Adaptations are always a good way to bring attention back to well-known classics or to breathe new life into long dormant series. However, it’s important that an adaptation stays true to what made the original so well liked while staying original enough to have its own identity and feel distinct while avoiding any sense of monotony. However, there’s one such adaptation that even with this in mind, it fails at even being a movie.
Amazon’s “War of the Worlds,” tries to take a new spin on the classic story by H.G. Wells and fails horribly while doing so. Starring Ice Cube, as a federal agent, it utilizes the “screen life,” filmmaking technique to retell “War of the Worlds.” Screen life is essentially an entire movie playing out on someone’s computer such as a zoom call recording. Movies like “Unfriended” and “Host,” are examples of screen life films. This filmmaking technique is best with horror movies as the minimal editing and immersion of someone’s computer is best for a horror story. This does not apply to “War of the Worlds,” however.
The movie entirely consists of Ice Cube reacting to the aliens attacking rather than showing the aliens themselves and makes for an extremely jarring watch, especially considering the lackluster acting. Spoilers for the film are going forward, besides the fact that there are aliens attacking the planet, this movie holds zero resemblance to the original novel. It’s simply an alien invasion movie with the title “War of the Worlds,” slapped on to gain people’s attention. So, does it do anything interesting with what it already has? The answer is a straight out “No.”
The reasoning for why the aliens attack in the film is that they feed on computer data as if it was food for them which they don’t give any actual reason for. It eventually turns out Earth gained the attention of the aliens because of a secret project by the government to establish a mass monitoring system via satellites and the aliens are defeated when Ice Cube uploads a computer virus and stops the invasion, which he gets via hard drive delivered by an Amazon package. Yes, a crucial plot thread that determines if the aliens get defeated or not is a flat-out advertisement for Amazon.
