Cast:
Ice Cube (Will Radford), Eva Longoria (Dr. Sandra Salas), Clark Gregg (Donald Briggs), Iman Benson (Faith Radford), Henry Hunter Hall (Dave Radford), Devon Bostick (Mark Goodman), Michael O'Neill (Walter Crystal, United States Secretary of Defense), Andrea Savage (Sheila Jeffries, FBI Agent), and Jim Meskimen (the President) Directed by Rich Lee.
Review:
This is the debut feature of Rich Lee, who had spent two decades directing music videos for various bands after first doing work at Scenic Technologies doing sets/sculpting and also did work with previsualization for a few feature films. Not exactly the worse resume for a movie that might go down in infamy as one of the most ineffective feature film debuts ever. At any rate, let's start carefully. The screenplay was credited to Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman, with a story by Golde as based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells (which apparently is in the public domain now). Evidently, the first rumblings of making this film started in 2020 that would use "screenlife technology" (as, as popularized by films such as Searching (2018), which shares a producer with this film in Timur Bekmambetov. So yes, they wanted to make a film that looked like an event but with the budget of a small thriller. Apparently, post-production lasted for two years after the film was shot over the course of fifteen days and had a handful of edits made over and over again. Actual footage of disasters (such as a fire) had CGI put over it to serve for this film. Universal was originally set to release it, but it was later sold to Amazon, who released it onto Prime Video. You might wonder why this film gets a pass then despite being on a streaming thing. Well, I do love a good target, especially one that claims to not be deterred by bad reviews.
The following things are namedropped or shown: Spotify, FaceTime, VISA, Zoom, the Mac, Tesla, the Push button ("that was easy"), Amazon (drones are totally cool) and gift cards, commentators such as Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Bekmambetov apparently believed that the best way to experience the action through the lens of phones and computers that surely would be a modern spin of the novel akin to the Orson Welles radio broadcast from 1938. I cannot imagine someone trying to pretend to be immersed in the film actually portraying an invasion and people rising above it to tell truths by displaying an image that says: "Let's Disrupt Some Shit". You have got to be kidding me with this movie, right? There is no desire in my mind to give the film the "so bad it's good" treatment, there is only a desire to bury this movie into the ground for all of the genuine terrible quality that comes through in 89 minutes of what barely even counts as a film. How can you call this a movie where you are basically paying attention to small rectangle rather than the whole frame? How can you call this a movie where you already know the outcome and the characters are still badly developed? How could this have passed for a film? Is that all there is, movies being made for "content"? To call this a movie is an insult to movies made on a shoestring budget or even Neil Breen. You can't believe anything you see or hear with the film from hacking to the art of needing a thumb drive as delivered by a drone. Ice Cube can't even make this tolerable to watch because he just sounds bored by what he is doing here, a movie where he was filmed without the director or actors around. Gregg can't even sell the idea that he cares about the perils of trying to seize a higher place of power in disaster because he has the commitment level of someone stuck in an unending phone call. The "Disruptor" stuff is just cringe and unconvincing in actually making you believe in the film besides the invasion. The effects, aside from the probable tastelessness (debate for yourself) of taking actual suffering and putting CG over it, don't even heighten the drama because the visuals just aren't interesting to look at. In the end, you could stick with the 1953 or 2005 version of War of the Worlds, end of story. This is an insult to moviemaking, and it honestly deserves to be buried into the ground for sheer audacity in wasting the time of its audience with no sense of tension, interest, or soul in any shape or form. Laughing at it isn't enough, giving it a 0 is what it deserves.
Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.
Well, we tried our best to do a quality Turkey Week. Six Novembers of having some pretty bad movies to close out the month has been pretty enjoyable, and I look forward to further years of ridicule. At any rate, presented here were the finalists:
Doolittle / Killing Me Softly / National Lampoon's Movie Madness / Gotti / Driven / Date Movie / H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come / Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
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