If the latest adaptation of HG Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, a movie starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, was designed to make us pause and ask questions, it has certainly succeeded. Unfortunately, what a lot of viewers have been asking is why it was inflicted on the public in the first place. Is War of the Worlds “one of the worst movies ever made?”, asked the BBC. “Shockingly bad War of the Worlds is one of the worst movies of the decade,” said the New York Post. “Amazon’s War of the Worlds update should never have been released,” declared the Telegraph.
The 2005 adaptation, starring Tom Cruise, was a smash hit. Now people are flocking to the remake to see just how bad a film can be – it’s in the top 10 films watched in the UK and US on Amazon Prime. It seems that we have come to love “bad” films almost as much as those deemed good. The website Rotten Tomatoes practically celebrates films that garner a 0% approval rating: Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio, reborn in 2002 as an Italian fantasy comedy-drama, is one such offender; Look Who’s Talking Now in 1993, starring John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, replaced talking babies with talking dogs and was slated; while Travolta hit rock bottom in 2018 with Gotti, a movie about the New York mobster that was so gloriously awful it was nominated for six Razzies, the parody prize bestowed on Hollywood’s biggest cinematic failures, including worst actor and worst picture.
