Amazon’s critically panned adaptation bears almost no resemblance to the classic novel, or a decent film
Photo via deadline.com
War of the Worlds, director Rich Lee’s first film project, released on Amazon Prime at the end of July, stars rapper and actor Ice Cube. The film is based on the classic novel by H.G. Wells, but bears almost no resemblance to the novel — or, for that matter, to a good film.
H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds is highly regarded as one of the earliest works of sci-fi in literature featuring the classic ‘alien invasion’ premise. The novel also features a number of important themes, both for its time and today — evolution, developments in science, “social darwinism,” and, of course, colonialism.
What Wells’ classic novel is not is a case study in terrible parenting, which Lee’s version inexplicably focuses on. Wells’ novel is also not a giant marketing tool for Amazon (or any trillion dollar corporation), which, again, this movie seems to be.
For an alien invasion movie –– not to mention an adaptation of perhaps the most famous work in the genre — this film has very little to do with the actual alien invasion, or any of the novel’s core themes, for that matter. Instead, it inexplicably focuses on possibly the worst parent in recent cinema — to the point of being completely unbelievable.
While on a video call with his child, Will Radford (Ice Cube) watches as invading martians appear and attack her. In a real scenario like this, the first thing (you would hope) that he’d do is actually try and leave the building to go help his child.
In the film, however, he tries one door, and then gives up and goes back to his computer and — no joke — starts looking at daughter’s Amazon account, because he is worried about the hundreds of dollars of his money ending up in her shopping cart. Because it’s an Amazon movie — get it?
Of course, it’s important to know your kids’ spending habits, but any reasonable adult would rank “child currently being chased by UFO” a few degrees higher on their list of priorities.
If the movie has one saving grace, it’s that the aliens’ appearance — although you rarely see them — is reasonably close to how they are portrayed on the book cover. Everything else in the film, unfortunately, is complete nonsense.
Ice Cube, as Will Radford, delivers one of the worst acting performances I have ever seen. The emotional range of his character consists of scowling at every plot development, and repeating the line “get out of there.” That’s essentially the entire performance. The rest of the cast do little to save this movie, either. Iman Benson’s performance as Faith Radford is similarly unconvincing and one-note.
Some movies might be lacking in the plot and acting departments, but are saved by the cinematography. Not this movie. Visually, War of the Worlds consists almost entirely of Radford reacting to anything resembling an interesting plot development through his computer screen. One particularly glaring example is a close-up shot of Radford’s face. There’s nothing wrong with close up shots, but in this one you can see the green reflection in Radford’s glasses, revealing that he is sitting
in front of a green screen.
Crammed into this film, for some reason, are themes of government surveillance and the invasion of citizens’ privacy. The whole time Radford is watching the invasion, he is using government resources. While there’s nothing wrong with adapting a classic work of fiction to the themes and concerns of the modern era, this just has so little to do with the source material. It begs the question of why this had to be an adaptation in the first place.
Short of a terrible movie night with your friends, there’s practically no reason to watch this, and even then, there are better terrible movies out there. With other exciting releases out this month, your time is better spent watching something else.
