If I see anything worse than War Of The Worlds before the end of this year then I will be astonished. It's one of the most painful, but also laughable, movies I have seen in some time. Even the mega-flop of Megalopolis at least had some ambition, and a genuine feeling of someone trying to present a (misguided?) vision. This is just amateur-ish, uninteresting, and horribly cynical, especially when it comes to a third act that relies so heavily on some embarrassing product placement.
Presented as a "screenlife" feature (a film with all of the events depicted on one screen or another), although I am not sure it even manages to stay with that format for the 91-minute runtime, this shows a Department of Homeland Security officer (Will Radford, played by Ice Cube) doing his best to respond to unbelievable events when a bit of strange weather turns into an alien invasion. Tripods rise up, an attack begins, and Will tries to figure out counter-measures, while also trying to keep his adult children safe.
The feature directorial debut from Rich Lee, a man who has directed a multitude of music videos and worked on the visual effects on some big blockbusters through the past few decades, this is staggeringly incompetent in almost every way. The biggest problem is the screenplay, written by Marc Hyman and Kenny Golde (credited as Kenneth A. Golde). Obviously believing that they are being clever and relevant with their updated version of the classic tale, which has the alien invaders looking to gobble up massive amounts of data, Hyman and Golde show that they cannot manage to do well with either the dialogue or the plotting. Having Ice Cube in the lead role allows for him to blurt out some "Ice Cube-isms" (even if nobody else would describe them in that way), but that's all this has going for it. And that's nowhere near enough.
I tend to enjoy Cube in movies. He can do good work. Not here though. It's almost painful to watch him overreact and over-explain in every main sequence, making up for the fact that almost all of his activity is moving between a variety of windows and typing things out on his keyboard. Iman Benson and Henry Hunter Hall are the endangered family members, and both benefit from the fact that they don't have to carry so much of the movie on their shoulders. Which isn't to say they're actually good. Eva Longoria makes an appearance that amounts to a brief cameo, Andrea Savage is an expendable FBI Agent, and even Clark Gregg highlights the mishandling of the material in the moments that have him acting like a parody of his NSA Director character. It's also worth mentioning Devon Bostick, although his character is responsible for the worst parts of the film.
However bad you think this is . . . it's even worse. There's no real sense of spectacle or scale, no actual tension, and most of the runtime has the cast members acting as if they're just taking part in a table read before delivering the full performance at another time. As for one of the main turns taken by the plot at about the halfway point, it's just as cringe-inducingly bad as everything else.
There's a moral here about surveillance and the use of data, but the main moral I would offer people is to avoid surveilling this particular travesty.
1/10
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