War of the Worlds is one of the great works of science fiction. The original novel by H.G. Wells about a Martian invasion of Earth is so iconic that it’s been adapted numerous times over the years. The newest take on the material is a brand new movie you can watch with a Prime Video subscription that stars Ice Cube, and if that doesn’t sound like the greatest movie you’ve ever seen, well… you’re right, it's not.
I’m not going to lie to you, the new War of the Worlds isn’t great. If you’re looking for a faithful adaptation of the H..G. Wells book, you won’t find it here. The thing about it is, the movie isn’t really an adaptation of the book at all. It would be more accurately seen as an adaptation of another previous adaptation, arguably the most famous version of The War of the Worlds ever made. And no, not the movie by Steven Spielberg.
Prime Video’s War Of The Words Is A Modern Version Of Orson Welles' Classic Adaptation
The new War of the Worlds is what’s called a screenlife movie. Like other recent movies like Searching or Missing, the entire story takes place on a single computer desktop, that of Ice Cube’s character, who plays a guy who works for the Department of Homeland Security, surveilling American citizens. It’s an interesting gimmick, but one that is clearly meant as homage to 1938’s War of the Worlds as produced by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater.
That adaptation was a radio broadcast, and it took the form of… a radio broadcast. It opens with a musical performance that is then interrupted by an apparent news bulletin that informs listeners that astronomers have witnessed strange explosions on the planet Mars. Eventually, through more news bulletins, we learn that alien spacecraft have landed across the earth, and then they open, and start destroying things.
It’s become a famous story that thousands of people who tuned in late to the broadcast, and thus didn’t hear the show’s introduction, believed that aliens really had landed on Earth and panicked as a result. While at least some of the stories are apocryphal, there’s no argument that the show’s format makes it all feel just that little bit more ”real.”
As somebody who was introduced to Orson Welles and War of the Worlds on a cassette tape decades ago on a camping trip, and would go on to watch Citizen Kane because of it, I love that version of the story even more than the original book, and the idea of doing a “modern” version of that story was something I was interested in. But it just doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, The Modern Movie’s Gimmick Doesn’t Work Like It Did In 1938
I can absolutely see the thought process that went into creating the new War of the Worlds. If you wanted to make something like Orson Welles' version, but for a modern audience, the first thing you would do is replace the modern communication medium of 1938, the radio, with the modern communication medium of 2025, the internet.
The problem is that the screenlife structure, while it’s been interesting in other films, doesn’t really work in the same way that a scripted radio broadcast does. The reason The Mercury Theater’s War of the Worlds works as well as it does is that the concept makes the audience feel more engaged with the story. We're following it as we would real news. We're essentially characters in the events.
While the screenlife movie makes the internet a key component of the storytelling, we never feel like active participants in the events. We didn’t hack into the network to watch Ice Cube's office desktop. The feeling that any of this is "real" is gone. We're still watching a movie. An alien invasion that plays out over a series of social media posts would seem to be a more appropriate analog to a radio broadcast, though admittedly, building a coherent story like that would present its own challenges.
The new War of the Worlds isn’t good, but it tried something new and different for that, and I at least appreciate it.
