I used to be a big midnight movie girlie. When I still lived in D.C., I went to at least half a dozen screenings of The Room, possibly the most notorious midnight movie of the 21st century. It’s as notorious for its ramshackle production—characters wander in and out of the narrative, sometimes played by new actors; several shots are out of focus; this blow job face is next-level bonkers—as it is for its auteur’s flamboyant weirdness—writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau can neither write, direct, nor act, but he is A Presence. And the vibes of these midnight screenings were always rambunctious and convivial1, especially when Wiseau himself was there.

After the second or third viewing, though, the novelty wears off and the movie’s vibes start to feel rancid. It’s terribly and carelessly put together, but at a certain point the flagrant incompetence can no longer camouflage the flagrant toxicity. In particular, its pathetic but vicious misogyny. The female lead, Lisa, is a capricious gold digger who seduces Tommy Wiseau’s best friend Mark and lies about being abused out of callous boredom, which tears Tommy aPART, Lisa. The movie goes out of its way to ogle the poor actress and call her character a bitch, with as much vitriol as two terrible actors can muster. Wiseau’s bone-deep hatred of women ultimately ruins the whole experience—for me, at least.

These days, I’m not as fond of the midnight movie circuit as I used to be. I still love a campfest—I have a group chat that’s specifically dedicated to watching goofy creature features together—but I generally need my movies to pass a certain threshold of competence. Alas, my omnivorous cinematic appetite still takes me in some weird directions sometimes, and that means that some truly rotten pictures still get through.

Enter War of the Worlds. Not the Tom Cruise one, which would make more sense given my recent fixation. No, unfortunately, I mean the 2025 Amazon Prime adaptation starring Ice Cube, Amazon Prime, Eva Longoria2, Microsoft Teams, Tesla, and Fox News. The one where domestic terrorist surveillance agent Ice Cube watches our planet suffer a violent alien invasion from his laptop screen.

Now, one thing I will say—screenlife movies can work! I’ve seen them! Unfriended is a fun one, for instance, putting some deeply obnoxious teenagers on a video call and letting a vengeful supernatural force tear them apart emotionally and then physically. And Host, a pandemic horror movie, is actually excellent and genuinely creepy (and just over one hour long, for those of you who care about that kind of thing).

All of this to say: it’s not just the laptop setting that sinks this movie. It’s the laptop setting both in the context of the movie, and in the clunky execution. The two successful examples I gave work in large part because the action only concerns the people on the laptop screen. As such, the laptop makes sense as a container for said action. There aren’t external threats to worry about, or to only see the edges of. There’s not, for example, a global alien invasion resulting in mass casualties and, somehow, the loss of “all” our “data.”3

Still, it’s theoretically possible to make even this setup work. The best found footage movies excel at showing the edges of the action as our protagonists experience it. But the best found footage movies don’t have Ice Cube frowningly under-reacting to everything that happens. And look—Ice Cube is a profoundly charismatic person. He’s innately watchable, and you want to like him. But he clearly needs something more to work with than a camera pointed at him and a cue card that reads “something bad happens.” You need theatre kid energy, or at least Twitch streamer energy, to carry so much of the film on just your facial reactions to off-camera goings-on. But Ice Cube is constitutionally incapable of that level of effort.

(Honestly, I know I’m biased due to him being my first hip-hop husband and everything, but I’d like to see what Yasiin Bey fka Mos Def would do with it. That man is a theatre kid on the sneak, and makes more sense to me as an overzealous tech nerd than Ice Cube. James McAvoy would also be a fun choice, because that man is a born ham (laudatory) and always fun to watch.)

And for a while, this movie does (Prime Air) deliver on that midnight movie thrill of watching an abject failure. Despite varying levels of effort4 and ability, nobody is giving a good performance except maybe the Diary of a Wimpy Kid boy. The script brings a sort of “LLM approximating human speech in an action movie” vibe to the function that I really don’t like. The frequent use of WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Microsoft Teams5 is meant to provide some verisimilitude and visual interest, but ultimately just feels simultaneously washed and frenetic. Not a single thing worked.

The thing is, a movie’s whole hog incompetence is kind of charming when it’s a low-budget wonder. The “let’s put on a show” energy can be endearing, even. Not so much when it’s coming from one of the biggest companies on the planet. They could afford to do better, in every way. They just chose not to. And the thrill really dies as the Amazon Prime product placement stops being incidental to the plot and starts being the entire plot.

Unfun fact: there are explicit tiers of product placement, from standard prop and signage placement, to verbal exposure, to story-driven product integration. This movie lets Amazon Prime make its way all the way up through each and every tier!

Anyway, it’s not that I’m surprised that an Amazon movie would find ways to integrate Amazon Prime into its narrative. That is presumably why Amazon wanted to create its own production company in the first place. It’s not even that the product integration—having Ice Cube’s future son-in-law be an Amazon delivery guy who helps save the day by piloting a delivery drone to Ice Cube’s Department of Homeland Security office, and yes I am completely serious here—is too egregious. Again, this is why Amazon got into this business. It’s that the product integration is so illustrative of, and bound to, some toxic, conservative politics.

There’s the “parents just don’t understand” stuff that was in another Amazon original this year, wherein the parent in question uses their unfettered government resources to spy on their children. (In Viola Davis’s case, it was sending the Secret Service to catch her daughter at and bring her home from a party. In Ice Cube’s case, it’s hacking his daughter’s smart fridge to chastise her about drinking too much soy milk.)

There’s the point during the thrilling [footage not found] delivery drone scene, when the drone gets knocked onto its back and needs some manual flipping assistance. Our heroes hack into the cell phone of an unhoused man nearby and offer him—get this—a $1,000 Amazon gift card to scurry out from his hiding place and flip the drone over. Their appeals to the better angels of his nature couldn’t work, but an Amazon bribe? I suppose if you’re Jeff Bezos, everyone has a price.

There’s also the prominent role that Fox News plays in the news coverage of this alien invasion, legitimized by appearing alongside the centrist outlets like CNN and BBC News that movies like this typically favour. And there’s the fact that both Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan make prominent Twitter cameos, alongside professional disappointment and senator Chuck Schumer. There’s the fact that this whole movie feels, despite its half-assed revolutionary lip service, like a preamble to Amazon lobbying for yet more government deregulation. It’s just so transparently, casually red-pilled.

By the film’s end, I felt bewildered and pretty aggrieved, actually. What was supposed to be a Fried Friday gigglefest wound up reminding me of how successfully all of these incompetent but powerful malcontents have abolished all pretense of accountability. Like, the products that get the most prominent placement here aren’t there by happenstance—most of them are owned by the happy tech billionaires who flanked Trump at this year’s inauguration. This movie isn’t just a feature-length Amazon ad, but a display of gleeful oligarchic rot. Bezos and buddies rule the world, and flaunt it in ways both big and small. Even five years ago, a movie like this would have tried camouflaging its hateful worldview in something either more polished or more moderate. Maybe John Krasinski would have been in it, or at least a streaming series version. But now it’s 2025, and they’re eight months into a presidential administration that they helped buy. They no longer have to pretend to care about democracy, or shame, or making anything better. They don’t have to hide their crushing disdain for all humanity. They can let the ugliness ooze out of everything they do. They can just be and do evil, and do it shittily.

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