It’s the cinematic release you’ve all been waiting for, people: Prime Video’s adaptation of War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, is now available to stream on the platform at your leisure. The new remake follows the same beats of the classic H.G. Wells story, but instead of Tom Cruise trying to make a franchise happen in the 2005 movie, or anything resembling Jeff Wayne’s epic sci-fi opera, this one entirely takes place on one screen.
Here’s the 411. Will Radford (Ice Cube) is a top cyber-security analyst for Homeland Security, who spends his days tracking potential threats to national security through a mass surveillance program. Out of the blue, an attack by an unknown entity leads him to question whether the government is hiding something from the public. And that, my friends, is all as terrible as it sounds.
The new Prime Video movie swaps large-scale alien action for YouTube clips of destruction and the overarching threat of cyber-hacking. If I wanted that, I could have just purposefully failed an email phishing test and been told off, and there’s no doubt that Prime Video has missed the mark entirely by confining its narrative to a single screen. While I knew this was the case from the trailer, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the even bigger horror waiting for me in the form of a shock twist.
Has Prime Video’s War of the Worlds reboot just tried to brand Amazon as an evil villain?
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Spoilers for War of the Worlds ahead.
War of the Worlds wastes no time at all calling out Amazon – which owns Prime Video – through descriptions of Will’s job, but that’s as far as it goes by name. If you’re only taking clues from the script, Amazon quickly pivots to being the hero, with Will being able to retrieve an essential thumb drive from an Amazon drone, delivered by an Amazon driver (which of course, Will has to place an order on Amazon in order to get). When the drone later crashes, a stranger outside is bribed with an $1,000 Amazon gift card to fix it.
Now we know this is far from storytelling at its best, but what moral message is War of the Worlds really trying to send here? It all gets a bit nefarious when the gift card is used as a bribe, inadvertently (or not) assuming that Amazon is the corporate overlord controlling us all, and nobody can avoid them. Everything the War of the Worlds reboot defines as antagonistic is exactly what consumers and critics have called Amazon out for in the past in real life, and that can’t be a coincidence.
With everything else happening in the movie – and I mean everything – absolutely awful, it’s hard not to notice the glaring jewel in the crown of the movie’s subtext. Our stranger takes the gift card after turning down the offer of free internet from the government. Why? Because he doesn’t want them spying on him Big Brother style. But this is an odd choice against the film’s backdrop of data being what’s at stake, with our evil foes harvesting it rather than shooting us with alien beams like an episode of The X Files.
As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has more data about us than just about anyone. Is War of the Worlds suggesting parallels in being at risk ourselves, or is it doing a terrible job of trying to convince us the company has our best interests at heart? I’m still not happy that my credit card information is automatically saved on my account after a purchase, and watching this movie served as the double-take into my online privacy that likely neither Prime Video nor Amazon consciously realised they’ve initiated. Still, a strong contender for the worst movie of the year.
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