Prime Video's new adaptation of War of the Worlds has accomplished a rare achievement, but probably not one that the streamer was hoping for: the sci-fi movie has debuted to a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 0%.
The film, starring Ice Cube as Will Radford, a surveillance and threat assessment expert at the Department of Homeland Security, adapts H.G. Wells' alien invasion novel into a "screenlife" thriller, which means all the events of the movie are shown on computer or phone screens. On the hunt for a hacker known as the Disruptor, Radford's search is, ahem, disrupted by a shower of meteors hitting Earth that contain large, violent machines.
"The project might be scarier if the company that’s releasing it, Amazon, hadn’t already achieved world domination," reads Variety's review. "Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon."
ScreenAnarchy calls the movie "hilariously bad, until it becomes risibly ridiculous," while Cinemalogue's review says that "failing to muster any meaningful suspense from its misguided gimmick, this reimagining of the classic H.G. Wells science-fiction saga becomes more ridiculous as it goes along."
The audience score is marginally better at 12%, but viewers have been pretty scathing. "I honestly believe an elementary school classroom full of kids shooting on an iPhone could do a better job than what was done in this movie! That was time I’m never gonna get back in my life watching that garbage," said one.
"Awful waste of time. I'm thinking they spent about 14 dollars making this," someone else wrote, while another said, "I felt like I was watching a pre-show for a theme park ride."
War of the Worlds joins a list of fewer than 50 movies with a 0% score on the review aggregator site, in the company of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, Highlander 2: The Quickening, and National Lampoon's Gold Diggers.
War of the Worlds is streaming now on Prime Video. For more, fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best movies on Amazon Prime.
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