War of the Worlds (2025)
A few minutes into this Amazon Prime film, we wondered if the entire thing was a deadpan joke....like "The Naked Gun" or "Airplane".
Hilarious in its aggressive awfulness and stupidity, we stared in awe at it, much like rubbernecking when driving by a 10 car pile-up on the interstate.
It can't really be this intentionally bad, can it? Everyone involved in this must be in on the joke, right?
Nope. This film reaches such heights of incompetence and lunacy, it almost defies all attempts at a rational description.
Leave to us to try, though......
First dire warning: it's one of those computer screen movies, playing out entirely on websites, zoom calls, shaky-cam imitation YouTube footage, and Top Secret password encryptions........
We're in the office of Homeland Security Super Cyber Whatever Ice Cube, There isn't anything or anybody Cube can't access, interact with or spy on.....and his busy cursor gets him into everything from high level meetings with POTUS to helicopter parenting his grown pregnant daughter and video game obsessed teen son.
Befitting Ice Cube's total acting range of angry to angrier, the arrival of H.G. Wells' aliens piss him off even further, what with their tripods zapping buildings and people worldwide.
Obviously, these rampaging creatures don't realize it's never a good idea to irritate the already irritable Mr. Cube.
Even with his usual dialogue delivery of 10 miles an hour, you have to swallow that Cube can work his computer keyboards at light speed. And in no time at all, he manages to save civilization as we know it.....this includes remote control rescuing his daughter from Tripod squishing and teaming up with his son's network of hackers to massacre the aliens with homemade malware. (But only with the invaluable help of Amazon Prime Delivery Drones.......heh, heh, you're thinkin' we just now made that part up for a cheap and easy laugh? No.....we did not.)
If all this sounds enormously silly and dumb in description, you've no idea how silly and dumb it looks in execution. Whenever we weren't laughing, we stared in awestruck amazement at the film's ludicrous imitations of "Independence Day" tropes.
The people who slapped this together may have tried to channel Spielberg but the director they've truly evoked here is Ed Wood Jr. . And we'll at least credit them with making their very own "Plan 9 From Outer Space" for the new century's young generations.
Zero Stars (0). Only watchable with a good sense of humor and vast amounts alcohol and/or other uncontrolled substances.
Otherwise, give it a wide, wide berth.
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