Amazon’s new War of the Worlds movie starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria was quietly released online last week and received universally negative reviews. Clips of the horrible sci-fi disaster flick, which is told entirely via a computer screen, have gone viral online. But one particular clip involving an Amazon delivery driver and a drone perfectly sums up how this latest iteration of the classic sci-fi story is less a movie and more a cheap branding exercise that doesn’t even hit 90 minutes.
Released on July 30, War of the Worlds was cooked up during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and tells the story of an alien invasion. But instead of following a group of characters through a dangerous and hostile invasion, you mostly watch Ice Cube struggle to act in front of a webcam for 80 minutes, not counting the credits and opening logos. Very late in the film, Ice Cube’s character needs a specific piece of code to shut down a powerful computer that the aliens are going after, and which the United States is willing to nuke to keep out of their Martian hands. The problem is that Ice Cube and a load of people, including his family, would be killed by the bomb. So a hacker sends him the code. But he has to put it on a USB thumb drive, which he somehow doesn’t have. Don’t worry, Ice Cube’s daughter has an idea. She downloads the code and loads it up on a USB drive, and then her boyfriend, who is an Amazon delivery driver, will use his Amazon Prime Air drone to deliver the USB device to Ice Cube and save the day. Here’s the scene:
Yeah, you just watched an Amazon Prime ad shoved into this movie about an alien invasion. This honestly feels like a Super Bowl commercial more than a film. And here’s the wild thing: This isn’t the worst moment involving Amazon in the movie. A few minutes after this scene, the drone crashes and flips over near a homeless man living in a tent. This man is scared, as all around him are alien tripods destroying Earth. But our “heroes” need his help. So they use NSA tech to track down his phone number and text him to flip the drone over. He won’t risk his life to do it so they offer him a $1,000 Amazon gift card, pushing him over the edge and getting him to fulfill the deadly task. Gross shit!
Anyway, War of the Worlds is barely a movie. More than half the runtime is just a view of a desktop PC and stock footage spliced into windows as if they’re security cameras or YouTube videos. It’s horrendous. It’s awful. And it’s exactly the kind of movie Amazon and other big corporations want to make. Movies that are barely movies, made for little money, starring people you might recognize, and filled with ads and product placement. This is our future. It sucks, huh?
Zack Zwiezen
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