2025, Rich Lee (a long long list of music videos) -- Amazon
A lot of things went through my head while I continued to watch this absolutely terrible movie. As I caught myself consciously continuing to watch said movie instead of just turning it off. That said, I think I had said it before, that I generally turn movies off for being boring, not for being bad.
A movie from the perspective of two 14 year olds saying, "I can write a better movie than that!" and doing so.
It seems like there has been a lot of "War of the Worlds" projects in the past decade or so. The novel became public domain internationally around 2015, which would make you think everyone would jump on their own attempt, but really there are just the two British / European TV series (both started in 2019, which is where my perception likely came from) and a low low budget 2023 movie. Spielberg's movie is outside this window.
A movie based on your grandmother's perception of technology, the Internet, conspiracy theories she reads on Twitter and how "data" works.
William Radford (Ice Cube, Ride Along) is a DHS analyst trapped in working out of a locked room in the basement of a DHS office building. He is depicted as "the guy in the chair" personally tasked to help FBI agents perform a raid, help NSA Director Briggs (Clark Gregg, The Road to Christmas) do stuff, etc. He also stalks his children with the same technology he uses to "keep the country safe" -- hacks CCT cameras, sends drones after them, listens in on their phone calls, tracks their purchases, etc. None of it is Good Dad stuff. But the major issue I had with all this was not the invasion of privacy and his lack of focus at work, but my knowledge of THAT IS NOT HOW THIS IS DONE !! Even in cinema, even bad cinema you know its a room full of analysts each tasked with specific things, each taking time to complete said task. Instead, this movie has Will and only Will running commands, clicking buttons, tapping screens, etc. They replace the usual nonsensical hacker jargon with interface screens.
I should've been waving at the screen, yelling incoherently about how utterly ludicrous these plots points are. "WHY? Why did that happen? HOOOW ???"
If I can give the movie anything, it is that it indulged my love of interface depiction. The gimmick of the movie is that it is entirely done through the lense of digital cameras. So, we see Will from his monitor's camera, and we see the rest of the cast from phone cams, CCT cameras, drone cameras, etc. Admittedly, its a fun gimmick, and even though the interfaces are incredibly dumbed down (I swear, he ran command "hack camera" at least twice -- he didn't actually, but that is how it felt) it is exciting. And to the unexposed, it all looks incredibly technical and snazzy.
When I write terrible terrible pulp fiction vignettes, and never consider it being possibly published, I should remember, "This Got Made."
While Will is stalking his family and half-assedly doing his actual job (the idea is that Will is so good at clicking & scrolling that even half-assed, he is the best of the best) something weird is going on in the background, which of course, is an alien invasion. In the click of a mouse, there are CGI tripods climbing out of holes and zapping people. Beyond watching news casts and peeking through CCT cameras, Will also tasks NASA scientist Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) with letting him look through her phone cam. For no other reason than she works for NASA, she goes to one of the craters of the perfectly spherical meteors. She's a scientist (for NASA !!) so she is... doing science-y stuff? Not really, she's just getting far too close and poking things she shouldn't be poking -- she's not even wearing a hazmat suit. Oh yes, the real reason Will originally reached out to her because she has access to satellites, and many many satellites had gone offline due to... weather?
Why is DHS Analyst working with the FBI but reporting to the NSA and (AND !!!) tasked with getting the warrant so the FBI can raid someone. So, we can be technologically thrilled by seeing him send a PDF. Ooooo, its like "Law & Order" but updated !!!
Once the aliens start fucking with the world, within minutes, because all of this is supposed to be happening in real time, the armies of the world unite and start fighting back. The news casts start calling the response to the invasion, "The War of the Worlds." We are supposed to consider that witty. Its not like there are hundreds of thousands of the tripods, just a scant three to five for each major city. Cue flag waving rah rah Michael Bay scene.
Unite?!?! How the fuck is the world UNITING ? Its just the armies in each independent country fighting the aliens on their own soil !!!
Buuuut, then the real alien agenda shows! The aliens start focusing their attacks on data centres, each tripod seemingly disabled but actually sneaking weird bio-cables into the data centre to suck off the data (phrasing !!). Will somehow has a graphic that shows data centres as stacks of "data" like the battery bar on your (old) phone -- as each green stack diminishes, it becomes red. Not sure why this visual would exist on any system but... TECHNOLOGY !!
The aliens eat our data. Eat. As in sustenance. They did not come to Earth to eat our brains, but to eat our data. As if data was a tangible resource. There is a brief, miniscule comment where they suggest the aliens are using the data to become smarter, to know more about us, but then it flips to.... suddenly the armed forces of the world are losing. Without the "data" Command cannot communicate to their soldiers and everyone starts dying. Why. WHY?!?! Based on the fact that we are still watching Will do shit on his computer screens, it means the operating systems are every fucking computer in the world is still working, the core functions are still there. Radios still work, CELL PHONES STILL WORK! EYES STILL WORK !! Point and shoot, you stupid soldiers !!
Again, all this is happening in real time. It struck me the movie was originally meant to be yet another mini-series in that things that normally take a long long time happen in minutes. In the span of the ten minutes when all the data centres are emptied. the soldiers fighting would still have bullets, and bombs and rocket launchers and tank shells and.... could still pull triggers !!
Yes, both voices of this writer are now both screaming at the screen in unison.
I should mention that Will has now abandoned trying to satisfy his bosses, as he has a few other things on his mind. His pregnant daughter has been injured and despite him sending a robo car to drive her to his secure data bunker, he has discovered that Briggs, the NSA boss guy, could have stopped this, but didn't. You see, the aliens were attracted to his super duper extra top secret privacy invading data mining system -- all of the world's private data was... extra tasty and irresistible? And he hid the system in the basement of the building Will works in. SO, to hide the system from the aliens, and from the prying eyes of his own government, he sends fighter jets to bomb the shit out of Will's workplace and bury it in rubble. Yes, fighter jets that five minutes ago couldn't fight back against the aliens because all their data centres were slurped up. And the bomber fighter jets are B-2 Stealth Bombers, because they look cool, cuz nothing right now needs to be stealthy.
The car has a "losing battery" scene, in which Will has to hack the systems of the car and reduce energy consumption to conserve just enough battery life to get her to the destination. The car was a mile & a half away. So, this dead battery car was just sitting on the side of the road waiting for the owner to come back with the EV version of a can of petrol?
MEANWHILE it should be mentioned that his daughter (Iman Benson, The Midnight Club) is a scientist in her own right, and she .... if you know anything about "War of the Worlds" ... she made a virus. This "cannibal virus" is supposed to reprogram DNA to eat cancer cells. This sounds like the making of a spin-off horror movie unto itself, once that virus gets out and makes data-hungry zombies, but for this movie, once they realize the aliens are bio-synthetic, they know they can upload the "cannibal virus" into the xtra-tasty data centre. Someone writing the movie associated DNA code and computer code as being the same thing. In the silliest "upload the virus" scene since Independence Day uploaded Microsoft Windows onto the alien's MacOS system (Google the fan theory), this is how they defeat the aliens in a novel-reminiscent manner.
Don't forget them having to send the virus by USB key via Amazon drone by... ordering the USB key from the website... by now the movie doesn't even attempt to make any sense, and doesn't shirk away from shilling for its parent company.
When the movie ends, Will has decided to dump being a sweater vest wearing privacy hacking spy for his government, to being a black hoody wearing hactivist, spying on the government to make sure they don't create anymore top secret surveillance technologies that will attract aliens.
So, this movie got made. And secured a handful of face actors. And got sold to Amazon. And enough budget so that what camera work there was, did not look like something out of Asylum's catalogue. Its going to generate enough buzz (its already touted as worst movie released this year) to gain enough of a hate-watch audience, but this could not be intentional by any means, as it takes itself far too seriously, to even be fun by Bad Movie standards.
Holds up Toasty's notebooks --- got ya some NY Times Best Seller's material here !!
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