Tag: War Of The Worlds

2025 In Film: Day One (The Awful)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Bride Hard
Ups: You can tell it was fun to make.
Downs: Some of the dialogue is too unsubtle.
Dull music.
Never makes the most of its premise.
Best Performer: Sherry Cola
Best Moment: I guess the kitchen fight, because its the closest this movie gets to what it is trying to be.
Worst Moment: The hovercraft chase looks particularly bad.
Opening: Montage of lead characters growing up and splitting when one of their families moves away, set to a sappy song. Then, “30 years later”, the two are part of a bachelorette group in Paris. I have a small problem; the labelling isn’t clear.
Closing: She sets off the denoator whilst catching flowers. The person whose house is blown up doesn’t seem to care.
Best Line: Is this normal for an American wedding?
Original review here

Havoc
Ups: Very energetic.
Downs: It looks weird. Hard to explain, but there’s a filter which means everything looks like a cutscene from a video game.
Kind of hard to care about anything that happens.
Best Performer: Tom Hardy
Best Moment: The kidnapping of Lawrence
Worst Moment: The inciting incident murder. Doesn’t feel “big” enough.
Opening: Tom Hardy delivers a voiceover over scenes of him stealing, murdering, and performing unlicensed burials at sea. A pretty weirdly shot car chase scene follows, can’t explain it, but it feels “off” somehow.
Closing: Patrick has been shot and will possibly die.
Best Line: You live in this world, you make choices. Choices you try to justify. For yourself, for your family. And for a while, it works. Until it doesn’t. Until you make a choice that renders everything worthless.
Original review here

In The Lost Lands
Ups: Unique.
Downs: Looks like a video game.
Overstuffed.
Characters turn on a whim.
Best Performer: Amara Okereke
Best Moment: The torture of villagers. Effective and personal.
Worst Moment: The train crash, it looks fake as shit.
Opening: Batista’s character walks up to the camera and gives a gritty version of “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin”. This would have actually worked in the 1990s, but it now seems incredibly passe.
Closing: The two main characters who have spent the entire film working together decide to work together.
Best Line: The stronger the spirits, the weaker the senses.
Original review here

Keeper
Ups: Atmospheric
Tatiana Maslany
Downs: Meanders around.
Repeats itself a lot.
Some plot holes are vast enough to drive a truck through
Best Performer: Tatiana Maslany
Best Moment: The ending is satisfying.
Worst Moment: The cake. It isn’t impactful.
Opening: Quick scenes of women being murdered. Incredibly artsy.
Closing: Malcolm drowns in a jar of honey.
Best Line: This fork is going in your head one way or another. Might as well taste good.
Original review here

Kinda Pregnant
Ups: Amy Schumer and Urzila Carlson actually have really good chemistry and would make a great double act.
Some funny moments
Downs: It’s hard to like the characters
The premise is too dumb.
Most of the plot only happens because the characters are dicks.
Weirdly shot.
Best Performer: Urzila Carlson
Best Moment: The meet-cute. It’s believable and one of the few times she seems like a human.
Worst Moment: The break-up/threesome proposal with Dave. It feels incredibly fake. It would be like if you invited someone to your house on their birthday and all their friends were there, along with a birthday cake and a sign saying “Happy birthday”, but it wasn’t for their birthday, and you get annoyed at them for daring to think you were planning a birthday for them.
Opening: Two kids “playing mom”, well, pretending to be giving birth, with swearing. Weirdly short and feels like it’s there just because they know they can’t start the film with the next scene.
Closing: Public declaration of love involving a Zamboni and multiple vehicles being destroyed.
Best Line: “I will bite your fucking aorta”. Such a specific threat
Original review here

Matt And Mara
Ups: Some nice moments.
Nice to see low-budget movies get a release like this.
Downs: The characters don’t feel like friends.
They’re not that likeable.
Lack of cuteness
Best Performer: Deragh Campbell
Best Moment: The surly cafe owner.
Worst Moment: The car argument. Feels so forced.
Opening: A somewhat awkward meeting between the main characters.
Closing: Mara listens to music while holding her husband’s hand. She then puts a receipt in a book written by Matt.
Best Line: I’m letting my imagination reach the level of my stupidity, which makes it my reality
Original review here

Urchin
Ups: Some neat visual tricks.
There are moments where it shows you glimpses of how good it could be.
Downs: Unlikable lead.
Too episodic in nature.
Seems more focused on being visually interesting than being narratively compelling.
Best Performer: Frank Dillane. His performance is great, but his character is awful.
Best Moment: The karaoke bar. Three people singing an Atomic Kitten song should be skippable. But it’s incredibly sweet, and the way the three characters do it tells you so much about who they are.
Worst Moment: When he mugs the guy who tried to help him. Mainly because it’s too early on so colours your opinion of him. You spend the entire film knowing he’s a prick. If it delayed showing you that, it would have given us time to get some sympathy for him.
Opening: He wakes up, asks for money and is ignored. Interesting look in how hard that life is.
Closing: Arthouse weirdness. Probably killed himself.
Best Line: Each decision is yours.
Original review here

War Of The Worlds
Ups: Unique
Downs: Terrible CGI
Does this story really need updating?
Feels low-budget.
Product placement.
The world never FEELS in danger.
Too dumb
Best Performer: Henry Hunter Hill
Best Moment: The aliens crashing. Complete chaos, just enough to wake the audience up.
Worst Moment: The reveal of what the aliens are feeding on.
Opening: He logs on and opens up surveillance cameras. Let’s you know the gimmick quickly. Does include a fun moment where two people are talking about how “I think I’m being listened to” and is told to stop being paranoid. It’s interesting and intriguing. Then we see the freak weather, and it looks fake.
Closing: The aliens are defeated. Ice Cube refuses to spy on people anymore.
Best Line: I’m going to go with the tagline: “It’s worse than you think”. Almost like they were trying to warn us.
Original review here

Zero
Ups: Creative concept.
Makes the most of the location.
Downs: Terrible performers.
No style.
Dumb script.
Indecisive in terms of genre.
Best Performer: Moran Rosenblatt
Best Moment: The taking down of America. Depressingly relevant.
Worst Moment: The drug-taking scene makes it seem like the film is pausing.
Opening: Narration over a completely black screen. Did have to check if my HDMI cable was working properly. A guy is asleep on a packed bus in Senegal when someone puts a phone in his hand. He seems confused as to where he is.
Closing: The two characters stand in the ocean and accept their deaths. Kind of poignant. We then get the aftermath of the events; Senegal hates America, then a woman wakes up with a bomb strapped to her chest, but in Paris.
Best Line: “So where are you from?”
“I’m from that place that they signed the Declaration of Independence” Not the “best” line, but the most notable, because it’s terrible. Possibly the worst line I’ve seen all year. No person speaks like that.
Original review here

War Of The Worlds (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick synopsis: Aliens attack! But this time, we witness it all through computer screens.

To fill you in on my non-film-watching life, I work retail. A few weeks ago, I was putting some clothes up and turned around, where I witnessed someone facing away from the store, pants around his ankles, pissing in the doorway. It was disgusting, vile, and rude. Yet I would rather have that happen once every hour of my working life than ever watch this film again. Trust me, that’s being kind. This is the worst thing I’ve seen all year, and I’ve seen the news.

First off, War Of The Worlds is timeless; its themes and messages are still relevant today. Updating it adds nothing. I should clarify, it’s not “updated” in a “same basic story, but takes place in modern times”, I mean, they completely change the themes. The aliens no longer invade Earth for colonialistic reasons; they invade for food. This could still work and possibly tie into the themes. Have the humans discover that they are to aliens what animals are to us; nothing but food and sustenance. You could even have a scene of a character discovering humans being harvested. WOTW (What-wah) doesn’t do this. Instead, the aliens eat, actually, I’m going to need to pause here to gather my thoughts because it’s so damn stupid. The aliens eat data. Because aliens must know my search history.

The other change is that the aliens are no longer defeated by a common virus, which means that it was only luck that the humans won in the book. Here, they’re defeated by a computer virus; so it’s not luck; it’s intentional defence, which, again, destroys the very point of the source material. It’s so stupid, and it’s not even original; it’s the same as Independence Day, one of the biggest films of all time.

The notion of “destroyed by a computer virus” isn’t even the stupidest part of how they’re defeated. Essentially, the world is saved by someone ordering something on Amazon Prime. By sheer coincidence, this movie is available on Amazon Prime. Side note, for this to work, we have to believe that the NSA don’t allow thumb drives, but they do allow random drones to enter their airspace. Although it’s not as though anybody can stop him from using a thumb drive anyway, as there seems to be nobody else in his building. A whole building with one person fighting cyber terrorism doesn’t feel safe. I imagine that would make it very easy for people to infiltrate and blackmail that person.

The idea of an alien invasion being witnessed on a computer screen is intriguing and opens up a lot of possibilities. But it doesn’t work. Part of that is because the film is so low-budget can’t show us what it wants to. Although I guess it’s nice to know that “filming yourself instead of the actual interesting thing” is something that even trained NSA agents do. Not as though filming the actual threat could prove useful, just keep filming your face as you run. That’s definitely what trained professionals would do.

When you see stuff like that, it really takes you out of it. As do the terrible effects. The weather effects, in particular, are reminiscent of something from a PS2 game rather than a modern feature. The news reports also feel incredibly fake. It’s hard to clarify exactly why, but none of them feel genuine. It’s not the logos or the people, it’s the general feel of them; they feel very amateur.

The characters? Terrible. The lead character of Will may actually be an idiot, and the way he cyberstalks his daughter is weird. This is actual dialogue:

His son (certified computer genius): “I have information you might want to know”

Ice Cube: “Not now!”

If, in the middle of a serious event that is mysterious, someone says, “I have information you might want to know”, it would be a good idea to actually listen to them to see if it’s helpful, and to make the film at least 30 minutes shorter.

The characters might work if the performances were good. Spoilers, they’re not. Ice Cube just scowls, with less depth than the shallow end of a baby’s swimming pool. It feels like he wasn’t actually told what he was supposed to be reacting to, just told to make generic faces. It’s not just him; Michael O Neil looks bored, giving a truly terrible performance.

You may be morbidly curious about watching this. Don’t. Don’t watch it, watch good movies instead. Watch films you want to see more of. Don’t watch badly made pieces of shit. Don’t watch movies which pretend to be warning against the dangers of government surveillance, but then also praise Amazon and Facebook, if their data handling methods are squeaky clean. This movie is terrible, and it breaks Prime’s positive review streak on this website.