever came to hate watching a product because it took about five minutes to hate this film and I willed myself through the rest of it, just so I can say that it sucked.
This is an example of a movie that deserved to be shelved and filed as a tax write-off. There is no redeemable quality to be found in this movie. There is no reason for it to exist, much less be released for consumption. Everyone involved in this piece of crap should be made to take a long, hard walk off a high clifftop and land headfirst into the pavement below to destroy whatever defective brain matter possessed these people to make this film in the first place. And no, I’m not being harsh in saying that. If anything, that’s being fucking kind.
However, if you want me to say something nice about this movie… yeah, sorry, I can’t do it. I just can’t. This may very well challenge Ready To Rumble as the absolute worst movie in human history. It’s neck in neck. I’m on the fence as to which one I actively hate worse.
Every so often, someone will ask what it would take for me to give the Paul Feig Ghostbusters a watch since it’s going to be a decade old and I still haven’t watched it.
To quote a legendary and disgraced wrestling promoter…
No chance in Hell.
And you’ve got War Of The Worlds 2025 to thank for that.
Fuck this movie.
dtm666 