By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I don’t really go in for “worst movies of the year” anymore when it comes to giving them my time. There are a number of reasons for this –– most aren’t as bad or noteworthy as they are hyped to be, I want to watch movies that will engage me and a lot of “worsts” are just boring, I’d rather be eating a hot dog etc. –– but sometimes a movie comes along that gets a bunch of attention for its perceived awfulness and it does spark my interest.
War of the Worlds (2025) is not one of those because it isn’t really a movie that exists to be a movie. If you actually follow my writings (does anyone? Find me on social media and tell me), you’ll know that this new Amazon version of the classic sci-fi story is an ad movie.
And I ain’t got time for that.
War of the Worlds (2025) Isn’t A Movie
So, if you aren’t going to check out that ad movie link, let me say that the evolution of commercials into feature-length “films” continues with War of the Worlds (2025). It’s a screenlife movie which means that it takes place entirely on representations of screens. The screenlife genre itself is so susceptible to the ad movie mindset thanks to replicating the screens we see and use every day that are consistently selling us on something.
Since War of the Worlds (2025) is an Amazon movie, they are able to drop real-life references to their company and interfaces into the screenlife format, going so far as to involve Amazon in the active plot beats of the movie. It’s clear that this has turned people off with the repellant response to the movie, but like all bad movies, irony-poisoned chucklebucks have glommed onto this as “so bad it’s good.”
Which immediately raises both my suspicions and my active disinterest.
You Can’t Trust The Machine
In today’s mass-manipulated ecosystem of media, a movie like War of the Worlds (2025) being so reviled is actually an actionable point of success. There’s no doubt that Amazon likely knew this to some degree thanks to the film’s trailer having a tagline saying, “It’s worse than you think.” They knew that getting people hyped on a “one-of-a-kind stinker” is a viable strategy for the movie.
That’s why I don’t want to encourage anyone (myself included) to watch this “movie.” War of the Worlds (2025) is the kind of Super Bowl commercial trash that should be discarded, taken to the dump, and never seen again. Instead, a culture built around “see this movie because it’s awful” is easily seized by the people behind the movie’s marketing as an effort to juice what could have been a failure from a data standpoint.
Because all the machine cares about is numbers. Not art, not people, not thoughtful appraisal. All that matters is the ability for a soulless executive tp say, “War of the Worlds did X million views and that’s our gauge for success!”
So, I won’t be watching it or contributing anymore to its discourse than this article. The suits depend on your hatewatching. Stop getting played.
