And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...
In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:
… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.
Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.
In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.
Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.
Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.
The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.
This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.
Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
