Ice Cube shot War Of The Worlds in COVID isolation with no director

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.