Ice Cube’s film adaptation of War of the Worlds has received a devastating 0 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes following negative reviews from critics.
The science fiction thriller, billed as a “modern spin” on the 1898 novel of the same name by HG Wells, was released last week on Amazon Prime Video.
Starring Ice Cube as Homeland Security surveillance and threat assessment expert Will Radford and Eva Longoria as Dr Sandra Salas, the film follows a disparate group of survivors attempting to fend off extraterrestrial forces determined to wipe out humanity.
The cast also includes Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Henry Hunter Hall, Iman Benson, Devon Bostick, and Michael O’Neill.
Shot in 2020 and directed by Rich Lee, War of the Worlds had a 0 per cent critics rating and 12 per cent audience rating at the time of writing. The film has drawn criticism for its flat performances, uninspired direction, and lack of narrative depth.
Peter Debruge at Variety described the film as sitting through “two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon”.
ScreenAnarchy’s Peter Martin agreed, calling it a “90-minute infomercial for Amazon”.
Audience reviews are no better even though it’s currently the streaming platform’s most-watched movie globally, according to FlixPatrol.
A viewer who gave the film half a star out of five wrote: “Horrible, the worst I’ve ever seen, I’d like to invite a time machine and avoid seeing it.”
“Amazon Prime would have had an excellent take on War of the Worlds if they hadn’t turned it into a commercial for Amazon Prime shopping in the last 35 minutes of the movie!” wrote another.
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Patrick Aiello, who produced the film, described it earlier this year as a “visceral, first-person experience designed for big screens in a language and format that is now natural within our daily lives”.
“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.”
War of the Worlds is about an alien invasion. The novel has been adapted several times, famously causing a panic when Orson Welles produced it as a radio play in 1938. The scale of the panic, though, has been disputed over the years.
Steven Spielberg directed a version of the story in 2005 starring Tom Cruise in what is one of his most controversial movies.
War of the Worlds is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
