The modern executive overreach of wannabe moguls has spanned media companies both traditional, like Warner Bros., and nascent, like Amazon. But no matter which fleece-vested Scrooge has decided that they know how to do someone else’s job, it comes with the same exhausting, creatively bankrupt problems. For example, in Brad Stone’s book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos And The Invention Of A Global Empire—released in 2021 but once again making the rounds online—the author describes how the MBA version of the earthworm from James And The Giant Peach envisions a checklist-driven kind of storytelling. “Look, I know what it takes to make a great show,” Jeff Bezos reportedly told his studio head. “This should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have basic things in common.” As a man with three IMDb acting credits to his name, he should know. Bezos then listed 12 elements “off the top of his head” that should be included in every Amazon Studios TV production—or else.
That got us thinking: Does Bezos’ broad set of arbitrary buzzwords also apply to Amazon Original movies? Could one find all the half-baked ideas leaking from his AI-addled brain in any piece of the streamer’s media output? Say, for example, the company’s widely panned, worst-of-the-year film War Of The Worlds? As the Film Editor of The A.V. Club, I should have better things to do with 90 minutes than watch a particularly unpopular Amazon Prime commercial. And yet, for science, that’s just what I did. Below are the dozen surefire ways to make a billionaire-approved piece of media, as per Jeff Bezos. Accompanying them is whether or not they can be found in War Of The Worlds, a screenlife trashterpiece where Ice Cube sits at a computer for an hour-and-a-half and whose climax depends on a successfully completed Amazon delivery.
1. A heroic protagonist who experiences growth and change
The first, and presumably most important piece of Bezos’ solved equation for perfect fiction comes from playing a game of Telephone with Joseph Campbell. This pseudo-monomythical champion doesn’t have A Thousand Faces in War Of The Worlds. Instead, Ice Cube, who plays Department Of Homeland Security cubicle jockey Will Radford, makes the same face the entire film. An avatar of the surveillance state, Radford has access to magical levels of technology yet is constantly Boomer-baffled by pretty much everything that dances across his screen. Almost every line is “What?” or “Damn!” and Cube maintains a permanent cringe, as if—despite what the audience sees on his screen—he’s watching a feature-length compilation of people getting hit in the balls.
But let’s break this down: Is Radford a hero? War Of The Worlds makes this extremely clear, ending with—and this is not a joke—this universe’s version of Joe Rogan tweeting out a YouTube video entitled “Heroes for privacy rights save humanity,” which features Radford in the thumbnail. Not just a hero for saving humanity, but a hero for privacy rights to boot. Take that, the government.
Does he experience growth and change? Radford begins the film as the most surveillance-happy guy on the planet. He’s tracking everything and everyone. He’s keeping tabs on his daughter’s heart rate and eating habits (creepy) and watching whatever’s on his teen son’s monitor (playing with fire). He’s even got eyes on his daughter’s boyfriend, who just happens to be an Amazon delivery driver. (This latter character is also a hero, completing a literal Prime order via miraculous drone flight.) By the end of the paranoid film, though, Radford realizes that he needs to loosen his grip on his kids a little, and to stop spying on random civilians for fun. Sure, he comes to this conclusion thanks to a cataclysmic intergalactic force, lured to Earth by a technofascist conspiracy lurking within America’s own security forces, but at least he gets there.
A final note regarding growth: As Radford gets longer and longer speeches, he sounds like he’s just learning how to read, with Cube’s off-screen delivery moving with the shaky cadence of someone following the script’s words with their finger.
2. A compelling antagonist
War Of The Worlds understands the simple economics of tech execs: Two villains are twice as good as one. First, there’s the onslaught of robotic aliens who “eat data.” Then, the film tries to one-up the ugly tripods with Clark Gregg, the traitorous Director Of The Department Of Homeland Security, who presumably does not eat data. Him not eating data is a critical error, as this is the best and funniest thing about the towering aliens. The ghost of H.G. Wells is admitting creative defeat; he may have dreamed up these marauding beasts, but he could’ve never imagined that they came to our planet in order to eat Ice Cube’s old Facebook photos.
Though the destruction wreaked by these monsters is contained to amateurish CGI and ludicrous news infographics charting the mounting casualties, nothing is more engaging than the idea that they’re munching on JPEGs. “Data is food for the superior intelligence that invaded Earth,” is said with almost the same cadence as “The bones are the skeleton’s money.” At one point the tripods go into “hyper download.” Trying to parse whatever is meant by this is infinitely more compelling than Gregg FaceTiming in from his home gym to confirm that his character is evil.
3. Wish fulfillment (e.g., the protagonist has hidden abilities, such as superpowers or magic)
Despite what his daughter tells him, Radford does have an incredible amount of power. His single-monitor desktop, with its dozens of tabs and windows, boasts some of the best and strangest movie technology ever put to screen. Radford can type pretty much anything into a nebulous and omnipotent search function, with hyper-specific keywords like “Domestic Terror Suspect Watchlist” and “David Radford’s Location” and “WAR map” all immediately granting him what he wants to see. He can also right click anywhere on his screen and find an amazing amount of specific options in a dropdown menu, like “commandeer drone” and “show sensitive government targets.” He can highlight TikTok screenshots of aliens and analyze them with the same program he uses to remotely hijack a Tesla—DHS has some incredible software. In this world, computers are like the genies that tech bros imagine AI to be. Technology is whatever you need it to be, all a single click away.
4. Moral choices
How much surveillance is too much surveillance? This libertarian nightmare can’t quite decide, though this is the central ethical question lurking amid the alien-driven destruction. An anonymous hacker named Disrupter helps nudge Radford in the right direction here, moving him away from the privacy-invading ways of the government and towards a white-hat ethos summed up by an incredible image of Ice Cube Photoshopped into a kind of digital hooded cloak, above the words “Join the Rebellion.”
5. Diverse world-building (different geographic landscapes)
Technically, War Of The Worlds takes place entirely on a single computer screen. We’re effectively looking at Ice Cube, having a bad day at the office and watching War Of The Worlds on his laptop while doing three or four other things. This is how streamers assume everyone watches movies now anyway, so this film figured it’d cut out the middle man. But, thanks to a little movie magic and endless amounts of stock footage, War Of The Worlds escapes its COVID Zoom-movie confines and travels across the world. It’s not at Fake Blockbuster levels of tourism, but, as reported over Microsoft Teams by Eva Longoria, who plays a woman known as Sandra NASA, the attack had “Global impacts! Every country hit.” To reemphasize this very specific and silly point, a childlike news report claims that “The world’s governments have finally put aside their differences in an effort to protect the home planet.”
6. Urgency to watch next episode (cliffhangers)
This one is a bit tricky considering the parameters of the experiment. War Of The Worlds isn’t a TV show and therefore lacks episodes. And yet, because each story beat is so detached from logic, there is a level of urgency because one truly is never sure what to expect next. While TV episodes must break their plotlines down into connected questions and answers, each new sentence in War Of The Worlds offers unpredictable suspense.
7. Civilizational high stakes (a global thread to humanity like an alien invasion or a devastating pandemic)
This is pretty much right down the middle for Bezos: H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds is perhaps the most famous alien invasion story ever told, inspiring Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg to greatness. In Rich Lee, the first-time feature director who helmed the music video for Michael Bublé’s “Haven’t Met You Yet,” it inspires almost total stillness. As Radford watches a “live update” of the war’s progression—his mystical DHS program tracking worldwide “units in deployment,” “hostiles defeated,” and more—he deadpans “That’s a lot” when confronted with the mounting casualties. And the point can’t be made clearly enough: These aliens are here to eat our data, which the film reminds its audience is humanity’s “most precious resource.”
8. Humor
I laughed more during the first 20 minutes of this film than I did through the entirety of the new Naked Gun.
9. Betrayal
Again, the film demonstrates that one example of each of these traits is far less potent than two. Not only is Radford’s aforementioned DHS boss actually a baddie, somehow activating even more surveillance than exists at his employees’ fingertips (“We now have the ability to predict every person’s thoughts and movements,” he claims), but that Anonymous-like hacker The Disruptor is revealed to be…Radford’s own son! How he hid that from his unscrupulous creep of a dad is unclear, but it’s a necessary treachery that eventually gets Radford away from the government.
10. Positive emotions (love, joy, hope)
While much of the film rests on Cube’s nearly emotionless face, Radford has two main expressions of joy: One is when he shouts “Touchdown!” after he logs back into his computer after briefly being locked out, and the other is when he repeatedly presses a “That was easy” button.
11. Negative emotions (loss, sorrow)
As one may expect from a sci-fi disaster movie—even one playing out in a series of computer windows—negativity reins for much of the film. The aliens aren’t just wiping out thousands of people (including a whole school of kids, as one news report briefly notes), but slurping up all the memories we’ve foolishly uploaded online. Radford watches photos of his children vanish before his eyes, the final voice memo from his dead wife disappearing from his Facebook message history. While the film feints at a global shutdown driven by our dependence on now-useless machines, it never quite sees it through. Things start working again whenever the script wants them too, which makes it seem like the aliens specifically targeted Radford to inflict emotional pain upon.
12. Violence
While there aren’t a lot of fights outside of the random stock footage of military men hup-hup-hupping around, War Of The Worlds does have its fair share of blood, mostly pouring out of Radford’s daughter’s leg after she’s injured by some debris. There are also a handful of explosions (a group of hackers are targeted like a webcam version of Star Wars‘ Order 66), including a few caused by drone-fired missiles in support of a climactic commercial for Prime Air. This sequence literally walks us through Radford placing an order on Amazon for an overpriced 128GB flash drive, with an AI slop description, sold by a third party, and which is available at a lower price from other sellers. Though entirely bloodless, this is perhaps the part of the movie that most clearly chooses violence.
Apologies to the haters and critics, but this airtight analysis clearly demonstrates that War Of The Worlds checks all the boxes. As far as the man signing the checks is concerned, the film is Citizen Kane, which is the only movie guys like him know is supposed to be good. This 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. Not only does its ridiculously cliched script pay lip service to each of these spreadsheet-ready categories, but it does so by overpromising and misunderstanding basic functions of computers and phones. That’s Silicon Valley 101, and so-bad-it’s-good perfection.
