With superhero fatigue here to stay, and video games having delivered catastrophic results, Hollywood is openly scrambling to find its next tie-in megatrend. War of the Worlds clearly isn’t it – but it might contain an especially tiresome blueprint, that many more films will deploy in the coming era.
In the early 1990s, film producers kicked off development for a film starring Vanilla Ice. It was abundantly clear from the get-go that the idea was atrocious (and ultimately it yielded one of history’s true stinkers, Cool as Ice) – but it just had to happen. Why? Because Vanilla Ice’s record label had heard that another frost-based rapper, Ice Cube, was about to be involved in Boyz n the Hood. They reasoned that if one star could capitalise on their musical success to put bums in seats, surely the other could too.
Inserting musical stars into films was nothing new, of course. But this is an example I bring up, because it shows that the studio system, dominated by financiers and business majors, does not know how to relate to its audience on an artistic level. A good story about things that matter to people, that’s not what sells. No, for dumb-dumbs like us to sit through a movie, we need a recognisable commodity at its centre.
While Ice Cube proved a more attractive commodity in this sense than Vanilla Ice, beyond Boyz n the Hood, this wore thin; as can be seen by the steadily deteriorating – yet somehow endlessly expensive – stream of schlock he has been involved with since. Having been inflicted on audiences on a yearly basis for almost 30 years, studio roles finally seem to be drying up.
The latest, War of the Worlds, was actually filmed five years ago, having become trapped in production hell since its lockdown filming in late 2020. On the basis of Cube’s dreary, dead-eyed performance, and the fact he has only had one other role since that year, it might be one of his last.
Reading his lines monotonously, from a script that might well have been stapled to the studio wall in front of him, Cube is supposed to be howling in despair, as he can only watch remotely, powerless while his children try to avoid being vapourised during an alien invasion. But his energy plateaus at a kind of mild disdain, like an old tiger who, after years of being baited from behind the bulletproof glass of the zoo, can’t muster the energy to rage at anything anymore.
What makes his presence interesting, then, is not his performance – even though it has been earmarked as part of the hack press’ desperation to find the new The Room. This film is not funny-bad. It lacks the intent, the innovation, the deranged lack of self-awareness that a Neil Breen film possesses (and if you really want to see a funny-bad movie about the world’s most gifted government hacker, it should be Double Down). It is a lazy gesturing of feigned intent, which like its star, seems irritated at having to be on the screen at all.
I wouldn’t recommend you watch this on your ironic bad movie night, then. But what I would suggest, is you consider it as a way of getting a read on the elites of Hollywood, and society more generally. One front in which I found it interesting in that way, is its attempted passing of the torch between one form of commodity-driven cinema, and another. Ice Cube, the out-going rent-a-star, is representative of an older form of ‘cynical audience draws’ – but his character is emblematic of a new strain of that particular virus.
Amid the Marvelisation of mainstream cinema, executives have built their houses on the pulling power of brand recognition, rather than star power. We are invited to feel clever and special – and to identify vicariously with the hulking, sculpted stars of the films – not through some kind of relatable human element, but through the understanding of the infinite references to other products and commodities we can consume. But with superheroes also falling from favour, War of the Worlds debuts a new consumable – doing computer.
Cube’s character Will Radford works for a government surveillance programme, which can monitor every person on Earth. He is really good at computer. The best. He does computer so good, that he can use CCTV to chastise his pregnant daughter on the other side of D.C., over what she just ordered for lunch. That conveniently means (both for budgetary and production constraints) that Cube never needs to leave his studio to help fight against an alien threat, waging war in order to mine the world’s data.
There has been a shift, then. We have moved beyond being commended for recognising a celebrity from other products we have consumed, or understanding quips referencing other intellectual properties we likely paid for. Now, we are being patted on the head for our engagement with consumer technology, and every popular, data-guzzling, privacy-violating, ocean-boiling digital platform you can imagine.
You might think this was ironic, given that the story purports to decry the centralisation and exploitation of civilian data. But that’s only a bad thing when the government does it. But the products of Meta and Amazon are reified as though they have become a literal extension of the human body – Cube’s engagement with them therefore is deployed as one of the most humanising factors of his character, while his ability to deploy them in the battle against extraterrestrial colonisers is designed to flatter us into mistaking our begrudging use of apps that spy on us, and news feeds that actively make us miserable, with an act of subversive resistance.
As Cube cycles relentlessly through every feed, the screen becomes one giant, digital panic attack – vertical videos blaring ham-fisted exposition at us, while calls immediately setting up new plot points bombard us. Photos, music, streams of information and misinformation assault the protagonist at every turn – and as torturous as that is, it is also his superpower. And as we watch on, we are supposed to reflexively cheer, in the belief; I know computer. I am hero too!
On this occasion, this has been so abominably delivered, that the film was mothballed for several years until the studio figured what to do with it. That does not sound like something which you would expect to serve as a prototype for a wider trend. But it could have become a tax write-off, like many other – better – properties have. Instead, War of the Worlds was dumped onto streaming – because someone still sees something in it.
Perhaps, as with Morbius, that is a cynical attempt to cash in on an infernally lazy product, by marketing it as bad-good. But I suspect there is something else here which executives will try to tap into again before long – especially as the extremely aged caste of white, rich men running the show struggle to relate to what ‘young people’ want. Vertical video, like on the tik toks, or using a ‘screen’ as a way to frame videos of movement alongside boring talking (reminiscent of the way some influencers weaponise Subway Surfer), might be a part of that.
It did not work this time. In part, because it was made with the clear digital nous of people woefully out of touch with everything. People who are desperate to relay information to each other, but whose audio/video systems are compromised seem unaware WhatsApp still has a perfectly good text-messaging function they can use. YouTube is presented as the cutting edge of underground political activity. CNN and the BBC video feeds remain the leading feeds on Cube’s computer – while anyone who wants to know what is going on in Gaza knows these are the last places to check.
OK, Boomer.
But while we might laugh now at this ludicrously bad film, the original War of the Worlds should leave us in no doubt: unlikely things are still possible. The chances of anything coming from this idea are a million to one. But with the ‘ideas machine’ so clearly running on fumes, minds immeasurably inferior to our own may still be working on ‘tech-driven stories’ to bring in new audiences – without having to change any of their tired and hackneyed storylines. Slowly, and surely, they are drawing their plans against us.