Screenlife might not be the best genre for adapting H. G. Wells’s classic sci-fi story, The War of the Worlds. This fascinating story of an alien invasion highlighted the grotesqueness of imperialism and the evolution of organisms, big and small. But how much of that can be staged through a computer browser? As it turns out, none of those greater themes are present, replaced with Amazon product placements, bland alien designs, and characters so ill-defined that they feel less like people and more like vehicles for reciting bland one-liners.

There’s not much to be invested in with Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security agent played by grumpy Ice Cube. He’s a grieving husband with a pregnant daughter and a tech-expert son, terrified of losing both, so he keeps constant tabs on them by violating their privacy. He has issues with letting go of his dead wife and getting used to the man marrying his daughter, an annoying Amazon delivery driver. With a constant grimace, Ice Cube is saddled for the entire film inside a DHS data center, casually darting between monitoring his daughter and coordinating raids.

His frown soon turns agape when mysterious meteors hit Earth, emerging as generic alien attack vessels that, while true to the general descriptors of the original novel, feel modernly mundane with their bland white exteriors. Time seems to start and stop for Will as he darts between tasks while Earth is under attack. His pregnant daughter is in danger, and he coordinates with her husband for an extraction amid the chaos. At the same time, Will documents the attacks, recommends a strategy, and military forces worldwide are already declaring victories and losses quickly. The way the film frames this montage makes it seem like hours have passed, but it’s apparently only a few minutes based on his interactions with his daughter. In between all of this, Will carves out some time to pen an email to his kids to tell them how he really feels, and it’s written as generically as every character present.

Ice Cube has so little to work with that this is an entire performance that could be phoned in from his home office. When he’s not delivering tired reactions to aliens and explosions (“Get out of there!” “How you like me now!”), he’s reading off bland exposition in a way that sounds like he was given zero time to rehearse or present a believable character within the DHS. I can’t say I blame him. Who would want to deliver a top-level performance for a role where you mostly sit, react to little more than a computer screen, and have to cite Amazon delivery services for the big climax with only the mildest of grumbles so as not to upset the conglomerate.

As far as screenlife movies go, this one is strictly for those who know nothing about computers or the internet. The film tries to evoke some somber drama from aliens draining information from Facebook and the American government revoking Will’s internet access when he learns too much about a conspiracy. It’s laughable the way Ice Cube tries to show desperation as his character, a DHS surveillance expert, refreshes a page and gets the dreaded no internet connection page. He frantically clicks around and is dismayed that he has lost his connection to Zoom and Teams, as though that restriction wasn’t apparent with what was happening. Naturally, the film ends the same way as the original story with a virus wiping out the aliens feasting on our data, but get this, it’s a COMPUTER virus! A novel idea for anybody who has never seen Independence Day.

War of the Worlds is a double-whammy of being the worst adaptation of the book and the worst use of the desktop framing in film. There’s such an emptiness with the staging that feels extra gross with the overt product placement and bland plot that seems to rely more on the assembly of windows and programs than any of humanity placed on the screen. This premise could be compelling if it had some intelligence and a willingness to skewer the bureaucracy and tech talk of a DHS worker realistically handling an alien invasion. Instead, we’ve got Ice Cube reluctantly trying to make lemonade out of nothing as he reads off a poor script and delivers his most tepid of attitudes. The message is clear from this film; alien invasions are more exciting from the ground than behind a computer screen.