Film critics have widely panned the latest adaptation of War of the Worlds, branding the film “silly” and “shoddy” and complaining that the plot serves as a long commercial for Amazon Prime.
The new War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube, Eva Longoria and Clark Gregg, and is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
The film is described as a “screenlife” thriller, meaning that viewers watch the action unfold on the computer screen of Department of Homeland Security officer Will Radford (Ice Cube).
Variety called the result “disastrous.”
“What should have been a spectacular Roland Emmerich-style montage of destruction instead comes off blurry and unconvincing, as Will clicks through short lo-res videos of the attack,” writes critic Peter Debruge. “Then come the news reports, which supply updates on the global military response (basically, stock footage of soldiers doing soldier-y things, like loading missiles onto jets and jumping out of planes).”
Debruge also questioned Amazon’s product placement in the film, asking: “How many people will watch this nonsense long enough to get to the part where the Prime delivery guy saves the day?”
The Telegraph was similarly dismissive, awarding the film one star out of five.
“It is silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment,” writes Ed Power. “Like a heat-ray in reverse, it leeches all the fun out of what should be an epic tale of alien invasion.”
Film blog Ready Steady Cut called the film “hilarious in all the wrong ways.”
“Ice Cube’s shtick is totally ill-fitting in the context of a disaster movie, let alone a conspiratorial government thriller, and the scenes where he’s required to express earnest emotional sentiment to his children play like parody, as if he’s seconds away from offering them both out for a fight,” writes Jonathon Wilson.
He concluded: “It’s no surprise this was dumped without ceremony on Amazon’s streaming service; what is surprising is the blatancy with which it reveals that with or without an alien invasion, the entire human race may well be doomed.”
War of the Worlds was originally a science fiction novel about an alien invasion written by H. G. Wells in 1898. It has been adapted several times, famously causing a panic when Orson Welles produced it as a radio play in 1938. The scale of the panic has been widely disputed over the years.
Steven Spielberg directed a version of the story in 2005 starring Tom Cruise, a film which has been cited as one of his most controversial movies.
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