War of the Worlds transcript
Season 1 · Episode 1. Generated automatically, so expect the odd misheard word.
Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Worst Movie Podcast. I'm Ade and this is Aaron. Aaron, why don't you tell everybody what this podcast is all about?
This is a podcast where we watch bad movies and we try to find something good along the way.
Yeah, we'll try to bring to you some of the worst reviewed movies out there. The Razzie winners, the zero percents on Rotten Tomatoes. This month we are doing a theme. We're gonna try to do a theme every month. This month's theme is Modern Messes. So all movies that have come out in the last few years and are a mess. Aaron, why don't you also tell our audience why they should listen to us and our expertise about movies?
We are not experts. I have no background in film. Neither of us are critics, but we like to watch movies and talk about them. And we have microphones, so we figured we'd talk about it with you.
Yes,
we have microphones and opinions, the two most important things for creating a podcast. So thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy.
Yes.
today we're going to talk about the movie War of the Worlds, released in 2025, starring Ice Cube and directed by Rich Lee. This has been pretty infamous movie It was getting 0 % on Rotten Tomatoes and then I think it got one good review. So now it sits at 3 % on Rotten Tomatoes, released on Amazon Prime.
direct to streaming. And what did you know about this movie before going into it and watching it?
I knew nothing about it. You mentioned it to me first and I thought you were talking about the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds, so I was very confused. So yeah, I had no knowledge of it going in. I think it's kind of like virally popular right now.
Yeah,
yeah, lots of discussion about this. Can you, know this is gonna be hard, but can you give us a quick synopsis of the movie?
I can give you what they tell us the movie is about. This synopsis, a gargantuan invasion is coming with this fresh take on the legendary novel of the same name. Renowned actress Eva Longoria is joined by iconic rapper and actor Ice Cube, along with Michael O'Neil and Iman Benson for a thrilling out of this world adventure that's filled with present day themes of technology, surveillance and privacy.
Okay, that's a mouthful. Yeah, well, we're going to walk through the movie, give our thoughts and hot takes on this movie. Before going through the walkthrough, I should give a big spoiler alert. We're going to spoil everything about the movie. That said, there's not much to spoil. I think actually...
It's loaded, yeah.
My hot take off the bat is you probably won't see this movie unless it's spoiled and somebody tells you that it's so bad that it's good. I'm not saying we're going to say that quite yet, but yeah, it's not a movie you go into hoping to avoid spoilers.
Yes, you're not missing.
Right. By the way, I opened up Amazon Prime to watch this and it was actually number one on the movies they thought I would like. So I don't know what Amazon has on me, but apparently I'm square and it's target demo. So that's a little, little concerning. Yeah. Okay. So we start off in the movie.
Hahaha
They're learning.
with Ice Cube plays William Radford. He's a domestic terror analyst. And we start with a shot of him in his office using his Guardian software to analyze threat levels across the United States. What are your notes on this opening scene?
that it's wildly unrealistic. he's working, it seems like he's working on a Microsoft Surface tablet and he has all of his Microsoft Office suite of software that he's pulling up to get live feeds from people's cell phones there's a scene.
Yeah.
Where he's got he's got an overhead like drone view of the Pentagon and it's doing an immediate threat threat analysis that it's like that the Pentagon is low threat of something. I don't know what the threat is, but it does instant analysis of anything. Could be a car driving down the street and he has instant access to everybody's email, phones, cameras, drones.
Yeah.
Anything else? It's like a it's like a tech dream to open. Yeah.
Yeah, all powerful software. Yeah, it's,
it's, the software has featured a lot throughout the movie and it's as bad as you can expect in terms of it's, it doesn't have any realism. Like the person who designed this didn't work in technology and they're just weird things like, it shows at one point he's watching his daughter and it has like these
you know, these tags that the software has tagged like information about her. And one of the, guess, official tags in this guardian software is baby daddy. It lists who her baby daddy is. She's pregnant. then, there's, a part later on in the movie where he right clicks on something, I think a map and there's a menu item that says like, show all top secret government facilities.
Yeah.
It's just this
batshit software that has all these weird features and options. Yeah, exactly.
It knows exactly what he wants. He'll just
type in like, Faith cell phone and it knows his daughter Faith is exactly who he's looking for and he wants to see her cell phone text messages.
Right, Yeah, so in this is a weird movie to describe and explain and walk through. I think hopefully we don't confuse the audience. I should say the whole movie, it's important to understand, you're mostly watching Ice Cube through his computer. So you're just seeing a headshot of him. And then occasionally it's like either his headshot and with the
software he's using overlaid or side by side. so most of the movie is just cube using the software and watching people through different windows.
Yeah, the perspective, I think for the whole movie is from his computer. We're watching him operate his computer.
Right. Which, yeah, and
yeah, and some of the context for this movie, I should say, is it was filmed in September of 2020 at the height of COVID. And so part of how this was the producers pitched this movie was that it could be shot where all the stars, Ice Cube, the whole movie, there's nobody else with him. We'll get to that later, I'm sure. And it's mostly, you can tell just him.
him by himself in some studio or at home or something like that, recording his expressions and his dialogue. Same with Eva Longoria. There are some shots of her out in the world and shots of some other characters out in the world, but none of them really interact with other people. It's just all these shots of them by themselves. So you can tell it was made under some sort of condition, like a global pandemic. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So this is why.
peak lockdown.
we get the movie that we got for the most part.
Yes, there's a lot of stock footage too of like military stuff and disasters, stuff like that.
Right.
Yeah, it seemed like there was very little original footage that wasn't a selfie. Yeah, exactly.
Webcam. Yeah.
so anyway, the stage is set. he's analyzing domestic terror threats, but another big part of this movie is, will is obsessive over his daughter and his son, faith and Dave, and is constantly going back and forth between analyzing threats to our homeland and spying on his kids.
he FaceTimes his daughter and she buys a muffin at some cafe and he calls her and criticizes her for buying a muffin because it's loaded with carbs and she's not being healthy. right, and it cuts to him looking at an image of her fridge inside. He's, I guess, planted a camera inside her fridge to see what she's eating.
You
doesn't have enough protein.
Like he's that obsessive over his kids and is wildly abusing throughout this whole movie, wildly abusing his, you know, powers to spy on his kids.
Yeah.
yeah, I would, I would argue that he does far more, illegal spying on his own children than actual threat assessment for Homeland security.
100%, 100%. There's a point in the movie where his boss asks him to prepare this critical report that they're going to deliver to the president. And we don't even really see him working on the report. He just spends all that time talking to his kids and watching his kids. he seems...
Yeah. Yeah.
He did about
30 seconds of work on this report and then went straight back to writing a very long email to his kids for the rest of the time.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's clear. I mean, I wrote a note, maybe 10 minutes of this movie. He seems seriously mentally ill and his family seems to know it. Like they, you know, they all. Yeah. I mean, they're like, you, you just work all day from, know, from your screen and just watch, watch us. And he doesn't really seem to have any sort of healthy relationship with them. We learned that his wife is dead. She died of cancer.
Yeah.
They're worried about him.
And the last, he plays several times the last voice message that she left for him. And it says, remember to take out the trash and be nice to the kids. The fact that she has to remind him to be nice to the kids seems to me like, it's supposed to be a sad moment, but I don't know, it was a sad moment for me in a different way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he seems troubled.
You
I'm a little worried about the kids.
He is Ice Cube after all, so he's maybe a hard ass.
Yeah.
Yeah. so we end up, once they've established kind of who he is and his capabilities with the software, we cut to this FBI raid where one of the domestic terror threats that he's been working on is tracking down this hacker called the disruptor. And he, and it cuts to this, he, he obtains a search warrant, that he
I don't know. That he sends to.
He sends
a text message and is like, I need a search warrant now. And they come back with a PDF search warrant for him.
And he gets a FBI search
warrant that PDF that he sends to an FBI agent played by Andrea Savage. And she's out in the field doing a live raid on the disruptor's apartment. Yeah. What, what other notes do you have about this scene?
Yeah.
My favorite part of that scene is she calls him on her phone and is doing like selfie mode to do the video call. But then he hacks into a security camera in the lobby and you see her walking through with her gun out, but she's also holding her phone out to record her to record herself. And she's she basically selfie cameras herself through the whole search warrant raid.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many good things about this scene. The fact that they like went up there and like quietly lockpicked the door when they had a search warrant, like if it's a no knock search warrant, just kick the door in and go. Like, I don't know why they stopped to lockpick. It was just really odd.
Yeah.
And not to get into too much analysis right now, but it was, again, the movie was shot really weirdly because of COVID. Like this is a good opportunity for maybe a bad action sequence where you have kind of your classic FBI team, you know, knocking down doors and going through this, this apartment building and building some tension. But because it's all shot in the selfie cam mode and then the occasional shot through of like drones and
other cameras, there's no suspense. It just falls really flat.
Yeah, and they they get up to the apartment where they are pretty sure he's in and of course he's bounced his signal. He's not actually there and they find nothing. But.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind
of a, yeah, it's a nothing, but it's, it's a setup for later and spoiler alert, but you know, yeah.
Can I
say one thing that we kind of skipped over is while he's spying on his kids, he gets periodic messages from people that he's working with or emails or calls come in that he takes while he's spying on his kids. But while he's doing this, he gets a call from Eva Longoria's character.
And who's in his phone just as Sandra NASA? Everybody's in his phone as like FBI Dave or like Sandra NASA, but he gets a call from Sandra NASA and she is apparently watching these weather cycles that are super unusual. They're getting really bad thunderstorms and stuff. But my favorite call up to this point is he gets a call from Sandra NASA.
Right.
And she says, take a look at this. And she shows like a three second clip of a lightning. And then she's like, you guys hearing anything on your end? Like he would know what a random clip of lightning is about. And he's like, I just watch people.
Yeah, well,
yeah, I don't watch weather. I watch people.
Yeah.
So there's something funny going on with the weather. And that's how they introduced that part of the story is just you guys heard anything about this lightning?
Yeah, I guess they're friends. We don't really understand what their relationship is. yeah, that's how they introduced the idea that there's some weird weather stuff going on and then that escalates into this meteor attack that hits DC. One of my favorite parts of the movie is it hits his office, Ice Cube's office, and it's this like, I mean,
we could each build this scene by shaking our phone or a laptop and like pretending to stumble over. love that. I don't know if you noticed during that scene, he's like holding a cup of coffee, it's splashing everywhere and he's like falling all around, but there's a, there's a cup of something behind him that's just perfectly still and not toppled over through that whole thing. So it's just really bad production to illustrate that there's this worldwide meteor attack.
Yeah
Yeah
But yeah, so there's this meter attack and there's this emergency Zoom meeting with Eva Longoria's character, Ice Cube's character, Ice Cube's boss, and then the secretary of defense. It's just this weird collection of people on the Zoom call.
Yeah. Why
is Sandra Nassar just allowed on probably a top secret call with the NSA director and the secretary of defense?
Yeah, they have several of these Zoom calls where it's not clear what is the jurisdiction of Will's job. seems like he's a pretty high up analyst, but it's just him and his boss that seem to work here and they have access to the highest levels of the government at all times.
At one point he just hacks into an already going video call with the President of the United States and nobody bats an eye that he just joins the video call.
Right. Yeah, throughout
there's several times where Ice Cube's character can hack into pretty much anything instantly.
did you catch any reference as to why he's in the building completely alone? Why is he the only one at the NSA? It is on a Sunday, so maybe, you know, crime sleeps on Sunday, except for Ice Cube.
No.
That that's what.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's one of my notes for sure. He's in this, there are several shots of the building where he's the department of Homeland security where he's working and it's this multi-story building. And yeah, we never see anybody else in the building. There's scenes later on where he's running through the building. We have drone shots of the building. Nobody else is there. nobody else is
consulted other than his immediate supervisor, who's the head of this whole thing. it just makes it really weird. the way that they've executed this, it takes you out of the movie several times.
For sure, yeah.
I know I'm going to be jumping around a lot, but media shower. And then it turns out that, these transform into aliens. Like the, the meteors crack open and alien robots come out. there. A lot of confusing scenes, one where the FBI agent calls will, I don't know why she calls will.
like when she encounters the aliens, but she asked him what the rules of engagement are. And one of my favorite quotes in the movie is he says, engagement should, I know don't do nothing.
Why is she calling this guy to get rules of engagement? Does she not have a boss?
I guess not. because he was in charge of that FBI raid on the hacker. He's, he's in charge of FBI response to alien invasions.
This is the ragtag Sunday crew of Homeland Security. You get one NASA person, one FBI agent, a DHS person, maybe a director, and the president.
Right. Exactly. So at this point, this is where Will is told by his boss to put together this report. It's all encompassing report to figure out what the aliens are doing and what, where, why they're attacking. and, as you mentioned earlier, he kind of half asses this report and then spends a lot of his time trying to make sure his kids are okay. By the way, he even has apparently heart monitors on his kids.
Yeah.
that he can pull up to see if they're alive.
I just assumed
it was their smartwatches or something that he's hacked into.
Yeah, I mean, I guess so that that would make
sense. Yeah. But man, that is. That is high level.
It's quite the leap. He gets real time
heartbeats from his daughter and son.
Yeah. So his, I think I gloss over it pretty quickly, but his daughter's pregnant. So he's especially worried about her, and protective during this alien attack. he sees she's in trouble and he's like, I'm going to come save you. And he tries to leave his office and he can't his office is locked.
Yeah.
And he said something about we're in DEF CON whatever. So the office is shut down, locked down. Yeah, which is that, does that seem like it would be a thing that you'd be locked into your office? Can't even go to the bathroom because we're in DEF CON one. And so then it cuts to him.
one.
All essential buildings secured.
I have no idea.
Yeah
Also, they're
trapped in buildings that they know are being targeted by aliens and nobody was like, you guys could leave.
Right.
Yeah, that just seems maybe, maybe everybody else was allowed to leave and he got locked down. That's probably that maybe that explains why he's there alone. I don't know. So he, because he can't leave, he recruits Faith's baby daddy to help. Do you want to kind of set the stage for who this character is and his role throughout the movie?
Possibly.
He is the financial investment of Amazon into this movie.
Yes, product placement galore.
Yeah, he is an Amazon driver that's a go-getter, super eager, but kind of an outsider not accepted by Ice Cube into the family yet. He keeps calling him pops, but that pisses Ice Cube off. And he is out hustling and delivering packages when he gets a call from Ice Cube that he's got to go.
Get to his daughter immediately. She's in danger and so he he kind of goes off. To help I don't know what he thinks that.
Yeah.
Mark is gonna do, but yeah, he's on a mission, I guess.
Yeah, and most of what we see of this character is shaky cam footage of him FaceTiming people while running down the sidewalk. That's most of his action.
Yeah.
Yeah, it takes him a very long time to get to faith. So there's all this like tension of he's coming, he's almost there and he's like live tracking Mark's progress on the on the guardian software as he gets there.
Yeah.
At one point Ice Cube hacks into a Tesla. He calls it a Tesla. And it gets faith to jump into it and he drives, he drives her away remotely. Yeah.
I loved that.
Yeah, self driving.
My favorite dialogue in that scene is she's in the car. She's been wounded in the attack. She's got like, I don't know, a spike through her leg or something. And so she's bleeding out and Ice Cube is remotely like guiding her to this Tesla.
puts the destination into the Tesla and it self drives her to DHS field office because he can pull up and he sees that all of the hospitals are full. So he takes her to a field office. But while she's being driven around in the back of the car bleeding out, she gives this speech about how funny the irony of the situation is that he never wanted to leave that.
building that he works in to begin with, but now he can't leave to like he's trapped there. And I'm like, you're, you're bleeding out in the back of the car and you want to talk about the irony of the situation. And then, and then she gets like really tough with him about how he has this illusion of power and control through, through his software and his job, but he has no power. and
Yeah.
Meanwhile, she's being driven remotely by the car that he sent to save her. She's like, you have no power here. Could you turn the air on? Back here.
Yeah.
Ha
Yeah, it's a lot of weird dialogue between him and his kids where they're trying to make it heavy and meaningful, which I do respect to some degree, but it's just all made awkward by the way that we're watching it unfold. It just doesn't click. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot up to like everything in this movie feels like it was made to be an ice cube react reaction gif. Because all of the acting is so flat and forced and it's like just it's so weird. feels weird.
Right.
I did wonder at one point, I was curious to see, and I could really figure this out by reading online, like what was the process of Ice Cube shooting this? Like how much of it was he knew what he was reacting to? Because you're right, there's a lot of just him being like, damn, and like, know, yeah, just one-liner reactions.
no!
did he actually have a script to know what he was reacting to? Because most of it, again, it wasn't like he was in a scene with live acting partners. I can't imagine. It seemed like everybody recorded their own portions, asynchronously. So it actually gets to one of my favorite reactions. So at some point, the world governments rally to attack the aliens.
Yeah.
And there's all this stock footage of armies getting ready and going into battle. and then kind of, yeah, we start attacking these alien robots. and then at one point, one of my favorite reactions is ice cream is just watching all this unfold on, I think some live CNN coverage and then other, I guess he's just hacking drones and things like that to, watch,
Yeah.
at his own volition, at one point he's like, got him, took your ass out, huh? Like he's just, he's just live reacting to all these, you know, to these battles unfolding across the world.
Yeah.
His daughter's life is in imminent danger, but he's trash talking these alien drones that are, I don't know, it's so weird. Like he just flips back and forth between like shit talking the drones at work and then writing this really long email about how being a parent is hard.
Yeah, yeah,
he's all over the place. mean, he's, it's probably a good time to say, there's no way he's a model employee. He spends more time on personal stuff. And also, if he's spending this much time on personal stuff during the biggest crisis the world has ever seen, a normal day he's gotta be just wasting a ton of time.
No.
Yeah, yeah, if this is him at his best, which we have to presume it is, he spends a shocking amount of time on personal projects.
Right.
Yeah, the
world is getting annihilated and he's, yeah, it's wild.
He gives
He gives his threat assessment report to the president and all of these other like heads of state and it's just a shoddily assembled file of clips that he just dragged and dropped from news stories and is like they're attacking data centers and that was it like it took him 30 seconds to Assemble this document and then he like slurred his way through the whole speech. Did you notice that that?
He sounded drunk. Oh, yeah.
It sounded like he was reading that for sure. But yes, was, if that was the best take of him doing his, it was the longest, it was probably the longest like sequence of dialogue that he had. And it was this like, know, technical analysis or whatever that he was giving to the president. And it sounded very weird. Like, yeah.
You
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, it was not the best delivery of the dialogue.
No.
yeah. so the, the aliens attack, we, we hit back at the aliens, but we don't kill them all. At some point I got really confused about how this was supposed to be, how we were supposed to understand this unfolding, but at some point, he's talking to Eva Longoria's character or tracking the alien robots and realizes
that they're not actually trying to attack us. They're hunting for data. They're hunting data centers. And so as this unfolds, realized like, the big aha is like these aliens feed on data. they're actually, so these meteorites came, these robots were in the meteorites, these nanobots were in the robots and the nanobots
Yeah.
have blood and feed on, anyway, did you understand what was happening here?
So my understanding is they came in meteorites that were specifically aimed to also take down like satellites and security stuff for us. they knocked power centers. So they like dropped these meteorites that had the robots in them. And the robots were basically Trojan horses that would go to the data centers and smash into the buildings and release all of these bugs that were,
and power centers.
They were cybernetic organisms. were hybrid organisms, biological and cyber is what they kept saying. And those were attracted to data. They wanted our data.
Yeah. And there was a
Yeah. And so there are shots of IceCube in the software. sees schematics of data centers and all the servers slowly emptying and basically they're draining all our data and there's even so he, he gets a fake.
There you go. Every
system has been penetrated and drained of data is one of the quotes. I don't know what system or what data they're draining, but it's all data.
At some point he gets a Facebook alert that says your memories are deleting and he logs onto Facebook and it's like his Facebook profile, like all the images are going away and this his last voice message from his dead wife is being deleted as the yeah, as the aliens sucked out all our data. so as someone with a technology background, and I don't think it takes
You
as he listens to it.
a computer science major to tell you this. This is not how data works at all. I was like, what is happening? What is happening here?
There were planes falling out of the sky because they were losing their data. Like they can't, like physics no longer apply. If they don't have data, planes don't work.
I mean, so that was one of my favorite sequences. show planes falling out of the sky, boats just capsizing. They showed shots of tanks rusted over and I was like, wait.
Yeah
Yeah.
They're instantly
rusty shitty tanks because they don't have data.
and there's oil rigs combusting, just all this stuff just destroyed around the world because the aliens have.
Data protected
us from all of this happening.
Yeah, exactly.
there's a quote that says, we're in utter chaos without our most precious resource, our data. Like they're really on the nose hammering at home that our data, it's important.
Yeah.
none of this made sense. But they're trying to connect it to this conspiracy theory around Goliath. Do you want to explain Goliath?
Nah.
not sure I understand Goliath. My understanding of Goliath is like this all-encompassing data collection monolith that collects every bit of data on every human and their lives and I think tries to predict threats. But I'm not sure. It seems to me like they're already collecting every bit of
Okay, me neither.
data on these people. So I don't I don't know what it does beyond what they're already doing. Did you catch that?
No,
I mean, it seemed like his, existing system was all encompassing. mean, he's looking at people's fridges and, the only thing that I was able to capture that Goliath specifically did other than these generalities was that it would look in your Amazon cart. He mentioned, he has two lines in the movie where he's like, we don't need to be looking at people's Amazon carts.
Yeah, that his son also had a line about looking at Amazon carts.
Yeah. So, so that's, I guess that's the key central feature of this, all encompassing, data collection system. So, so anyway, so, so speaking of a son, we learned that the hacker that they were going after with the FBI raid surprise disruptor is his son, this whole time. And,
Disruptor.
Talk about how they found out that his son was Disruptor. Do you remember?
All I, well, I didn't, then his son tell him and he's just like, it's you.
They sampled some audio from a disruptor YouTube video and then he just pulls up a pitch slider and starts sliding the pitch around until it sounds exactly like his son and he's like, my God, it was who the whole time? Why didn't they try?
Alright.
Yes.
Yeah.
messing with the audio before. This is the first time they were like, maybe it's the real voice we should try to, to de-encrypt it.
I don't know, he just...
Right. It's weird too, because when he tried to catch Disruptor at the beginning of the movie, Disruptor was doing a live stream. And because he's constantly checking on his kids during work, at some point he checks on his son, Dave, and sees that his son is playing video games and he deletes, he gets so mad that his son is playing video games and doing something productive. He just erases the video game from his son's computer without telling him. So.
when it was this big reveal, I was like, well, he can't be Disruptor because he is playing this flight simulator video game at the time that he was doing a live stream. it doesn't, yeah. mean, trust me, I'm not, I'm trying to slow down my brain when I think about this movie. but yeah, so there's, you know, he confronts his son and he's like, I know it's you and, he's all.
Don't think too hard about it.
You
And his son
just admits right away.
Yeah. And, his son gives him all this information on this project called Goliath that, again, looks in your Amazon cart and does other things. and then all this evidence that aliens came here back in the fifties, once scientists built ENIAC and original computers.
and aliens came here to get our data then and we thwarted that attack quietly, I guess, and then...
It's
just a thumb drive of conspiracy theories that he just sent his dad and is like, here's proof that the government is spying on us.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's all true and that Will Ice Cube's character's boss built Goliath and people warned him not to do it because they were like, if you do this, the aliens are going to attack. even though presumably the amount of data we were collecting five years ago or 10 years ago is several
They want our
several orders of magnitude of what we were collecting in 1950, but somehow Goliath tipped it over the top to where
Yeah.
Yeah, they knew that
was the threshold. Any more data and we're gonna be on their radar.
Right? Yeah,
it's going to be full scale attack. so Ice Cube confronts his boss and he's like, man, I didn't sign up for this. Like you're the guy who this whole movie so far, you've been abusing the power you have and even wishing you had more power. And then somehow there's this 180 turn where you're like, no, that was, that's a step too far. And, and so.
Hahaha
Yeah.
So Ice Cube teams up with his son and his son's team of elite hackers to, I guess, take down Goliath so that we can, so the aliens stop attacking. I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah,
think that they can somehow corrupt the data that the... So they're gonna hack the government to corrupt the data that the aliens are consuming and that will kill the aliens. That's their plan. I just want to say though that when Ice Cube gets all of these files from his son and starts looking at them, they're like Roswell stuff and like Operation Blue Book.
that Ice Cube just immediately believes 100 % everything he's read. He's looking at it, he's like, this is what Dave was trying to tell me. They've been lying to us. They've been lying to us the whole time. He just is 100 % on board immediately.
Yeah, he doesn't even really read it.
Yeah.
Yeah, he just skims the, he basically just skims the folder and is like, yeah, there's enough information here to.
He looks
at the pictures and he's like these are the same aliens so yeah
Yeah.
and, and also how did he not know about Goliath? It seems like he would be the number one person to consult. don't know. Somehow a whole data center has been built in the bottom of his building. That's an upgrade to the current system that he's in charge of. And, he'd anyway, so.
Yeah. Perhaps
he's a low-level employee that they don't tell anything important to, but he just has... every low-level employee has access to this insane system of spying. Like, maybe he's not even good.
but he's also, he's
also low, he's definitely not good. Let's just get that out of the way. But he's also a low level employee that gets invited to Zoom calls with the secretary of defense when their world crisis unfolds.
Hahaha!
fair.
Yeah,
he has to report to the president.
Yeah. So, so we kind of get to the third act of the movie where it will on his team, his son. so the, the group of hackers build this rabbit virus. I don't know. Let's, let's, let's fly through this because it stops making a lot of sense. the virus doesn't work and then they go to their plan B, which is, it, so.
It turns out his daughter, Faith is some sort of microbiologist that has.
I can't even put this in a coherent sentence, but basically they build this DNA cannibal code. it's some sort of, her research of hacking DNA, his son's ability to hack computers. And they put together this, cannibal virus thing that, that Will has to plug into the Goliath server so that, I don't know, it, it blows up Goliath or it.
Yeah.
kills Goliath and it kills the aliens and he needs a thumb drive for this to work so he can plug a thumb drive into the servers.
Yeah, because the aliens are both cyber and biological, as Eva Longoria says strangely twice, they're a hybrid organism, biological and cyber, that they can be killed because they have blood. They can use this cannibal DNA that she's developed.
Right, the NASA employee. The weather person.
Yeah.
I don't
know what it does. It's supposed to, I guess, fight disease and illness, but...
Yeah, I mean, this was just like, if, if chat GBT existed when this was filmed, I would have bet all sorts of money that they wrote this using some sort of early AI model. but
You
Yeah, and so
he needs to get this code into a thumb drive so he can install it into the mainframe, but because it's a hyper secure building, he's not allowed to bring thumb drives in. So he needs to order one from Amazon.
This has to be the worst product placement in a movie ever. I can't imagine it being worse, but sorry, it continue.
This dethrone, for me, up until now, the worst product placement was in the Transformers with Mark Wahlberg where in the middle of a fight he cracks open a cold Bud Light off of a car door and chugs it in the middle of the fight and then proceeds. This dethroned that scene for me because he has to place an order through Amazon so that
Ha ha ha ha.
Who's it? Mark? that the boyfriend? The baby daddy. He needs to receive an order so that he can use his Prime Air Amazon drone to fly a thumb drive with the software to IceCube in his office.
the baby daddy yeah yeah
So we get shots of Ice Cube, checking it out of his, adding it to his cart and checking out.
You
Yeah. so Mark puts on this like he puts on these VR goggles to fly his drone personally directly to ice cube and halfway along the way it hits a bridge or something and flips upside down and is stranded and like in the street, like he can't flip the drone back over. So they
they find a homeless man that's in the frame, like in frame, and they find out who he is and text him, I believe they text message him and they're like, can you flip over the drone in the street? And he's like, there's a million drones in the street. You gotta be more specific. They're like the Amazon one. And he was like, I'm not gonna do it for free. I want a thousand dollar Amazon gift card.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So they buy him an Amazon gift card for a thousand dollars to go flip the Amazon drone over.
As if they didn't have enough Amazon product placement already. They're like, let the audience know you can buy gift cards.
Yeah, a thousand dollars even. could do a thousand dollars if you wanted. And proceeds to fly the drone straight into the office and straight to Ice Cube where he retrieves the disk drive or the thumb drive.
Yeah.
that scene, I know it already sounds ridiculous, but he's flying this drone through this office building. And it seems like conveniently all the doors are open for him to be able to fly down into the sub basement hidden data center.
Hahaha
Yeah. 40 feet
below the surface of the earth is where this data center is.
Yeah.
And all the while we get this count down of bombers heading to Washington DC where they're going to obliterate the building. so it's, it's this supposed to be this tense race against time so that Ice Cube can put this cannibal code virus into the servers before he's blown to smithereens and it ends up with him.
kind of doing one of those like last second dives into the server room while by all these like tentacles from the aliens are, are in the data center consuming him. It is the worst green screen I've ever seen.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
you
Everything about it is the worst.
Yes. and yeah, so he, yeah, he dives into this, into the data center. Seemingly he gets the thumb drive in nick of time as he's being, you know, consumed by the aliens and then it cuts to black. know, sec, we think he's dead seconds, know, seconds after he puts his thumb drive in the bombers, which they're live.
think he's dead.
streaming to CNN or something. They're like mission aborted, mission aborted. They somehow without will or anybody communicating this plan to the higher ups, the bombers knew, don't blow up the building threats over aliens are gone or destroyed because of this virus. and that's basically the end of the movie. and then we get an epilogue where, Nope, he's alive. He's fine.
Yeah.
The threat was over.
He went to his daughter's baby shower and, um, and then, oh yeah, we get us. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and we get a scene where the secretary of defense, recruits will to head the new, whatever data collection program. And he's like, complete, uh, completed one 83. He's like, nah, that's not me anymore or something.
Yeah.
So did Sandra Nassah. She was invited.
See you in another video.
I don't- I don't-
yeah, he was like, I don't spy on people, I'm gonna spy on you guys now. So he's gonna- he's gonna watch the Watchers.
Yeah, with
what technology? knows.
And also during this, boss, the NSA director, was arrested for approving the Goliath program, knowing the risks.
There was, there was a lot there. So.
There's a lot to unpack, but so very little, too, at the same time.
Yeah, I mean,
that is true. Any scenes, I mean, any scenes or quotes or anything like that that we missed.
I mean, so many. It's just a barrage of one shitty idea or thing after another. I loved the scene when Ice Cube has teamed up with his son and the other disruptors to hack into the government and do their rabbit virus. And the other disruptors are like, your dad's got to give us total immunity. And he's just like,
Okay, and he just he deletes their all of their files. I don't know what that means, but he just deletes all their records out of the database. And so that's immunity, I guess.
Yeah, as an analyst.
Yeah.
Yeah,
nobody knows what that word means. I loved how there several shots of the secretary of defense and he's at the golf course. there's, you know, there's a shot of him first getting on a call from the golf course while aliens are attacking. And then he's on a different zoom call, you know, later on in the movie at the same hole, I think. So he's, he's also, he's not only not heading to a secure facility.
Yeah.
golfing the whole time.
He's also just not progressing with his golf game.
We didn't say he's a good golfer.
Yeah, they're just small things like that. The president clearly photoshopped onto or green screened into the whole office. Like it looked like his head didn't even really match his body. Just production, things like that all over the place.
I also liked Faith who had this thing stuck through her leg that was bleeding profusely and Will kept saying, don't take it out, like wait till you get help or something. And then he calls her back and she's like, I took it out and she's just bleeding out. She's an educated woman. You would think that she would know don't take the thing out. You're going to bleed. Yeah.
I mean, she's a biologist too. Like it's not only educated, but you'd think she would
know. I don't know.
a little
bit of first aid and then her boyfriend, Mark or whoever gets there and like tourniquets it with Amazon packing tape because he's like, yeah, I'm a professional. He's a professional driver so he knows first aid.
And he's like, I know what I'm doing.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a mess of a movie. What are your biggest hot takes?
So my hot take, I think that this movie was intentionally bad. I think that this was an attempt by Amazon Studios to get their name out there virally as like they want to make like the next Mystery Science Theater movie
Hmm, okay.
I know Evil Angoria and Ice Cube can act better than this. And like, the thing is we're all like kind of talking about it and they didn't pay any of us. It's like they made a movie so bad that you have to see it. Like we all watched this movie instead of something else that we'd probably rather watch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's an interesting take. don't know. I could, I could buy it. I don't know how much I believe it just because from what I, what I understand of the production. Um, I mean, it was, it was filmed and created in 2020 in September, 2020. it, so it took almost five years before it was released. So I think, I think it was my guess it was made with good intent and shelves because people realize it was so bad. And then.
Right.
At some point I'm, yeah, I'm sure Amazon was like, let's, yeah, let's, let's put a marketing pushback. I mean, maybe because of what you said, but I don't know that the creators tried to make it bad. I think a lot of it, is bad because of the constraints they put on themselves because of COVID. So I could see how you could even take the, the outline of the script.
Why release it though?
Yeah.
if you shot it conventionally with action sequences and, you know, even, even a similar ish budget. I mean, I, I, guess I, I couldn't find what the actual budget of this movie was and yeah. And I assumed that they were able to hit that budget because they, the production costs were super low. If everyone's just taking selfies of themselves during COVID. so yeah, maybe you couldn't, know, maybe you couldn't do it with a, create a conventional movie with that same budget, but.
Same.
Yeah.
I think a lot of the, the bad movie experience was, was B because of those constraints. my hot take is, is actually, a little bit of nuance, but I actually kudos to them for, for one, trying to make a movie during COVID. we all remember lockdown and like, it's, it's actually pretty creative under those constraints to think, okay, how can we actually put a full movie together? And.
Yeah.
Fair.
And guess part of that is, guess work kind of is like this. mean, most of our, most of our jobs are just staring at a screen the whole day, watching things unfold and zoom calls and FaceTime and text messages. there's a lot of Microsoft teams in here where he's messaging people. Like that's really what most of us do all day. Yeah, exactly. And I think some of the bad action movies we get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, let me tell you, it felt like work.
what takes me out of it sometimes is like, are people, why are people driving across town for a 30 second conversation or to do this thing that you can easily look up on your phone? Like I actually think it's a pretty, in some ways it's a very realistic movie. It's a more realistic movie than, you know, a Tom Cruise version where he's, you know, running around and meeting people face to face.
Yeah.
Yeah, which yeah, it's maybe a movie for its time There was a point in this movie where I was like 40 minutes into it and I misread the progress bar And I was like, okay, it's only 50 minutes long Like they at least had the decency to make it short and then I realized I had 50 minutes left and I was like, man I'm not gonna make it
Hahaha
Yeah.
Yeah. It's a, it's an hour and a half long movie. So it's not, it's not, at least they didn't make it two and a half hours long, but, um, yeah, it's, it's digestible. Um, I, I also, I don't know if this is a hot take, but, um, I don't think any actor could salvage this movie in the lead part, but I think
Yeah.
No.
As much as I like Ice Cube and other things, I think he made it 10 times worse because it was like you said, maybe it was just the reaction shot Jeff thing, but he, his dialogue was terrible and his delivery of the dialogue was terrible. I don't know if the Daniel Day Lewis could make this much better, but man, I can't imagine a worse actor in that lead role.
yeah.
Yeah
Yeah.
Yeah, it was so bad. wasn't, like, none of the characters are good in it, and none of the dialogue is good, and I feel like none of the deliveries are good either. Every reading of every line is bad.
I some of it is like, thought Eva Longoria was fine. I thought the kids were fine. I thought the FBI agent was fine. I, Ice Cube was the one that I was, he's just completely unbelievable as a, know, brainy hacker, analysts and the way he was, it was, he, there was no nuance to his performance. It was just either, him staring intently at the screen or
Yeah.
just those reactions like the damn or got them and like just, you know, one liners like that.
Yeah.
He was just Ice Cube for the whole movie.
Yeah, exactly. Well.
Every
line felt like you could tell it was being read from a script though. In my opinion, yeah.
yeah, yeah.
Do you think there were rehearsals at all for this movie? Or do you think it was just straight up, let's do it live.
And
yeah, think it was send it. Just send it and that's good enough.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, so what was your overall verdict? Did you like this movie?
No. I didn't like it, and it wasn't so bad it was good. It was just so bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was terrible. I could easily see this being the worst movie I've ever seen. Not because, I mean, all the things we've mentioned in terms of just the production, the acting, the way it's shot and all that, but it just was boring.
Yeah.
any sort of tension. wasn't at no point did I laugh with the movie or feel any sort of fear for the characters or it was just boring. And so yeah, the production was terrible and I didn't, I didn't feel anything. I won't say it's, I agree. It's not so bad that it's good, but I do feel like if, if I was
talking to a clone of myself, I would tell myself to watch this movie because I feel like it is a, it is a unique experience to watch a movie this bad. Not that you'll enjoy it, but you should know what people are talking about. least, at least, you know, watch 15, 20 minutes, you know, get this, get the idea of it.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think that it'll remain significant only in how bad it is. It'll be talked about with like The Room or Plan 9 from Outer Space or some of these other famously bad movies. So if you want to see it for that reason, that makes sense. Like I think that I think that that's why people will watch this.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Yeah, well, I'm not going to be revisiting it anytime soon. So one of things that we'll like to do is have alt pics. So are there movies that you would recommend other than this movie from the lead actors, the same writer, director, or even just thematically? What are your alt pics for this movie?
As far as director, there's really nothing much that I'd recommend, looks like. Lee has mostly done music videos and he's no David Fincher. So it is pretty easy though for the actors. mean, any other Ice Cube movie, Boys in the Hood, Friday, the Jump Street movies.
sure.
Yeah.
I would watch the original War of the... I mean, not the original, the 2005 War of the Worlds over this. And Clark Gregg is in this, so he played Phil Coulson in all of the Marvel movies. So if you wanted more Phil Coulson, watch a Marvel movie.
Yeah,
he plays Ice Cube's boss in this movie.
Yeah, and the Secretary of Defense was also in 24, which kind of feels similar with this, like, surveillance and the future technology that they have there for tracking and surveillance feels similar. But yeah, anything else other than this, really.
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, fair enough. Yeah, had, well, first of all, I shout out to Andrea Savage, who plays the FBI director. created and starred in a comedy series that I really liked called I'm Sorry, which she's a, her background is as a comedian. So when I first saw her on the screen, it was a little confusing, I think, because I mean, she plays it straight.
And I think she does an okay job with what she's given, but yeah, I am really curious about how this movie was casted. anyway, yeah, like you said, Ice Cube, Boys in the Hood is probably number one for me.
but, probably my top alternate picks. I feel like, I don't want to criticize the movie for, like I said, taking a shot at, portraying a story in a minimalistic way. because I think, one of the first movies I thought about was rear window where the lead character spends the whole time.
⁓
you know, in one room and watching things. And that's obviously done with a lot of suspense and executed. Yeah, exactly. And then kind of that same vein, one of my like recent favorites is Locke starring Tom Hardy. Have you ever seen that? Heard of that movie? It's Tom Hardy stars in it he's the only person shown on screen the whole movie. And the whole movie is him in a car driving down the highway.
Great pick.
So much better.
And he's talking to, he's basically calling different characters talking that, yeah. And it sounds very boring and even way more minimalistic in terms of how it's shown on screen versus War of the Worlds, but a really great movie and definitely takes you through a lot of emotions and there's tension and there's, and so it can be done.
I have seen that. Yep.
again, I applaud War of the Worlds for trying a different perspective and, but yeah, it just didn't deliver on its, on, on the things that make movies great. So, yeah.
Yeah, protect your data people.
protect your data and don't create more or we might have aliens visit us and take all our data away.
watched
this movie with Amanda and her one comment on it was, I hate it.
Yeah, yeah, you will probably hate it watching it too. I can't, I can't imagine.
I think that's about all that I can take of talking about war of the worlds. yeah. Yeah. I’m Ade.
Same.
I’m Aaron
Thanks for listening to the Worst Movie Podcast.