War of the Worlds

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about how bad War of the Worlds is, because you can see that by looking at it.

But it’s not just bad in a straightforward way. I am a raccoon, and I am here to consume delicious garbage. Bad CGI doesn’t scare me. I think Repo: The Genetic Opera is a cinematic masterpiece. I watch Van Helsing unironically. There’s a reason that people still attend midnight screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show just to shout and throw things at the screen. Trashy movies are still capable of being entertaining, because even the trashiest movie has some sort of energy behind it. Someone (usually a lot of someones) made this bizarre thing, for reasons known only to them, and there’s a beauty in figuring out what meaning we can dig out of their efforts.

War of the Worlds is probably the first movie I’ve ever watched that struck me as utterly soulless. There’s nothing to latch onto.

Sure, the dialogue is whack. Characters just sort of say words, and sometimes their emotions don’t line up right with the words, but both the words and emotions are bland as protein paste. The phrase “seeing into people’s Amazon carts” is repeated at least twice by different characters as some sort of catchphrase about internet privacy. It’s weird.

The story is even flimsier. Every aspect of the plot collapses like a sandcastle under a toddler’s butt. Why is the government trying so hard to hunt down a random Youtuber if the thing he’s claiming exists doesn’t? How does Ice Cube’s character still have wifi and electicity after the entire world’s power systems are destroyed? Who in God’s name implemented a “your memories are being deleted” alert into Facebook in the event that aliens slurp down a data center’s contents like a smoothie? How does the entire movie take place over a roughly six hour period?

Questions best left alone for sanity purposes.

In the end, the fate of the world hinges on an Amazon delivery drone and a $1000 Amazon gift card. I really wish that were a joke.

I’m not claiming this movie was written by AI, because that would be silly. There is too much continuity and cohesion to put the blame on an LLM. But if AI were capable of writing a screenplay, War of the Worlds 2025 is the sort of thing you’d end up with. It’s a rehash of tropes, based (and I use that term as loosely as possible) on an existing book, that somehow ends up making a faceless corporation into a heroic figure. It’s laughably shallow corporate propaganda, and it’s also ominous foreshadowing of what might be a future trend. Amazon has already demonstrated its willingness to sink money into glossy yet lifeless adaptations with projects like Rings of Power. Is it really that far a step to movies that aggrandize the company itself?

And I don’t want to hear about Covid being responsible for this. Host was produced during Covid.