Will Radford is a top cyber-security analyst for Homeland Security who tracks potential threats to national security through a mass surveillance program, until one day an attack by an unknown entit...
When I actively go out of my way to search for something bad to watch, it’s rarely cause I’m desperate and more because I’m curious; like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, I’m chartering into the deep unknown and despite the obvious warning signs, I can’t find myself to look away. I have to give everything a fair shake and if I do rip it apart, it’s cause it absolutely deserves it.
And the 2025 iteration of “War of the Worlds” absolutely deserves it.
Let me reiterate this to remind you guys and also myself: movies aren’t just about the narrative but the overall presentation and experience too. I do remember hearing about the outrage H.G. Wells’ novel caused in my Televisions Studies class and in a bizarre state of affairs, I can understand a little bit why they took another shot at adapting this: modernize the Orson Welles radio adaptation panic to capture the idea of this event being spread by social media instead of the hysteria of radio and word of mouth. And given how far we’ve both progressed and regressed as a society, to the point where we don’t even know what can even be classified as the truth nowadays, the idea does hold promise in modern times. It has the skeletal outline of WOTW-meets-Searching in feeding into the invasion of privacy, data farming, and government duplicity among the political chicanery. There’s just….one aggravating plight that places a Gordian knot around all that intrigue.
The execution is, for lack of a better word, HORSESHIT.
Telling THIS story through a desktop just doesn’t feel right; the perspective actively hinders the audience’s connective accessibility to the developments occurring while also being somehow distracting and obscenely boring. It really did feel like somebody’s never-ending Powerpoint presentation with the same trite bullet points copied and pasted on every page, taking every melodramatic cue it possibly can, telegraphing its ‘twists’ mere miles away and unable to circumvent any niggling contrivances by just simply ignoring them. And that’s on top of the reality that beneath all the layers of fickle techno-jargon this film attempts to spoon-feed you, it’s all masqueraded under the cliched, sappy, weightless dross of seeing yet another overprotective, overworked, mourning father who has to learn to let his kids go. Turkey-stuffed to the brim with plotholes and irregularities the size of Swiss cheese, this imitation is mired in its own self-importance and ill-conceived notion that its 'clever' use of technology can make a good substitute for a narrative. Maudlin with shallow focus and corporate propaganda so nakedly bare with its nod-nod-wink-wink condemnation of consumerism, while blatantly profiting off of and marketing itself as an ad for the Microsoft Office suite, everything rings hollow and eye-rolling in light of other more blatant product placements.
The last twenty-five minutes in particular might’ve been the only point where the movie almost sold me on the destruction but it’s only because it grew so frenetic, so risible, so batshit stupid and contrived in juggling every tiny detail, that I just completely gave up making sense of the situation and began laughing along to cope because I realized being predictable was the least of this film’s issues. Cloverfield and SIGNS pulled off this concept better without needing to venture into barbaric unhinged ludicrousness.
If anybody other than Rich Lee was at the helm directing this, I can assure you this project would’ve been twice as relevant but also less triple glazed with its potential. Directing all of this from an outside-looking-in perspective is a double-edged sword and unlike the first Cloverleaf film, this might as well be a sketch comedy. Everything feels so exaggerated with so little energy and while there are shimmers of Lee’s background in action previsualization peering through, that ambition is almost immediately neutralized.
Glaringly minimized budget aside, this production design is perhaps the most artificial of the genre I’ve seen as of yet and it does not take long for that irregularity to smash you square in the face. One of the most important things in any alien invasion film, whether psychologically or physically, is to sell the weight of their impending devastation or what their presence does to us as a species. This movie isn’t clever enough to outline said destruction in conjunction with or around the screenlife format and with a scope and scale too boxed in to capitalize on the urgency and bleakness of previous “War of the Worlds” films, all we get is a voidless claustrophobia that withers the atmosphere into toxic dust and rips away all sense of grandeur.
There’s such a laughable pretend-variety to the tension, especially with how cheap and third-rate the special effects come across as, and there’s not much Christopher Probst’s cinematography can do to distract us from that. It might follow a similar blueprint to how Searching and Missing were shot but the format and of the camera lacks a clear purpose here while the editing is milquetoast, blurry and unconvincing all in the same step. Costumes are completely pointless here, the tone here is a surrealist masterclass in misreading the room, conjuring endless LOL moments due to how seriously it takes itself, whatever constitutes as ‘action sequences’ are horribly rendered while intentionally graded down to the lowest resolution possible to hide and the erratic pacing that constantly dumps the plot and the thin veil of suspense with long stretches of nothing, can’t hide behind its breakneck speed to save its life.
Only one actor was good here amongst this entire ensemble and that was Devon Bostick, Roderick himself; literally everyone else, Ice Cube and Eva Longoria included were all phoning it in, stuck delivering terrible or distractible dialogue with shoddy deliveries, zero chemistry and even more tedious ciphers trying and failing to pose as actual characters.
Its only silver linings are how gracefully short it’s at with only 90 minutes, the sound design is bearable and for what it’s worth, Jon Natchez’s score is almost emotionally enveloping enough to listen to amongst what might as well be crowded white noise.
A physical manifestation of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment plastered in plain view, this movie isn’t war; it’s a surrender of the highest order, signing a white flag to competency, craftsmanship and creativity. This “War of the Worlds” is a black mirror of the source material it hoped to update, disguised as a so-bad-it’s-good cosmic scale disaster set out to do so little, and achieved even less for the sake of keeping the found-footage style going.
