Being a film star was clearly not Ice Cube’s first profession path, however he has been in some real hits: Friday, Barbershop, Ride Along, and the 21 Jump Street films, simply to call just a few. Sadly, his new model of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi traditional War of the Worlds received’t be remembered alongside any of these… and if he’s fortunate, it received’t be remembered in any respect. The film simply popped up on Prime Video this week, and critics are already slamming it tougher than an alien tripod robotic hitting a significant American metropolis.
Director Wealthy Lee’s Struggle of the Worlds gives a brand new interpretation of the enduring alien invasion story that cleverly takes some inspiration from Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio broadcast. If that model depicted what it could be prefer to expertise an alien invasion firsthand in 1938 — as in, as a radio broadcast — then this one does the identical for the fashionable period by having all of it happen by way of Zoom calls, Fb messages, and drone surveillance footage. That makes it one of the vital current examples of the “screenlife” gimmick (also referred to as “computer screen movies“), nevertheless it’s additionally a transparent indication that the development of telling a narrative fully by way of pc screens has run its course.
What’s a “screenlife” film?
Someway, screenlife predates the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic improve in utilizing Zoom requires every thing by greater than 5 years. Horror film Unfriended will get credit score for being one of many first feature-length screenlife films, adopted by Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, the place John Cho performed a father on the lookout for his lacking daughter. The excessive level of screenlife as a gimmick was most likely director Rob Savage’s glorious pandemic horror film Host in 2020, the place a bunch of buddies have a séance on a video name in the midst of COVID lockdowns.
The factor about screenlife is that it made excellent sense on the excellent time, reflecting fashionable folks’s obsession with their telephones after which the rise of Zoom. It even is sensible for a retelling of Struggle of the Worlds, not simply as the best way folks get their information now however as a option to capitalize on the inherent pressure of juggling a number of calls and messages whereas one thing nerve-racking is happening (it simply occurs to be an alien invasion right here). However the truth that it comes throughout as extremely foolish and gimmicky in Struggle of the Worlds ought to be the ultimate nail within the coffin for screenlife. It’s merely not efficient anymore, as a result of it’s laborious to disregard the deadly flaw of a screenlife film: The characters can all the time simply flip off their telephones and do one thing else. And so are you able to.
Struggle of the Worlds, which additionally stars Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, and Andrea Savage, is now on Prime Video.
