‘War of the Worlds’ or — Laughing Stock?
I’m not a proponent of the ‘So Bad it’s Good’ school of movie watching but I was too curious about the latest version of ‘War of the Worlds’ (2025) and the critical kicking it had been getting to resist checking it out. And I’m so glad I did because this might well be the funniest film of the year.
Everything you’ve heard about this trainwreck of an adaptation is true: the ‘obviously shot during lockdown’ production; the fact it’s nothing more than a massive advert for Amazon; the utterly illogical and nonsensical plot; how 75% of the movie is constructed from readily available stock footage with shoddy-looking tripods cheaply inserted over it. It’s all laughably terrible.
Yet there’s an extra-special, almost indefinable, badness running throughout this “movie” that transforms it into something so hypnotically awful it becomes even more mesmerising than a real-life alien invasion, and I suspect it’s all down to Ice Cube’s remarkable performance which should see him, if there’s any justice in this world, winning BOTH this year’s Oscar and Razzie for it.
Mr. Cube plays Will Radford, a high-level government surveillance monitor, who watches an alien invasion of earth unfold on his PC monitor. His unique ability to hack into any and all security cameras, mobile devices and satellite systems allows Will to witness the horrifying destruction occur from any angle or location.
It should be terrifying, yet what makes ‘WOTW’ so pain-inducingly hysterical is that Will’s reactions to all this carnage aren’t so much ones of shock, panic or fear but more bemused disgust, as though we’re watching a man looking up porn and he’s “accidentally” clicked on the SCAT category.
So, thousands of people are, apparently, being slaughtered and killed and Ice Cube’s reaction is simply — ‘Eww! Man! What the hell is that shit?!’
It’s phenomenal.
His only real moment of genuine anguish and emotional devastation is when the aliens eat his dead wife’s Facebook page… and I’m NOT making that up.
In order to keep tabs on all the world-wide destruction Will has countless browsers and webcams open meaning the screen is constantly filled with multiple layers of digitally distorted and degraded images, the effect of which is practically avant-garde (it’s like having a zoom call with Jean-Luc Godard). This allows Will to carry out several activities at the same time, such as speaking to the Secretary of Defence whilst hacking into his daughter’s fridge so he can look inside (again, I’m not making this up).
Yet what’s most fascinating about “War of the Worlds’ is that it gradually becomes impossible to tell if the movie is this bad by accident or on purpose. At one point he hacks into his daughter’s boyfriend’s Amazon van and starts speaking to him over the van’s speaker system (or whatever the hell it is), and the boyfriend’s reaction is to frantically look about with a comedic expression of “Where the hell is that voice coming from” in the style of Eric Morecambe. And he’s just as funny.
Fortunately, the day is saved by Will placing an order for a USB stick on Amazon.
‘War of the Worlds’ is, without a doubt, so terrible it’s quite the achievement, although the real achievement is how they’ve managed to transform H.G. Wells’ classic novel into what’s, essentially, nothing more than a 90-minute-long reaction video of a middle-aged man watching ‘Two Girls, One Cup’.
