Amazon Prime quietly dumped its Ice Cube-led new take on H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” late last week without much fanfare, or anything in the way of early reviews.
The release came one week after the trailer was released for the movie which is a ‘Screenlife’ project in which the entirety of the movie takes place across screens – computers, tablets, phone screens, camera recordings, etc.
Cube stars as Will Radford, a top cyber-security analyst for Homeland Security, who spends his days tracking potential threats to national security through a mass surveillance program. An attack by an unknown entity leads him to question whether the government is hiding something from him … and the rest of the world.
Now that it has been out for a while, and the reviews have been coming in. The movie, which was shot back in 2020, has scored a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 12 reviews ciritcs thus far with not many more expected.
In addition, audiences are rejecting the film in droves with an 11% rating on the popcornmeter from over 500 user-submitted ratings. Some of the reviews are an understandable treat with Variety’s Peter DeBruge summing the film up as a “feature-length commercial for all things Amazon”.
Scenes include a homeless man being bribed with an Amazon gift card, delivery-drone sequences, an Amazon checkout interface sequence, etc. Questions have begun to fly on social media regarding why this got a release and wasn’t a tax write-off.
Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage and more co-star in the film which is now up on Amazon Prime Video.
