War of the World (2025)
I don't get the reviews. When you're sitting in front of your TV, looking at Ice Cube sitting in front of a green screen that is reflected in his glasses, the correct choice is to review and enjoy the film for what it is. The wrong one is to review it as if it would be a serious work of art, because if there's one thing the reviews are right about, then it is this: War of the Worlds (2025), which was originally filmed during the 2020 lockdown, is an utter disaster. From the terrible cinematography, to the forgettable sound design, to the incredibly bad acting of the entire cast and digital effects on the level of 2003 game cinematics (the arrival of the tripods basically looks like it was copied and pasted from the arrival of the Burning Legion in Warcraft 3), one can only come to the conclusion that even Uwe Boll movies are better.
Now, the techincal aspects aren't Neil Breen level terrible, but if you've ever seen a The Asylum film (I would recommend Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies if you haven't and are interested), that's about what you're getting - just that everything looks like found footage because most of the cast filmed their scenes with their phones' selfie cams.
With that out of the way, what an enjoyable silly ride this was. The premise, the acting, the cinematography, the editing, the effects - combined everything is so bad it breaks the laws of physics and becomes a stunningly enrapturing mixture. Plus it has Clark Gregg, and let's face it, anything that has Clark Gregg in it automatically gets taken up a notch. If you don't agree, then fine, but know that you're wrong.
Spoilers from here on out. I'll not mark them, because, well, what would be the point?
The film features, of course, Ice Cube sitting in a chair, cast in the worst role you could think of for him, a high ranking intelligence officer. His daughter Faith, a genius biologist, is dating an Amazon delivery truck driver so Ice Cube can get a thumb drive at the end of the movie. He keeps a really close tab on his family, down to checking what Faith eats during her pregnancy, but he's completely oblivious to the so-obvious-it-hurts fact that his son Dave is the hacker and conspiracy theorist Disruptor that he spends the first fifteen minutes of the film trying to find.
Shortly after yet another failed raid, meteors rain from the sky. The Burning Legion tripods arrives on Azeroth Earth. In what is a fun little twist and about the only interesting thing the film really does, the initial counter attack by various militaries around the world is highly successful. These tripods are not invincible, and they're taking down easily by concentrated missile and tank attacks. Ice Cube is swivelling on his chair yelling BOOYAH at the green screen - you know, like any seasoned intelligence officer would. Who could blame the guy.
Alas, all that was just a diversion. Some tripods manage to locate data centers, and that is where the film really goes off the rails. See, the tripods in this version grow tentacles and start injecting tiny cybernetic insects into the data centers - insects that feed on data, and the more data they consume, the smarter they get. All the world's data gets eaten from the data centers. Power plants fail everywhere, Facebook pages disappear, the military is now completely incapable of fighting back as fighter jets and commercial airliners just fall from the sky, tanks stop dead in their tracks and not a single digital gizmo keeps working.
Except Ice Cube's computer and Faith's, Mark's, Sara's (NASA friend of Ice Cube's) and Dave's smart phones, plus all the apps running on them. The internet is still working fine too, in spite of a global power outage. The tripods also forgot to attack or deactivate all the US drones cruising about. After Ice Cube finally finds out that Dave is DISRUPTOR, Dave's hacking collective develops a computer virus to drop the enemy mothership's shields infect the tripods, but it fails. Why? Well, as Eva Longoria puts it, the insects are part biological and part cyber.
A couple of seconds later they got it all figured out, they combine Faith's research into anti-viral agents with their computer virus (DNA is just a sort of code, after all). Now all that is left for Ice Cube is to plug in his thumb drive, download CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE and upload that to the super secret government surveillance programm GOLIATH - which will infect all the aliens once they consume it. Only hitch in that plan? Ice Cube doesn't have a thumb drive. Top secret military installation, he says, ain't allowed to bring one to work.
Makes sense. On the other hand, he's using Facebook at work and has Zoom and WhatsApp installed. Well, can't be perfectly secure in all aspects, can we. Anyway, now's Mark's time to shine, because Ice Cube just needs to buy a thumb drive from Amazon - which still works, by the way, even after the world's data was eaten by cybernetic insects - and out comes the Amazon delivery drone. Dave covers Mark with a leftover Predator drone and shoots down some aliens and crashes the drone into a tripod.
Meanwhile the tripods are converging on Washington D.C., and a couple of B2s take off to carpet bomb (nuke, maybe, they are talking about a blast radius of five miles) them into oblivion. Well, them, the residential area of D.C., and most importantly, the GOLIATH data center hidden beneath Ice Cube's workplace. Please don't wonder how there's still working military equipment at this point after it all failed without data, and also don't think too hard on how and why the military would not constantly fly sorties against the alien invaders. They just knew they'd need to be on standby to bomb the ultimate goal of the alien invasion.
Mark saves the day by successfully delivering the thumbdrive to Ice Cube, who barely makes it down to the server room. He plugs in the thumb drive and poof, alien threat vanquished. Yep. CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE does the trick.
While writing this post I've racked my brain trying to find a worse film that I've seen, and somehow I come up short. Not even 80ies B-movies are this bad. Definitely a "so bad it's good" sort of film. A+, a 10/10, five stars. Will be shown at film schools all over the world in the future as an example of how not to make a film.