A bottomless stream of pompousness

When it comes to streaming options, we are living in an age of abundance. That sounds good, right?

But so much of this content is merely meh. This flood of middling series and movies, this glut of take-it-or-leave-it entertainment can lead to viewing inertia. The search for something truly compelling can feel so exhausting and overwhelming that decisions often get made more by the gravitational pull of the couch than by anything actually happening onscreen.

Amidst this purgatory of TV that’s not quite bad enough to give up but not quite good enough to truly hook you, streaming content can stand out by being great. By being original, intelligent, well-crafted — you know, all that hard stuff.

Or, in what feels like a depressing confirmation of the crappiness of our 21st-century attention economy, it can stand out by being absolutely, excruciatingly awful.

War of the Worlds, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 alien-invasion novel that sees security analyst Ice Cube staring at a computer screen for 91 minutes, could be 2025’s definitive example of that second option. Currently showing on Prime Video, the movie — filmed during the COVID lockdown period and only now released straight to streaming — has been shellacked by critics, pummelled by audiences and fast-tracked onto Rotten Tomatoes’ “100 Worst Movies of All Time” list.

The movie’s distinctive dreadfulness, however, has created its own kind of buzz. Now a flick that might have languished unnoticed in a sea of so-so slow-season offerings is grabbing media attention — and yes, I know I’m not helping — and racking up viewers.

Currently ranked in Prime’s top 10 numbers for Canada — it was No. 3 at one point — War of the Worlds is clearly drawing in people hoping to enjoy the must-see hate-watch of our long, hot, mediocre summer.

Coming after Orson Welles’ infamous radio play, a stalwart 1950s movie adaptation and Steven Spielberg’s 9/11-inflected take, this version from music video and commercial director Rich Lee debuted with a zero score on Rotten Tomatoes and seems to have stalled out at three per cent, thanks to the addition of a single positive review. Over at Metacritic, the critical consensus is summarized as “overwhelming dislike.”

It’s been called “a disaster movie that’s a disaster of a movie,” a “cinematic atrocity for the ages,” an “inept screensaver” and “a film that dares to ask, ‘What if a planet-wide alien invasion was just a series of awkward video chats?’” There are suggestions that the only reason for the film’s existence is to become a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Even War of the Worlds’ own promotional materials seem to confirm its abject terribleness. The poster’s tagline is “It’s worse than you think,” which was presumably meant to refer to the alien influx of murderous mechanical tripods but in hindsight could be the marketing team sneakily leaning into the movie’s only possible selling point.

I overlooked War of the Worlds when it first dropped, but as reports of its stultifying stupidity started to spread, I tuned in, mostly out of morbid curiosity.

Unfortunately, WotW is not bad in a goofy, watchable way, in a funny Sharknado way, in a so-bad-it’s-good way.

It’s possessed by a particularly icky and exasperating and banal kind of badness, a quintessentially 2025 kind of badness. It’s a stupid movie that thinks it’s smart, a would-be serious movie whose “ideas” are not just unformed but hypocritical, thanks to blatant corporate suck-uppery, comically obvious Amazon product placement and what amounts to a gratuitous Jeff Bezos fan-fiction plotline.

Governments can’t save us in War of the Worlds, and not just because Ice Cube’s security analyst is literally (literally!) the only employee in the entire Department of Homeland Security building when the creatures attack. These alien invaders have come to Earth to devour our data — which the movie calls “our most precious resource” — but governments are too bloated and bureaucratic to respond.

What we really need, according to War of the Worlds, are those tech disrupters, those move-fast-and-break-things guys in Silicon Valley, which is why key movie moments centre on self-driving Teslas and Amazon gift cards and Ring cameras and emergency Zooms. The most heroic action in the entire story involves an Amazon driver who’s working through a global apocalypse and whose on-time drone delivery of a thumb drive will end up saving the world. (“Prime Air, the future of delivery!” he enthuses.)

The government’s overreaching surveillance is also critiqued, with characters remarking — several times! — that Washington, D.C., is “way too worried about what’s in people’s Amazon carts.” That would be fine, except the script seems to imply that while government data collection is bad, data collection by our tech overlords gets a pass.

I guess we might have to get used to drones delivering our packages. But I never want to get used to Amazon meddling with our movies. That, it turns out, is just bad-bad.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca