The climax of the new movie War of the Worlds features cheap-looking CGI’d clips of large robots standing next to large buildings, cut together with b-roll clips of B-2 stealth bombers in flight and Zoom-style laptop camera shots of several exhausted actors making wildly unconvincing Oh no faces. The music is very intense. This would’ve been exactly as wack as it sounds, except that the sequence is tied together by another set of clips, of 56-year-old Ice Cube running around, lost, in a large empty office space, while shouting for assistance. I am sorry to report that this part kicks ass.
The context really helps. No, not the plot, which is bullcrap—the production backstory. This project entered development back in September 2020, during the terrifying height of the pandemic. Timur Bekmambetov, the film’s producer, pitched it as a screenlife flick, a type of movie (or show) where all the action takes place on computer screens. While this type of visual storytelling sucks infinite ass, you can sort of understand the appeal for a mid-pandemic production: all the actors can work from separate locations; many of them can work from their own living rooms; you can make “action” out of literal mouse clicks; and, depending upon how authentic and/or inexpensive you want the whole thing to be, you can film your performers using laptop and smartphone cameras. Also—and I can understand if you’d prefer never to recall this experience—by the end of 2020, people were prepared to accept and even to celebrate some bottom-rung, insanely bleak diversions. Many of us made messy and high-maintenance house pets out of literal yeast. At one point, the people in my family circle took to having a couple of pre-teen nephews spin around until dizzy, and then race approximately 15 feet across the space of a living room, for whole blocks of time, several times a week.
Any new thing that was both provided by someone else and could be observed from the safety of one’s living room was received as a gift from heaven. This was around the time everyone was raving about Tiger King. Beckmambetov had already pioneered a commercially viable template that seemed suited to the moment, and so he, Ice Cube, and a music-video director named Rich Lee embarked upon this War of the Worlds concept, where the entire story would be told via the screens and cheap cameras of desktop and handheld gadgets. The movie was picked up by Universal and “fast-tracked,” per Deadline, in October of that year.
I can see that you are now wearing a puzzled expression and doing some confused finger math. Yes, it is now the year 2025. And not even early 2025! War of the Worlds was finally released to the Prime Video streaming service just weeks ago, on July 30. So it is clear that some things went sideways during this production. You can detect some of this in the movie’s galling product placements, which in several cases call for the actors to all but pause in action to read ad copy for Amazon. There is also a rumor, started on Twitter in a since-deleted thread by someone who says they worked on this film, that the entire initial budget for visual effects was spent before the movie’s script was finalized. You can see how that would be problematic in a story about alien cyborgs destroying most of human civilization. I am not a filmmaker, but I can imagine it being a good idea to reserve some wiggle room for crafting a story’s visual elements, uhh, after you have finished writing the story.
But the rumor that is most useful for enjoying the climax of War of the Worlds—which, again, features a greying and tired Ice Cube running up and down empty stairwells while saying things that my confused dad might mutter at a dashboard GPS device, but at the very top of his voice—is that all of Ice Cube’s scenes in the movie were shot before anyone else had started filming. By this telling, our hero had nothing to act against, no images or voices to motivate his emotions, no way of calibrating his actions to the vibes of the scene being constructed around him.
I don’t actually care if this rumor is true. I am not here to report the details of the making of War of the Worlds. I am only here to tell you how it is that I was able to enjoy the absolute hell out of the final 15 minutes of what is very definitely one of the handful of worst movies ever made. The opportunity to imagine the circumstances of Ice Cube’s performance is the absolute best thing about watching this movie. There would be some over-earnest side actor on the screen—maybe Devon Bostick, maybe Iman Benson, maybe (God help her) Eva Longoria—and then there would be just the very must boring shot of an airplane, and the music would be going chugga chugga chugga chugga DUN DUN DUN, and then there would be a static-camera shot of paunchy, grey-haired, extraordinarily grumpy-faced Ice Cube huffing and puffing down what appeared to be an emptied cubical farm, and he would shout something like where the damn hell am I, and I would think about how that scene was shot in dreary neon lighting, and may have involved multiple takes of Ice Cube guessing at different screenplay developments, and doing his best to make his face and voice communicate urgency amid the breakdown of his hard-used Generation-X-grade body.
And then another over-earnest side actor would shout something like we’re all gonna die, and then the great and legendary voice of Ice Cube—the very same one that you remember from “Ghetto Bird”—would cut in unnaturally and say something like not on my damn watch, but the clip on the screen would be of old-man Ice Cube throwing himself bodily down a red-lit stairwell. Buddy, this ruled.
To call this movie half-assed would be to overstate its qualities by orders of magnitude. There might literally never have been a less assed creative undertaking than this one, and thus it is entirely unworthy of your attention. In a world any less cynical than ours, War of the Worlds would never have been released; you should take its presence on the homepage of a streaming service that you pay for in real dollars as an insult. Maybe you consumed some entertainment calories in early 2021 that you are not proud of today, but it is time now for self-respecting grown-ups to reach a little higher for diversions. That this or that diabolically conceived attention scam manages to stumble into moments of viral-grade entertainment value does not mean that you should sacrifice to it any of the irreplaceable moments of your one precious life. Skip it, man.
Still, I cannot deny that I felt some affection for poor, lost Ice Cube during the final third of this mess. There he was, schlubby, physically creaky, hysterically wayward along multiple axes of existence, rattling around an abandoned WeWork like the universe’s most screwed ghost, and of the two of us having paid the much greater cost for having arrived together at this moment. All I lost was 89 minutes and some brain cells, and despite myself, I was smiling at the end. Ice Cube did that! I can almost tell myself that it was a heroic sacrifice. That it was insanely for naught—that his actions would not be known to the world until whole years after the pandemic had been declared over and then replaced by an era of fresh horrors—adds, if anything, an air of cinematic tragedy to the performance, one that certainly far surpasses anything conjured up by the screenplay. It sucks, it all sucks so bad, it sucks so intensely that it makes me want to cry, but hell if I wasn’t also giggling, taking a regrettable measure of terrible delight from the terrible thing on my television screen.
Since you will never watch this movie—must never, for reasons of salvaging some dignity for your species—I don’t mind spoiling the ending. They defeat the aliens by saving, or possibly by destroying, a stockpile of data accumulated by an illegal government surveillance program. Ice Cube appears to have died, but then is not dead, which somewhat cheapens his hero arc. The director of the Department of Homeland Security is arrested “on conspiracy to violate the 1st and 4th amendments.” Ice Cube quits his government job and pledges to devote his professional life to watching the watchers, but then there are a bunch of photos of him going on long-overdue quality-time vacations with his adult children, devoting a fraction of the effort to this new morally upright occupation that he devoted to the prior, evil one. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.