The new War of the Worlds film, starring Ice Cube, has officially been recognised as one of the worst films of all time by Rotten Tomatoes after receiving nothing but poor reviews.
The latest adaptation of HG Wells’s influential 1898 novel was released in July on Amazon’s Prime Video service and features a twist on the classic sci-fi tale.
In the film, Ice Cube portrays Homeland Security surveillance and threat assessment expert Will Radford, who witnesses the entire events of the film play out in front of him on a computer screen while trying to help disparate groups of survivors fend off the invading aliens.
Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Henry Hunter Hall, Iman Benson, Devon Bostick, and Michael O’Neil also star in the film that was panned by critics, with one likening it “to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon”.
The film managed to score a zero per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes (that has since risen to four per cent) and has now entered the aggregator’s website for the 100 worst movies of all-time.
In a note on the list, Rotten Tomatoes explains that it compiled the top 100 based on movies that had a score of four per cent or less and have at least 20 reviews.
With that in mind, the makers of War of the Worlds might consider themselves fortunate that their movie only makes the list at number 88, sandwiched between the Bruce Willis comedy The Whole Ten Yards and the 2004 Robert De Niro thriller Godsend.
Topping the list is the 2002 sci-fi thriller Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu. That is closely followed by the horror movie One Missed Call and the religious disaster movie Left Behind, starring Nicolas Cage.
Patrick Aiello, who produced the film, described it as a “visceral, first-person experience designed for big screens in a language and format that is now natural within our daily lives”.
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“It will be exciting for audiences to watch the movie and ask themselves: if aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones,” co-producer Timur Bekmambetov told Deadline in July.
“In that way, it’s kind of a modern spin on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Back then, he used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real. Today, that medium is the screen of our devices.”
