Ever wanted to see how H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds would play out on a bunch of smartphone screens and computer monitors? Look no further than Timur Bekmambetov’s War of the Worlds. Bekmambetov is the filmmaker behind the “Screenlife” series of movies such as LifeHack, Open Windows, Searching, and Unfriended. The film was shot way back in 2020, but it’s finally getting released, surprisingly on Prime Video, next week.
Directed by Rich Lee in his feature debut, War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube 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, until an attack by an unknown entity leads him to question whether the government is hiding something from him … and the rest of the world.
Also in the cast are Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Henry Hunter Hall, Iman Benson, Devon Bostick, and Michael O’Neill. The screenplay was written by Kenneth Golde and Marc Hyman.
Universal Pictures originally had the rights, but clearly disliked it or didn’t know what to do with it. The decision was made to dump it onto streaming, which is where Prime Video comes in. War of the Worlds will be there on July 30th. It looks pretty awful, but who knows? Some of the ScreenLife flicks have been decent.
