We all embarked on some questionable project during the depths of COVID isolation, but most of us got to at least leave those projects behind along with that weird year. (When was the last time you checked on your sourdough starter?) Ice Cube has to deal with the fallout of his half a decade later. In a recent interview with Kai Cenat, the actor shared that he had filmed the entirety of his disastrous War Of The Worlds remake in 15 days in 2020. “So, the director (Rich Lee) wasn’t in there, none of the actors was in there. This was the only way we could really shoot the movie,” he said, per Deadline. “It’s pandemic time.”
None of that is hard to surmise, even just in the film’s trailer. The entire story—which revolves around scary mechanical aliens who “eat data”—is told via Ice Cube reacting to videos and FaceTime calls on a screen. That was obviously somewhat practical, but Ice Cube also has an interesting analytical interpretation of the choice. “But really, if shit went down, everybody would only have their screen to look at,” he said. That’s… pretty accurate. Maybe Eddington didn’t show its characters looking at their phones enough.
Ice Cube also expounded on the rather chilling reason it took the film five years to see the light of day. “Well, it was a Universal movie, and they sold it to Amazon Prime. And it took a minute to finish the movie because of how it’s shot,” he said. “All the footage is from real surveillance cameras all around the world. So they had to build all that shit.”
At least Amazon’s founder probably had a lot of fun with the film. In an essay earlier this summer, The A.V. Club‘s film editor Jacob Oller posited that War Of The Worlds was the “Jeff Bezosian fever dream, in which his company’s exploited delivery drivers rescue hapless federal employees—and the entire world—from the overstepping follies of Big Government, is also an essential demonstration of a tech executives’ idea of art.” Maybe it was really Amazon eating our data all along.
