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| Images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video |
We’re in a new era of dumping ground movies. Before movies collecting dust on studio
shelves had to wait until January or February before seeing some measure of the
light of day. We have theatrical
features that have ended up straight-to-video in many cases over the years
depending on production woes. And yet
few could’ve predicted the kind of post-COVID shoestring productions that
somehow bypassed the winter dumping ground slate and end up in front of
everyone on digital online streaming platforms that we’re being inundated with
now. Movies that aren’t trying to tell
stories so much as they’re trying to produce content for a half-bored audience
scrolling through digital titles to throw on their 4K flatscreen
televisions. Mostly though, it has
become a place where movies no one asked for or wanted to see end up cropping
up before unsuspecting streamers click on the play button.
The latest example of post-COVID streaming dumps is Timur
Bekmambetov’s Screenlife adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 science-fiction horror
classic The War of the Worlds in a story familiar to countless readers
and moviegoers around the world over involving an extraterrestrial alien
invasion of Earth intending to exterminate the human race and take over the
planet. Initially canonized in the court
of public opinion by Orson Welles’ 1938 Mercury Theater radio play adaptation
which freaked out listeners throughout the United States (the actual number
likely embellished), it soon sparked a 1953 Oscar winning film by Byron Haskin
and later a 2005 big budget Steven Spielberg film. In between there were some knockoffs and
parodies including Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! and Roland Emmerich’s Independence
Day which introduced the idea of infecting the aliens with a computer virus
rather than them simply getting sick with Earth’s bacteria. There were also numerous television iterations
including miniseries versions in 1988, 2019 and 2022 amid the then-ongoing
pandemic, but I digress.
In this new Screenlife webcam thriller version from the
Russian producer behind Unfriended, Searching and Profile,
a misbegotten affront to the eyes, ears and common-sense starring Ice Cube as a
DHS officer named Will Radford, at long last, someone actually made a version
of The War of the Worlds that all but urinates all over H.G. Wells’
timeless sci-fi creation. As Radford
monitors everyone on Earth from his carefully tucked away government
workstation, he’s on the hunt for a mercurial hacker dubbed Disruptor when he
isn’t helicopter piloting above his computer nerd son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall)
and his pregnant bio-researching out-of-wedlock daughter Faith (Iman
Benson). However while chatting with his
NASA friend Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) and fending off phone calls from
DHS director Donald Briggs (Clark Gregg), meteors begin striking the earth
before cracking open unleashing clunky looking tripods whose tentacled arms
begin emitting deadly heat rays. The
twist here is that these aliens which are closer to the machine beings of Star
Trek: The Motion Picture feed off of digital data, have been here before in
the Roswell era and are back to collect from the global data surveillance
system known as ‘Goliath’ which against warnings of extraterrestrial
retaliation is about to go into effect.
A misbegotten COVID-19 film that started in 2020 but sat on
the shelf until 2025 directed by recurring Black Eyed Peas and Eminem
video director Rich Lee, what makes this frankly poorly rendered
quasi-YouTube quality exercise comprised of found footage and surveillance
videos such a striking failure is that Lee started out as a visual effects
supervisor and designer on films such as Minority Report, three of the Pirates
of the Caribbean movies, Constantine and I Am Legend. For someone seemingly so skilled in the art
of special effects filmmaking, to have this 2025 Amazon Prime exclusive War
of the Worlds CGI rendered tripods and 3D environments look this lousy is
more than a little shocking. So bad it
asks one to perhaps reevaluate the Asylum Entertainment knockoff, it also could
well be the worst of Bekmambetov’s Screenlife offerings.
Ice Cube as Will Radford, bless his soul, isn’t given much
more to do here than mix his beleaguered parent from Are We There Yet? with
Will Smith’s wisecracking pilot from Independence Day. He’s a good actor but is trapped in a film
that undermines his talent, sitting in front of a computer workstation
occasionally scowling at the camera when he isn’t pretending to be open jawed
at the sight of tripods. Eva Longoria
isn’t given much to do but show up and pad out the running time when she’s interacting
with Ice Cube from his, no pun intended, cubicle. Henry Hunter Hall and Iman Benson fare better
as his two children struggling to find their own identity separate from their
overprotective father. Clark Gregg from
the MCU films plays a standard scuzzy bureaucrat while Devon Bostick as Faith’s
boyfriend Mark is tasked with pumping in all of that Amazon Prime Air Delivery
product placement, particularly when an Amazon drone saves the day by flying a
USB drive to Ice Cube dodging heat rays and tripods. As of yet, this has the most Jeff Bezos sponsored
adverts of any single Prime exclusive release I’m presently aware of.
Released on July 30th 2025 on Amazon Prime
through Universal Pictures and produced by the Russian film company Bazelevs,
this new Screenlife version of War of the Worlds which is currently
being raked over the coals by critics and poor saps like myself foolish enough
to satisfy their morbid curiosities is yet another nail in the coffin for Timur
Bekmambetov who shows no sign of slowing down with his webcam pig slop. A movie that, like Profile before it,
should’ve stayed shelved, it is far and away the worst possible take on H.G.
Wells’ timeless classic novel you could possibly imagine. From its continuously lousy visuals,
increasing patent absurdity of how a ragtag group of five humans singlehandedly
do what the world military complex couldn’t and forays into tired parenthood
melodramatics, it is less of an entertainment than another unwanted exercise
within the Screenlife subgenre. To
Bekmambetov’s credit, at least he is consistent in his bottom barrel scraping. Rich Lee may not get much more feature-film
directing work after this but Ice Cube will probably survive it. As for ourselves, it’d be nice if there was a
way to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind erase this from our
collective memory banks. May well in
fact be the absolute worst film of the year!
--Andrew Kotwicki
