War of the Worlds

 When Orson Welles broadcast his take on HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds in 1938, mass panic followed. If those same audiences were somehow able to watch director Rich Lee’s take, which Universal just released through Amazon Prime, mass confusion would follow instead. It certainly won't fool modern audiences either. Let's see why.

Will Radford (Ice Cube) keeps tabs on everyone for the Department of Homeland Security. As a side-project, he also keeps tabs on his adult kids, Faith (Iman Benson) and David (Henry Hunter Hall). A normal workday is disrupted by a worldwide meteor storm, followed by an alien invasion. As mechanical Tripods blast away, it’s up to Will to get his kids to safety. That’s practically it.

Oh, yeah, everything unfolds from the comfort of Will’s monitor. We see Will look through security cameras, Zoom-conference with family & co-workers, watch choppy footage of the Tripods’ attacks, and even scroll through Amazon in the climax. It’s not the first film to do this, but it’s probably the first of these films based on a famous novel. It’s a fine approach heat-rayed into oblivion by its execution.

First, let me talk about the visual effects. The ultra-storms that precipitate the Tripods’ arrival are appropriately freaky. The visualization of the Tripods, however, pale in comparison to the effects utilized by Byron Haskin and Steven Spielberg for their films’ alien war-machines. The obviously CGI Tripods’ rampages are made worse by city-scenes that barely acknowledge their existence. There's barely any mass panic or destruction, just an average Sunday. When Will hacks into a Tesla for Faith, the video feed shows nothing out of the ordinary. Even the ineptest monster movies have characters who actually believe they're being attacked by something unspeakable. What does this have?

Now, let’s talk about the characters. Will reacts to just about everything, even several fake-out deaths, with mild annoyance. He’s slightly more emotional when the invaders delete his late wife’s Facebook page (more on that later). He gets rather animated when Earth fights back, then zips back to dull disappointment when the invaders counterattack. Meanwhile, Faith, a science major who creates an anti-invader virus, takes a rebar to the leg at one point, and decides taking it out will stop the bleeding. Surprise, it doesn’t, but she survives with plot armor! Most of the other supporting cast, including Clark Gregg as the DHS director, and Eva Longoria as Will’s NASA contact, are not much to write home about.

Midway through the movie, it’s discovered that the invaders eat data! Yes, you and your loved ones’ Facebook pages are just four-course meals, as Will finds out. Their data munching even renders military vehicles and passenger planes useless! It later transpires that they're specifically here for Goliath, a MacGuffin of a Surveillance Program. So, why did they need to open their invasion with their war machines? It sounds more like a job for extraterrestrial subterfuge. The film never bothers to explain how any of this works. 

So, what does work? I'll have to admit that its climax, where Will races to upload the kill virus before bombers blow-up DHS headquarters, is pretty tense. Sure, most of the movie kept me detached from Will's situation, but the climax had me on edge. The sound design, at least, tries to sell us on the impending apocalypse as air raid sirens fill the air. The Tripods' war cry is nice and loud, even if I prefer the mechanized digeridoo which vocalized Spielberg's Tripods. Finally, it's pretty nifty how the film works in both the novel's Tripods and Flying Machines, rather than keep them to one type. It might not make a difference for some, but I find it a good touch.

And finally, should you watch it? Spielberg's film is infinitely more competently made, but it's one of the most harrowing sci-fi films ever made. This film is worth a few good unintended laughs. See it with a few friends and you might get a few good heckles in. It's a quick and easy ninety minutes, which is slightly longer than Haskin's film. But I'm sure you might have better uses of that time. I'll understand if you do.