Seldom does a film gets such negative press that it musters only 3 percent from Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer,” but the latest incarnation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has done so. Indeed, audience reactions are also dismal with the movie garnering a 22 percent favorable rating from viewers.
In a small screen effort produced for Amazon Prime, Ice Cube plays a U.S. Homeland Security computer analyst witnessing an alien attack on his monitor in a mess brimming with product placement. (“A 90-minute infomercial for Amazon,” stated Screen Anarchy.)
Reviewers have noted that the movies pales in comparison not only to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation, but George Pal’s 1953 classic movie with Gene Barry and the Steven Spielberg blockbuster of 20 years ago starring Tom Cruise.
“A week out from its release has given us a hysteria not dissimilar to Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio broadcast — it’s just now folks are flocking to Prime to check out what’s become this year’s quintessential hate-watch film,” Gizmodo wrote.
Balladeer’s Blog noted that producers tried to “update Orson Welles’ radio version of War of the Worlds by presenting the story to us like it’s one big Zoom meeting but with additional footage from the camera phones of assorted characters.”
Variety dismissed the movie as a “a cheap-looking thriller that suggests Amazon Prime as Earth’s one-stop solution.”
“In 1938, Orson Welles hosted a radio version of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that reportedly sent listeners into a panic by treating the alien invasion as a breaking news broadcast. Skip forward to today, and a witless, straight-to-streaming adaptation of Wells’ novel seems highly unlikely to alarm anybody, confining the global takeover by aggressive extraterrestrial tripods to one man’s computer desktop as it does.