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If you know me even slightly, you knew this was coming. 

3% on Rotten Tomatoes? "Overwhelming dislike" cited on MetaCrtici?

Obviously, it would take an alien invasion to keep me away.

Quick Plot: Will Radford tirelessly works for the Department of Homeland Security, spending his days randomly Google Earthing and zooming in on civilizations to listen to their private conversations. The same way a lot of us distract ourselves with social media during the work day, Will kills his time by spying on his children: soon-to-be mom Faith and son Dave, who has some moral qualms with the way his father violates all personal liberties. 

Will's incredibly immoral professional behavior pays off when hungry aliens land with a bang. What are they hungry for, you might ask? The same thing Will consumes every day: data.

That's right, these creatures from another world have come to ours to invade our data centers.

[demands crossover with Eddington now] 

We all knew that a reckoning of how we killed time during the height of COVID-19 was coming. Me? I ate too much Domino's cheesy bread and watched toxic levels of America's Next Top Model. Gal Gadot? The Imagine video should haunt her past the time those Wonder Woman residuals run dry.

Rich Lee made War of the Worlds.

Considering the infamous radio play mania of War of the Worlds's history, making a Zoom-style adaptation in the internet age makes perfect sense. On paper, this is a good idea.

But good ideas require good execution. 

Or moderately acceptable levels of execution. 

Or lazy intern-levels.

I don't know how much lower I can go: this is a bad, bad movie. I'm almost willing to give the performances a pass because I have to wonder if they thought they were just killing a Friday night with a friend's read-through, the same way a lot of us connected with our pals via Jackbox games. There's no way Clark Gregg (as the corrupt FBI director) and Eva Longoria (as "Sandra NASA", because that's how our government operative saves his contacts) gave these performances thinking they were being recorded, right???

I just hope they were paid generously in Amazon gift cards.

So, that's the other reason War of the Worlds is picking up so much justified internet hatred. This is an Amazon commercial. A terrible, fairly inept 90 minute (plus some commercials because even an Amazon commercial needs ad revenue) Amazon commercial. Guess who saves the world? An Amazon driver, by way of his Amazon drone. 

No, I'm not kidding. 

High Points

This isn't coming for Spielberg, but for what War of the Worlds is, the effects are mostly fine

Low Points

This movie ends on a thumbs up tweet from Joe Rogan. AND it's a commercial that...has commercials. We're living in a dark, dark timeline

Lessons Learned (and illustrated through Ice Cube's best acting moments)

$1000 Amazon gift card beats free internet for one year (providing you have access to internet to use said Amazon gift card)

Top secret military installations don't allow thumb drives, though they do grant personal access to Facebook

Prime Air is the future of delivery

Rent/Bury/Buy

It's hard to be responsible for anyone giving an Amazon original commercial their eyeballs and data. Also, this is a terrible movie. AND YET. Terrible movie completists will not NOT be entertained by this mess. It's a moral quandary.