We Watched Amazon Prime’s War of the Worlds So You Don't Have To

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Here we go,
War of the World.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Those are the opening lines of the movie. I feel
like I'm talking with ice.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Cube producer Mike. You said that if at least three
people signed off on it, we could do an episode
recapping the new movie on Amazon Prime War of the World.
Three people wrote in We're doing it.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah. I don't know if they were genuinely wanting to
hear this or just trolling me, but either way, we
watched it and here we are, and I hope they
enjoy listening to us talk about it.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
So usually in a movie recap episode, I usually will
warn that there's going to be spoilers. To be clear,
I am going to tell you what happens in the
movie War of the World in this podcast, but I'm
not calling it a spoiler because you are not going
to watch this movie if you have not already watched it.
I don't think that you should watch this movie. Something
about our conversation may make you curious, like morbidly curious.

(01:12):
What could this movie really be that bad. I'm telling
you it's not worth it.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, it's not worth it. Don't do it. Don't be
like us.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
A listener wrote us a very compelling email, basically saying
the movie. You should recap the movie not because it's
a good movie, which it's not, but because it's a
basically one long advertisement for Amazon and one long love
letter to big tech surveillance, which it absolutely is. But
it is just a bad movie. When I said that

(01:42):
I wanted to review it and that I was curious
about how bad it was going to be, I was
assuming that it was going to be a so bad
it's good kind of bad movie, like a fun, stupid
bad movie in the vein of a snake's on a
plane or a shark Nado or a hot tub time machine.
More of the World is trying to be a real movie.
It's trying to be a movie with something important to say,

(02:04):
like capital SQ, capital I, capital s. But that important
thing that it's trying to say is something that's really
stupid and also really muddled. A good bad movie is
a movie that knows that it's stupid, is in on
the joke. More of the worlds of the movie that
thinks it's smart, but is stupider than the universe of
the film even has the capacity to really realize and

(02:25):
grapple with It.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Takes itself seriously, which feels bizarre given the events that
are sort of unfolding, and also feels really discordant with
ice Cube, who is a legitimate, good actor, but he
really brings a lot of like gravitas and seriousness, you know,
I feel in most of his roles, you get the

(02:48):
sense that he is a man who has things to
do and he's not here to fool around. And it
just feels completely out of step with the nonsense of
this movie.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
It's truly when we watched this movie, we stopped it
and we were like, I'm not even sure how we
are going to make a compelling podcast episode about us
talking about it, because not only isn't a bad movie,
I do think that it really stretches what the definition
of a movie is. It's one of those movies where
I'm not even sure it's fair to really call it
a movie, if that makes sense, Yeah, like.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Maybe that's its enduring legacy. It has me questioning, like, well,
what does what is a movie? You know? Like it
was ninety minutes of video footage. There was a plot,
and yet somehow it doesn't feel like a movie still.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
You know that thing where I might be horribly misrepresenting
this since I apologize in advance, but where movie companies
and movie producers will intentionally fast track a bad movie
that is meant to bomb, and sometimes they market it overseas,
and it usually will have an aging famous actor like
a Bruce Willis in it or something like that, and

(03:59):
the whole whole thing is just done as some kind
of a financial scam or an investment scam of some kind.
That's the what I mean. I actually did some digging
after watching this movie because I was so sure this
movie had to be some kind of a tax scam,
investment scam. That was the feeling that I that I
left almost like this, somebody has to be getting scammed

(04:21):
for a math to math on how this movie came
to be. I don't know if it's me as the
viewer or what, but somebody's getting scammed here.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, somebody's getting scammed. I totally agree it's some kind
of scam. It's not a movie. Nobody sat down was like,
you know, I'm a tortured creative visionary and I have
a story I want to tell. Let me put ink
to paper and share this with the world. That's not
how this movie came to be. I don't know exactly

(04:49):
how it started, but it's definitely some kind of scam.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
So we really are hoping that we can capture the
experience of what watching this movie was like, so that
y'all listening at home do not have to And I
will say that the amount of people who are sharing
the experience of what watching this movie is like, it's
almost sort of historic because the film is historic and
the amount of hate that it's gotten. It has Letterbox's

(05:14):
second lowest rating review ever recorded, and for a time
it had a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which was
initially what drew like, what caught my attention to this movie.
It did get one contrarian kind of positive ish review,
which bumped it up to a whopping three percent on
Rotten Tomatoes. To give you a sense, only thirty nine
movies ever have gotten a zero percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
That's a shockingly small number considering how many movies get
made every single year. Do you have a list of
what those thirty nine movies were?

Speaker 1 (05:45):
I do a few notable entries Police Academy four. Have
you seen that movie?

Speaker 2 (05:51):
I have, and I remember kind of liking it as
a child, but also recognizing that it was very bad
and stupid.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Another one is Problem Child. I might have actually even
seen that in the theater. I remember liking it when
I was a child. But it's not a good movie
by any stretch of the imagination. But I don't think
it deserved as zero percent.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
I think in my household, my mom was like anti
that movie because it was glorifying bad behavior, which she
did not appreciate it definite.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
I mean, it's it's about a problem child. It's pretty,
it's pretty. The ticular particular child is a problem child. Yeah,
your mom's not wrong. Another one is Look Who's Talking Now,
which was a follow up to the movie Look Who's Talking,
where it's like babies talk via voiceover, but in this
in this follow up, it's it's like the dogs who
are talking.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
You know it's gonna be a good movie when you've
got voiceover for animals.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
The Garbage Pale Kids movie, which is a movie that
I have seen. I've seen that as an adult. That
one I can confirm does deserve zero percent that is
that is really a stinker. Something I remember about it.
So folks don't know what the garbage pail Kids are,
allow me this di version garbage pail Kids in the
eighties and the nineties. It was a parody of the
cabbage patch dolls, which were very popular in the eighties

(07:10):
and nineties, but they were sort of gross out parodies,
and so you would have garbage pail kid dolls named
things like acne Annie, and she would have like gross
weeping acne all over her face. And the thing that
I remember most about this movie, the one gag that
I remember clearly, is that one of the garbage pail kids,
his stick was that he always wet himself. So over

(07:33):
the course of this ninety minute movie, you watch this
kid wet himself maybe ten times, and that they're making
a meal of that stick. They're really they're really using
the fuck out of it.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Was that a live action movie?

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, it's it's it's like, is it seat?

Speaker 2 (07:48):
How are you struggling with this question?

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Because I mean, what does that mean in like the eighties, right,
Like it's it's it's not animated. If that if that helps.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
I guess that's what I was asking like is it
animated or like it includes human actors.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
They're like, it includes human actors, and I guess puppets.
That was kind of the thing in the eighties, you
know what I'm saying, Like, it's hard to explain. It's
hard to explain, Like.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
You're kind of making me want to watch this movie.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Well, if that's gonna be our next rewatch, we're just
gonna do bad movie recaps.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
It's gonna watch garbage over and over. Let's move on.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
So all of this hate toward War of the World
has kind of led to this feedback loop where the
movie is so bad, people like me get curious to
see how bad actually, and it in invertently failed fails
its way into success because it is by far one
of the most streamed original movies on Amazon Streaming Mike.

(08:55):
When you and I watched it, it was at number
two on Amazon Prime's top ten.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Left this is like the downfall of society that we
are rewarding things for being exceptionally terrible. Like this is
not gonna end well for us.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
I mean, I do think there's kind of a collective
experience of all watching a truly bad movie together. But
you know, one of those movies that's so bad it's
good in the vein of like a show Girls, which
I do enjoy. I mean, I mean, one of my
favorite movies is Mars Attacks.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
I'm not somebody who is not down for a bad movie,
but I don't think that War of the World's really
really meets that criteria in a traditional sense, because it
is just a really bad movie. When we were watching it,
we paused it multiple times just to ask what the
fuck did we just watch? In my notes for the movie,

(09:49):
multiple times I wrote in all caps, wow, what a
bad movie, to the point where I'm genuinely not even
sure how to recap it.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Same in my notes, I think the majority of the
notes that I took, and in the question mark, I
was like, what, Like, did I get this right? Why
is this happening?

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about how this
movie came to be. So this is one of those
movies where at the time that it came together, you
can kind of see why they thought it was going
to work, but then when you see the finished product,
it's very clear that it did not work. The movie
was first conceptualized in twenty twenty in the midst of
the COVID nineteen pandemic. Universal was initially intrigued by the
project's use of what's called screen life technology, which is

(10:32):
when a movie is totally shown through screens and text
messages and FaceTime calls. They described it as quote having
the look of a commercial event film, but at the
budget of a contained thriller, which I guess is a
nice way of saying this movie was cheap to put together,
which no shit, it really shows. But this also allowed
the actors and crew members to work in individual, remote workspaces.

(10:55):
You know, this was at a time during COVID when
nobody was making movies in person, so it's good idea.
They fast tracked it. I read a Deadline piece that
seemed to suggest that the film was filmed with all
of the actors just in their houses by themselves, and yeah,
it kind of shows. Back then this was just an
untitled ice cube thriller project. But it sounds like H. G.

(11:17):
Wells's science fiction novel War of the World's entered public domain,
and they were like, hey, let's make it that. So
the producer explained that he's sort of going for an updated,
modern spin on orson Wells's War of the World. He said,
if aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most
likely we'd be watching it on our phones. In this way,

(11:38):
it's a modern spin on Orson Wells War of the
World's back then. He used radio, the most popular technology
of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, I mean he also used plausible narratives, like people
were so convinced it was real they started calling police
stations and gathering their families and going out into the
yard with shotguns, and so I kind of wish the
producer had focused on that aspect of it, the good
storytelling aspect, and not so much the medium, which I'm

(12:09):
a little skeptical about that to begin with.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
Well, that's true, because not only is this a bad
movie that makes no sense, it also looks like dog shit.
It reminds me of those old remember those Sci Fi
Channel original movies that were known for the bad CGI
and bad special effects, Like ice Cube is meant to
be working at the Department of Homeland Security the entire time,
and they pretty clearly use a very obvious virtual background

(12:35):
to just simulate this, and it is the main set
piece of the film. Also in the movie. Ice Cube
wears glasses the entire time, but at points the glasses
have a visible reflection, which is pretty clearly a green
screen or some sort of screen in front of him,
not the thing that we're told that he's meant to
be looking at. And I guess nobody thought to fix

(12:55):
that in post like that is the level that we're
talking about here, and this is meant to be a
real movie, not a sci Fi Channel original. But I
will say we talk a lot about AI and AI
slop and whether or not AI the overuse of AI
will make movies unwatchable. This was almost sort of heartwarming
in that it was a good reminder that humans can

(13:16):
make flop too. It doesn't always just have to be
AI slop. This is good old fashioned human created.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Flop in twenty twenty five, or I guess twenty twenty
when they made this. It was a pretty brazenly bad
level of CGI like it was sort of hard to
tell what was going on with the aliens, and I
guess it's still not clear to me if the big
alien things that were destroying buildings if they were a

(13:43):
vehicle or a para suit of some sort with aliens inside,
or if they were the aliens themselves.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
It's never explained.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
It's never explained, and it you know, it's I think
it's sort of given to the viewer, like what do
you think is happening? Which is not how it's supposed
to be.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Pains me. Should we get into a plot summary of
what happens in this movie?

Speaker 2 (14:04):
I think it's time.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Oh boy, Okay, let me just say this. Don't overthink
any of this. And also, this is just me telling
you what's going on. I mean, I'm this. I can
only report what I saw, So don't overthink it. Don't
overthink it. Okay.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, maybe they were going for like a fog of
war thing, so they were trying to recreate the experience
of not really knowing what's happening.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
So the again, the entire movie takes place on ice
cubes computer screen, Like the first scene is him opening
up Amazon Music and hitting play on a song. This
might have been a cool thing back in twenty twenty.
I actually did see a movie that I thought was
pretty well done about COVID that is in a similar style,

(14:45):
called The Code. I do think that we were all
kind of interested in this sort of technology. What does
it all mean? YadA, YadA, YadA, think in twenty twenty.
But to be clear, in War of the Worlds, we
are literally looking at somebody's computer screen as they do
things like type in passwords for a fair amount of
this movie, like he's switching between applications. Sometimes he's switching

(15:06):
from What's up to Microsoft teams, and we are taking
along on that scintillating journey in real time as the viewer.
So ice Cube is a domestic threat analyst for the
Department of Homeland Security, and the movie opens with him
doing remote digital surveillance on the streets of Washington, d C.
Which is where we live. So he is surveilling the

(15:30):
White House, just random streets around DC, Georgetown University, the monuments.
He's got drones. He's listening to people's conversations, Like at
one point he has technology where he can listen to
people's phone calls and he listens to a guy who's saying, dude,
don't worry, no one's listening to our conversation. You're being paranoid,
And dudes not being paranoid because ice Cube is listening.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
I'm gonna come up as kind of the piggy here.
But like that first scene being somebody who lives in Washington,
DC and knows about these different landmarks and the different
agencies that are petroleum. These are like all different agencies.
You know that you've got the Secret Service, you've got
the Park Police, you've got the Department of Defense. And

(16:14):
so the fact that he's surveiling all of these suggests
that this is like he's one of the top intelligence
guys like in the country, which is sort of reaffirmed
at some points, but then like at others, it's kind
of like undermined. But he has like godlike powers of
surveillance within certainly within Washington, DC.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Oh. In this universe, ice Cube is the guy behind
the guy behind the guy, the ultimate surveiller of all right.
He can tap into anything, any camera at a phone
and a drone, any car he can commandeer and that
he wants at any time. He is ice Cube is
the puppet master holding the strings of all of us.

(16:57):
This whole thing is being overseen by ice Cube. Folks
might have listened to the episode that I did breaking
down what's happening in DC right now? And I won't
say that we watched this movie while we fled DC.
But I also won't say that we watched it while
not having fled DC. We did not. We we watched

(17:20):
this movie not in Washington, d C in part because
of everything that's going on in DC right now, and
then watching a movie that is about that starts with
this incredible level of surveillance to d C, it just
really hit differently. I guess I'll just put it that way.
When when you've when you've low key fled your city
because of threats of a fascist takeover of said city,

(17:41):
watching a movie that opens with really cool deep state
surveillance of the city was a little much for me.
I don't know how. I don't know how you felt
about that experience. Also being somebody who's from DC, Yeah,
it was similar.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
And you know, one of the big stories that people
have been talking about the past couple days is how
federal agents from various agencies are just out there with cameras,
like really aggressively trying to photograph everyone that they come
in contact with, people walking by on the streets, just
adding to their database to be to have like facial

(18:18):
recognition capabilities for everyone. And it did feel a little
weird to see that depicted on ice Cube's desktop, that
you know, he could look at any video feed and
then click on a person and not just identify that person,
but also get access to their telephone number. When he

(18:39):
was doing it in the movie, it seemed, you know,
like he was doing it to keep us safe. And
it definitely felt differently to be in a city where
there are like armed people from out of state who
don't blog in this community taken our photos and trying
to add our faces to database. So yeah, it felt

(19:02):
kind of weird.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
This was meant to be kind of an escapist movie,
but that part did not feel escapist. Also, you're so
right that when the movie opens and he's scanning people's
faces and getting all the information about them and tapping
into their phones and whatnot, it's done with a kind
of a hip, cool, hip hop score. You are absolutely
meant to think this is great. You were meant to

(19:23):
watch this and be like, wow, you can get information
on anybody. I think that we as the viewer, are
meant to think this is a cool guy, what a
cool job. All of this is super cool. And let
me tell you, I can tell you right now, ask
somebody who is experiencing it personally. None of it's cool.
It's not cool. I don't like it.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Let's take a quick break at our back.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
So ice Cube takes a quick break from his unimaginably
critical job of surveilling everything and everyone all the time
to have a chat with his friend Sandra, who works
for NASA, played by Evil Longoria, which Evil Longoria is
a real actor like that, like some of the I
don't I'm curious how she got mixed up in this,
but I digress. So Sandra, who works for NASA, calls

(20:26):
ice Cube at work via WhatsApp because she is concerned
about some unexplained weather and atmospheric disturbances. He tells her,
I've got bigger fish to fry and watching the clouds.
I have to be watching people. Then ice Cube checks
up on his nemesis, a hacker called the Disruptor, who
is sort of like an anonymous figure. He's hooded, he
uses like a voice changer. We don't know his identity,

(20:49):
and the Disruptor has made a video threatening to release
top secret evidence that citizens are being tracked by the
surveillance state in a project called Goliath to enslave citizens
and an authoritarian takeover. Ice Cube is like, not on
my watch, I think not.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
Yeah, so I bet you didn't see that coming. That
there's like this cat and mouse game with this secretive
hacker about a secretive government program called Goliath. When this
first came up on the screen, I thought, oh, ice
Cube is mad that the Disruptor is going to expose
the tools that ice Cube is using to spy on everyone.

(21:27):
But later, this is a little spoiler, we find out
that ice Cube doesn't know about the Goliath project. It
doesn't think it's real. So even with his godlike admin
powers to surveil every person in America, he somehow was
still kept in the dark about this super secret extra
surveillance program that would be even greater surveillance.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
He surveils everything, yet it's blind to the truth. Mike,
he sees he surveils everything, but can't even see what's
happening right in front of his eyes. So something to
know about ice cue Cube is that he's not just
survailing US citizens. He is also kind of abusing this
government technology to just spy on his kids. He's spying
on his pregnant daughter, Faith, who is a biomedical student

(22:12):
at Georgetown University researching something called cannibal DNA. Question Mark
I don't know if that's the thing. I don't know, Like,
let's just move on. He spies on her through some
like very intrusive ways, including hacking into her smart fridge
to scold her for not eating nutritiously enough. He has
the ability to take remote access over any computer, including

(22:34):
his kids computers. He sees his son playing a video game,
so he deletes it from his computer, and he's pressuring
his son to get a job at the NSSA. His
son is like, oh, Dad, spying on people's Amazon cards?
Why would I want to do that? Ice Cube is like,
would you rather have someone spy on you or be
blown up? His son hates this and says, you know,

(22:54):
it's us that those are the only two options, give
up privacy or death. And ice Cube is like, oh,
that's a pretty easy train, if you ask me. His
son hits back and says, you know what, Dad, you
haven't even moved mom stuff from the house. At first,
I thought I wasn't sure if we were supposed to
think that ice Cube and his wife were divorced or

(23:14):
if she if he's widowed and she died, I will
say this, I wrote this down. If if they were divorced,
he is what one hundred percent spying on her using
government surveillance tools, no question about that. However, it turns
out he is actually a widow.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, and he's potentially trying to spy on her from
beyond the grave because he has no qualms about using
any of these tools just to like see what his
kids are up to intervene in their lives in little ways,
no big deal. And also he's like doing this while
he's on the clock at work with his super important
job of protecting America and one other thing that he

(23:51):
does after he you know, sees his son playing this
video game through illegal surveillance and then remotely deletes the game.
I think while the son is playing it, he gets
off the phone and he hits a big red novelty
button that says that was easy, like those old Staples commercials,
And he hits that a couple more times throughout the

(24:13):
first half of the movie. I think it's supposed to
be his personality, like a little quirk he does around
the office for his own amusement since like nobody else
is there. But he does it like several times, and
I can just picture like it's like something a low
budget version of Michael Scott might think it's funny. Uh,

(24:34):
it's extremely sad. And I'm not sure if it was
meant to be sad or meant to be funny, or
if Staples paid for this marketing. I don't know if
they even still use that.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oh my god, Mike, so I'm so love that you
brought this up. I wrote down the same thing. They
actually talk about this in this hilarious piece for The
Ringer called the twenty one worst Things about the worst
movie of the year, War of the World. So ice
Cube is it's I can hit. I can answer the
question of whether or not Staples paid for this. They
did not, because Staples had the easy button, and this

(25:06):
is like a clear knockoff, so it's a knockoff that
was easy button. The piece reads ice Cube hits the
knockoff that was easy button three times in the first
twelve minutes, and then completely forgets it exists. It doesn't
say easy on the button like it should. It just
says the word push, like a bootleg version you'd find
and a dollar store toy ale. I was initially pissed

(25:28):
because they used the button at all, let alone a
knockoff one. It was an easy jump to irate when
they button matched it three times early and never again,
why use it at all? It should go down in
history as the worst use of the that was easy
button gag in cinema history. What a weird thing. He
doesn't he hits it three times within the first twelve minutes,

(25:49):
and then it's just abandoned. They never returned to it.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Your guess is as good as mine. My hypothesis is
that they were trying to use it to establish his
personal He is like a wild and zady guy around
the office. I guess.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Okay, So ice Cube's daughter Faith is dating Mark, an
Amazon delivery driver. This's a great time to remind everybody
that Amazon is a wonderful company. Get used to that,
because Amazon is mentioned by name about one hundred more
times in this movie. Ice Cube initiates a conversation with Mark,
and Mark spills the beans about a baby shower that

(26:26):
they're planning that ice Cube wasn't invited to, and he
becomes very sad, but honestly, dude, like, maybe this is
what happens when you surveil your family twenty four to
seven through kind of illegal means and show constantly just
how a little trust you have in any of them.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, his family relationship seems strained to say the least, which, yeah,
not surprising his daughter doesn't want him at the baby shower,
but also ouch, that must have really hurt him. One
thing that I do like about Mark is that he
holds up a Grandpa Shark t shirt that has ice
Cube's face on top of the baby Shark, which I

(27:02):
don't know, maybe this is basic, but I've actually felt
that kind of funny, and I think this movie really
could have used a few more dumb little jokes like that.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
So I actually do think there is a good bad
movie hiding deep, deep, deep into the nucleus of this
bad bad movie. They clearly set his daughter's boyfriend Mark
up to sort of be oh goofy, good natured white
guy boyfriend who is the comic relief of the film.
There's even a little ending credit scene that's supposed to

(27:31):
be funny of ice Cube catching Mark dancing when he
thinks he's alone in his Amazon delivery truck. Right, So,
there are all these little moments in the movie where
they might work for a different movie, but it's not
clear how they fit into a movie that is so serious.
As the one that they're sort of going for. I
genuinely do think a few punch ups and this could
have been like a good bad movie, not just a

(27:55):
bad bad movie.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
That's your opinion. I'm still not convinced they could have helped.
They could have helped anyway.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Ice Cube types out a message to his daughter Faith
about being not invited to this baby shower that's actually
pretty honest and heartfelt. It's like, why didn't you want
me at your baby shower? But then he thinks better
of it and it says no, no, no, no, deletes it
and decides instead to take remote access of her computer
instead to read the private messages she is sending to
her boyfriend about the baby shower, which honestly might explain

(28:26):
why he wasn't invited in the first place. Yeah, you
think this scene is so confusing because I watched it
several times. I still don't know. It could be. I
don't know if ice Cube is typing as the daughter
with remote access through her computer, or if he's just
reading the text that the daughter and the boyfriend are

(28:47):
sending back and forth. We watched this a few times,
and the movie does not make it clear to me.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
In my opinion, Yeah, I still am not sure. I
think we sorted it out that he was just reading them,
texting back and forth. At first I thought he was
spoofing Mark and writing to his daughter as if he
was her. It was confusing because it's just text in
a text field, and so you don't see anybody's fingers,

(29:14):
you don't see anybody's face, could be anybody writing these words.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
There are a few points like that in the movie
that almost I don't even know if red Herring is
the right way to describe them, where it's so unclear
what's happening. You think it's a plot point, and then
you realize it's just sloppy filmmaking. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (29:33):
It does, Yeah, that does come up several times. There's
quite a few spots that we'll get into where it's
just not entirely clear what's happening. But also I at
those moments, I was like, well, it doesn't really even matter, Like,
let's just keep going. It's gonna be aliens, aliens blowing up.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Don't overthink it. That's again I'm telling this to you,
producer Mike, but also to you the listener. Don't overthink
any of this underthinking if anything. So Mark logs onto
Facebook and it has revealed that his wife has died
and he's still playing voice messages that she left for
him on Facebook Messenger and like messaging her on Facebook Messenger,

(30:16):
which is genuinely like sad.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah, it's probably one of the more like touching emotional
moments of the movie where you see him feeling something
and you understand and can relate to that feeling.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
But no time for those feelings about your dead wife,
because the search warrant comes in for the disruptor, his nemesis,
and a special agent is about to bust him. But
as she goes in to bust him, uh oh, it's
a decoy. So ice Cube is watching special forces move in.
They're armed to the teeth, they're wearing tactical gear to
arrest this hacker as if they think he might be

(30:54):
armed with a sandwich or something, and ice Cube is
basically watching this failed raid in real time. When the
meteors start hitting the Earth, then we get some very
low budget, very janky looking footage of meteors hitting places
in countries all around the world. It's one of those
scenes where it's France and there's an Eiffel Tower with

(31:14):
a guy in a striped shirt riding a bicycle with
a baguet and like that's being hit by a meteor.
There genuinely is a very specific episode of Rick and
Morty that this almost seems shot for shots styled after.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
And I appreciate it because it's like, Oh, I recognize
this little montage. They're showing things happening around the world.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
I get it.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
It feels like a movie.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, it feels like a movie. So DHS and the
FBI and the White House and everybody, they all have
a big meeting on teams and shit is bad. I
will say one of my favorite bits of the movie
happens here, which is that the Secretary of Defense in
all of these video meetings about a literal attack on Earth.
In all of these video meetings, the Department of Defense

(31:56):
head is actively playing golf and smoking us I'm a
golf course when all of these meetings take place. He
is only ever shown golfing throughout this entire movie. I'm
not kidding. There is one seat at the very very
very end of the movie where everything's okay in the
end and he's like in a car, but the Secretary
of Defense literally never leaves the golf course during the

(32:18):
entire duration of this attack on the earth in this movie, which,
to be honest, I kind of respect, like, you know,
if we're all gonna go out, I'm gonna go out
working on my score.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Okay, Yeah, I love that detail. That's I think that's
one of those like funny good movies hiding in a
bad movie details that you mentioned, because that's that's some
funny stuff, you know, I and I. But the strange
thing is, like I didn't even clock that when we
were watching it. It wasn't until afterwards when you told
me about that. It's like, oh, you're right, he was

(32:50):
always on golf courses. But that was a good detail.
I wish it had stood out a little bit more
to me.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah. Same, Okay. So they're this big meeting about what's
going on and then oh no, it's an alien, it's big,
it's metal, it's got tenables and they're calling them tripods.
So ice Cube's son calls him and says, Dad, I
have important information about what's going on to tell you,
and ice Cub is like not. Now. This is one
of my all time least favorite cliches in movies when

(33:20):
someone tells someone else they've got important information and that
person is like, I can't, I can't not now, I'm
too busy. In the time that they do this back
and forth of Dad listen and he's like, no, I'm
too busy. The son could have spit could have surely
spit out whatever information it was if he wanted to say.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
It's a pretty extended back and forth with a son
really wants to give him this information but seemingly is
incapable of just saying it. He needs to like receive
permission to share it conversationally first. It's pretty drawn out.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
I gotta say, ice Cube really does not have a
ton of range in this movie. As we said, he
is a good actor, like if you've seen Boys and
the Hood or Friday. He genuinely is a good actor
with range, but he's not really given in his a
game here. I don't know if this is true or not,
but I've read that because this movie was filmed in
twenty twenty, ice Cube filmed all of his scenes by

(34:13):
himself in his house before anybody else had even started filming,
so he's not really responding to anyone else's energy or
voice or acting in this movie. He's just literally reading
lines in his house, which makes when I found that
out that it made so much more sense for the
movie because a lot of this movie is ice Cube

(34:34):
just saying damn, wow, that's crazy, and the movie is
just ninety percent him giving those kinds of vocal reactions
to what is happening on a computer screen.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Sometimes I feel those are the reactions that I give
you on this show. But damn, wow, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
I mean, value your contributions to this podcast.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Damn that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Okay, So aliens are knocking out the communication systems, military outposts,
power grids and they were causing all the storms.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Uh, and then ice cubes WhatsApp account blows up. It
kind of seems like maybe a top secret surveillance guy
wouldn't be using what'sapp so much. What do I know?

Speaker 1 (35:25):
We actually have an upcoming episode about why What's app
is not the most super secure messaging service. In reality,
he would be using Signal.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
No, well, yeah, he'd be using Signal because he works
at Hegset's DoD where they just use third party unsecure apps,
So he probably would be using Signal if he was
actually following secure protocol, he would be using internally built
tools that are actually secure.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Aliens are attacking and there's chaos on the streets. Faith
ice Cube's daughter. Unfortunately, it gets hit by helicopter and
takes a metal blade right through the sigh. This injures her.
Oh no, the DHS building where ice Cube works at
is on lockdown, so we cannot get out to save her.
And oh no, one of the aliens is nearby chasing

(36:15):
his daughter. Luckily, ice Cube is able to hack into
a nearby tesla so that she can get in, and
he hacks it so that he can drive it remotely
to drive Faith to safety.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, and I just want to back up to he's
like one of the most important people in the US
intelligence community. The United States is being attacked by aliens.
They're like destroying cities, and he spends like his first moves,
his first ten to fifteen minutes, like talking with his kid, Like,

(36:48):
I don't think that's how it's supposed to go.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
No, he's a dead first mike. So while his daughter
is essentially bleeding out in this tesla escaping an alien attack,
ice Cube is like, you know, this would be a
time to bring up my hurt feelings about that baby
shower snub from earlier, so he's like, hey, I get
that you didn't want me at your baby shower. What's
up with that? Faith lays some truth on up. She says,

(37:11):
you think you have so much more power than you do.
You think you have the power to keep the world safe,
and you don't. You have to let go. I'm not
a kid anymore, which is pretty eloquent for someone who
is bleeding out in the back of a tesla.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, and also like not really addressing his concern and
also also his like bringing this up now while she's
like bleeding and aliens are attacking. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (37:34):
It seems like there's bigger stuff going on, but maybe
we had for him weird timing.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Weird timing. So one thing to note in this movie
is that ice Cube is constantly commandeering drones around the
city for his own personal use, and that doing that
is literally is just as easy as right clicking on
a drop down menu that literally says common deer drone
question mark. Like in this universe, you basically just have
to write, click on something or ask what I think

(38:02):
is meant to be? Like an AI a chatbot ask
it to do things like release top secret government information please,
and that is all the hacking that is necessary in
this universe.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah, he's all. All of his hacking is done through
like drop down menus and features that are built into
the software that I guess his engineering team built for him.
So it's not really clear what his like skill set is,
but he definitely does commandeer a lot of drones. Another
fun fact about DC, there are zero drones in the sky. None,

(38:35):
none like that.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
Well unless they're so that's not technically true because there was.
They are allowed to have government like the civilians are
not allowed to fly drones in DC.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
That's true. Yeah, so like the government can have some
drones in DC, but civilians can't. It's illegal, and they're
just like there aren't any because this place has surveiled
pretty heavily. And like some of these drones that he's commandeering,
then these presumably government drooms I guess, are armed, Like
at some point later in the movie, he commandeers a

(39:05):
Reaper drone that is armed with missiles. And that's just
it's just slide around DC presumable I guess, not on
any sort of important mission, just like killing time, waiting
for somebody to commandeer it.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
And not only that, the process of commandeering these armed
drones is just a drop down menu. This commander armed
drone questioned, Mark, okay, shoot shoot from armed drone.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Gotcha, We'll do yeah, zero latency, nothing, just selected from
the drop down and boom you you now have the drone.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
So Icekee was able to commandeer a drone to track
down Faith's Amazon delivery driver boyfriend, who is really just
one of doing his own thing. He's just driving around
the city in this Amazon delivery truck even though aliens
are attacking the city, and he has Mark go to
Faith to help her with her wounded leg. So then
we get confirmation that the Meteors were intentionally crashed into

(39:59):
hundreds of satellites on Earth and that military assets worldwide
are going to strike back. The President of the United
States says, I have no choice but to initiate this
war of the worlds to save us all. And hey,
isn't that the name of the movie that we're watching.
Get used to that, because they're gonna say explicitly war
of the world no less than five more times in
the run time of ninety minutes of this movie. I'm

(40:21):
not kidding.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Otherwise, how were people gonna know what movie this is?
They might have forgotten, their brains might have melted.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
They're kind of trying to do an Independence Day thing here,
which I know is one of your You love that movie.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, it's a great movie. Everybody loves that movie. What
are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (40:39):
One of my favorite things about you is that I
don't remember how that came up. I was like, Oh,
if you like, wouldn't it be so cool to be
Will Smith and the movie Independence Day. You know, you're
punching aliens and saying welcome to Earth and save in
the day. And you said, I would hear to be
Bill Paxton, the president who rolls up his sleeves and
makes a rousing speech.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
That's not exactly how it went down.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
Well, that's what you said.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
I think that it's a very rousing speech. He rallies
all of humanity to this collective defense. He gets people
to put aside their differences and confront these aliens based
on the power of his rhetoric. I think that's meaningful.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
This will be our Independence Day.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
Let's take a quick break at our back.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
In an Independence day that get hits and what they're
trying to do works in that movie you know You've
got Will Smith's punching aliens. Bill Paxton making a big
speech when the military takes out one of the alien
tripods in this movie, ICEQB yells, take your intergalactic gases
back home, like it's clear what they're going for, but
it's just not working. It's just bad. So the military

(42:01):
is not successful in their attack against the tripods, and
then ice CEB has the realization that the tripods are
all targeting government data centers. His son calls him one
more time and says, Dad, listen to me. I have
information needed to hear. This is Goliath, that surveillance tracking
network that the Disruptor was trying to unveil. Ice CEB

(42:23):
is like, boo, shut up, that's a conspiracy because if
there was really a government secret tracking program called Goliath,
I would know about it because I work for the government.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
A funny thing about this entire movie, like the way
that it plays out on ice Cube's computer monitor, is
that everyone he's talking to is doing video calls with him.
So even in this scene, his son is like literally
running for his life from murderous aliens, but also taking
care to keep his face well framed in the shot.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
It makes no sense. Also, sure you might have zoom
calls at work, but everybody that he talks to in
this universe is facetiming him. I would be so confused
if a co worker of mine needed to get in
touch with me and they facetimed me. I find that
to be so weird, even when you're not running from
murderous aliens. I find that to be weird.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, and I think you might be a little at
the extreme of like hating it. Uh. You know, when
I used to work in an office, it was not
totally unusual for co workers to just do a video
chat when we were all remote. But that's when I'm
like sitting at my desk and I've got my you know,
camera right there. If I was running from aliens, I
would probably be pretty focused on that. That would be

(43:35):
like the main thing I was doing.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
I kept screaming, stop face timing and just call him
because you have to run, Like, don't you don't need
like you can't run and hold up your phone to
your face. You're fleeing for your life. What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (43:49):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (43:49):
And also the video quality was garbage anyway, So like,
what was he even trying to achieve?

Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yes? Yes.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
Also, when ice Cube realizes that all the aliens were
going to these top secret data centers, he realizes this
after he clicks the show sensitive US Government locations button
on his workspace. That again, this is like a pre
programmed button that the engineering team has built for the
software that he's using. He doesn't have to enter a
password or multi factor authentication or anything. He just clicks

(44:19):
the button.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Because that's how it works. That's how it works, just
to drop down show sensitive US Government locations question mark. Okay,
there we go. So we're back at Faith's house where
she has taken the metal chard out of her leg,
which I don't think you should do if you ever
are impaled with something. I think the guidance is to
not take it out until you're with a medical professional.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's my understanding too quick. PSA for listeners, if you
have believe a giant chunk of metal embedded in your body,
don't take it out until you've got a medical expert there.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
This I mean, it wasn't a helicopter blade. But when
I was a kid, I was moving boxes barefoot in
my garage. I don't know why I was doing this
and I barefoot stepped off a metal, upside down metal
golf tee and it went right through my foot. Was horrible,
So yeah, it sucks.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Yeah. Ouch.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
So she's taken out the shard in her leg and
she's really bleeding rapidly. But luckily Mark, her boyfriend, knows
how to make a tourniquet out of packing tape because
he works at Amazon, and as he says, that means
he's a.

Speaker 4 (45:24):
Pro Amazon, What a wonderful company? Yeah, Like, what does
he mean by that? Are people constantly getting severe cuts
in the warehouse and they don't have access to first
aid supply so they've got to just they all have
to know how to create tourniquits out of packing tape?

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Is that the implication here?

Speaker 1 (45:44):
I don't feel like that's the flex Amazon thinks it
is about what the work conditions at their warehouse as
must be. Like if it's like, oh, we're all pros
at making tourniquets out of packing tape here at Amazon, Amazon,
what a wonderful company.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Next up, we'll show you how to fashion a synthetic
leg out of a box.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
And had a pee in a bottle because you don't
get bathroom breaks. That's a real thing. Look it up.
So back to one of these data centers, Andrea, the
FBI agent, has found these little insect like cyborg aliens
inside the tripods that are inside this data center and
realizes that it eats data. The more data it consumes,
the smarter it gets, she says. So they realize that

(46:23):
the attacks by the tripods are a diversion to get
the tripods to data centers, and that these big tripods
are actually a trojan horse to get these little cyborg
bug things into the data centers to eat the data.
This is sort of a big reveal, but they just
sort of say this, and then ice Cube and Eva

(46:43):
Longoria just look at each other and they both get
each other like a really weird look, and then the
scene changes. It's for this being like the big reveal
of the movie. It is handled very awkwardly, but.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
I can understand why they would be to just like
take a minute to sit with this new insane information.
These little bugs that eat the data, you know, because
it's not like they're reading the gaina and gaining insight
or even gaining strength. They're literally consuming it. And after
they eat it, it is gone. Where does it go?

(47:15):
We don't know. Why do they want to eat it?
We don't know. There was a Futurama movie where the
bad guys consumed information, But shockingly, the way those weird
creepy alien scammers in that movie like got off on
sniffing information seems way more plausible and thought out than
these lazy little beetles ex Machina.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
They don't even explain really how they came to know
this and how like, what do you mean eating the
data makes them smarter? The way that they're just they're like, oh,
it's no matter of fact, like, oh, they're they're attracted
to data. They eat data. It nourishes them. That's it.
That's not It doesn't feel plausible because they don't give
you any other explanation for what's going on. They just

(47:56):
sort of lay that out on the end then move on.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
And Also, this is happening in real time, so it's
been like less than an hour and Andrea has figured
this out.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
I am so glad you brought that up, because the
movie presumably takes place in real time, Like we're watching
this unfold on a screen, so we're seeing it in
real time. This is all over the course of one afternoon, right,
aliens have attacked, Meteors have hit all over the world.
Global communication systems are down, but every global military has
come together to strike back. Andrea's figured this out and

(48:28):
it's not even like lunchtime yet. The timing of this
movie is one of the one of the in a
movie where you have to suspend a lot of disbelief,
the timing of how this all goes down is one
of the biggest glaring problems with what we're being told
is happening in this film.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
So ice Cube tells Andrea that he's going to circle back.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
So now all the grands have been down. Financial data
is wiped out because the bugs ate it, so the
whole world is bankrupt. GPS is down, oil rigs are exploding.
At this point, during a footage of a newscast, we're
told that the FAA has grounded commercial airline flights, which
we're halfway into the alien invasion and attack on Earth,

(49:07):
and we're to assume that commercial air travel was just
running as normal this entire time.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
What, Yeah, like they're dodging meteors as they try to
take off and yeah, but sure, sure, yeah, they were
still running with you know, those planes got to run.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
The world is going dark with that its most precious resource,
our data. So everything has gone dark, but somehow not YouTube,
because the disruptor goes live on his YouTube channel and
says that the Goliath program has collected all of our
data and that is the reason why these invaders will
not stop until they eat all of it.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
And in fact, all of the social media websites and
news outlets and retailers are still up and running just fine,
even though all of the world's communication systems and financial
systems have been crippled and collapsed. Ice Cube is still
getting push notifications from a bunch of different apps and
it stepping back. It does kind of give the impression

(50:03):
that the writers of this movie think the Internet is
like a magical force, uh, and not a system of
companies and physical infrastructure like literally running over wires and
from antennas it.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Honestly would have taken. I'm not saying this would be
a plausible explanation for why for this fucking glaring plot
hole that you could drive a semi truck through, but
it could have given you one nod like, oh, looks
like some of these platforms have back up whatevers or something.
Just say something. It doesn't have to make sense. I

(50:39):
don't got to check out. But the fact that they're
like all of the globe has gone dark, there's no
communication systems whatsoever. And then in the next scene, he's
getting a Facebook notification like, just say something, Just give
give us a little nod to this.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yeah, just ding ding ding ding ding notifications.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
So ice Cube listens to this disruptor YouTube live stream
about the surveillance project Goliath, and he says, her voice
sounds kind of familiar. So he saves the audio on
his computer, right clicks and does a vocal analysis on
the disruptor's voice and Doune dun dune it's his own son.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
What I have to give you credit? You called that
tens of minutes before it was revealed on screen.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
I feel like it was fairly obvious when the sun
called and says I have something important to tell you
about what's going on. That Dad is like, I don't
have time to hear important stuff about what's going on.
In a pretty good sense that something was going on.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Well, yeah, you called it. I thought maybe his son
was mixed up with some other hackers who had information
about the disruptor. But I just wasn't thinking big enough.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
So ice Cube calls his son, and his son is like,
for someone who watches everything, you sure miss a lot,
which I think is the only poignant line of the
whole film.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
So yeah, clearly the hacker's son is the hero of
this movie because he gets the good line.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Ice Cube's son sends him the information that he has
hacked from DHS ice Cube's own workplace about the Goliath program,
which is not a conspiracy theory. The Goliath program is real.
The hacked information that you see on screen is just
a list of files with names like CIA, NSA, NHS,
DO d Roswells, Skinwalker Ranch. Don't you see how deep

(52:27):
this thing goes? Wake up people Like it's just a
list of scary sounding government agencies and happenings.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah, and I feel that's about uh, that's about right,
that's about the right tenor for this movie of just
like a list of conspiracy theories and like vaguely menacing
sounding things like that's as deep as this is going, totally.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
Totally, So this is where we get the big reveal
of kind of what's going on here in this movie. Basically,
and this is. I would say this is my sense
of it, because none of it makes any fucking sense.
So basically, government data collection programs going back to the
nineteen forties is what initially attracted aliens to Earth. So
when you heard about like Roswell, that's why they were

(53:13):
coming here because of these government data collection programs. These
aliens eat data to become more advanced. I think question
Mark and the government knew about this and hit it. Briggs,
who is the head of the Department of Homeland Security
and ice Cube's boss, has secretly continued to do this

(53:33):
dangerous government data collection even though he knew that it
meant setting Earth up for this very invasion. So the
head of DHS, ice Cube's boss, Briggs, has been behind
this whole thing the whole time. Ice Cube has been
directly reporting to this monster.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
I think you did a nice job summarizing this insane story,
Like it's not explained why these aliens are only interested
in government data uh, or like how the government knew
about it, And there's so much that it's not explained.
But I think I think you did a nice job
with that.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Another thing to know is that the government did not
want DHS director Briggs to activate the Goliath program because
it's this massive data collection apparatus, and they said it
was going to be like ringing a dinner bill for
all the Tripod aliens who want to eat our data.
But Briggs is on audio being like, I'm so drunk
on the power of having everyone's data that I am

(54:30):
blind to the obvious reality that it might cause aliens
to attack the planet and there's a pretty good chance
I'll probably die if they do. He's just like, what
do you mean, how could we give up all the sweet,
sweet data because we're the government. So ice Cube calls
Briggs on it, and Briggs says, the government is like
Mommy and daddy, if we can't track our babies, how

(54:50):
can we protect them, Which, when you think about it,
is kind of like how ice Cube is as a
daddy tracking his own babies. I mean, really makes you think, right,
really makes you think.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
That's some subtle stuff there, some real subtle stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
This is not a subtle movie. This is a movie
that like really is like we are saying something honestly.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
When we were watching it, it made me think of
the shows that my eight year old nephew watches because
it's the same sort of thing, where like there's no subtlety.
They are saying the thing that is happening so that
children can follow along. And I kind of feel that's
what they're doing here.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
It absolutely is. So Briggs fires ice Cube from the
DHS and locks them out of everything, even teams. How
will the movie continue without teams? Luckily, his son is
this big time hacker who can override the system and
give them a little War Games reference. Do you remember
when he types.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Out, shall we play a game for.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
Folks who have not seen it because you're younger than forty?
That's a reference to the movie War Games. So they
team up with his son's crew of hackers with excellent
hacker names like Burnout, Fancy Beear, and Fellman Louise, and
their plan is together they are going to infect data
centers with a virus, which I feel like is the

(56:18):
mo of like every movie like this, where they're like, oh,
we have to defeat the alien by infecting it with
a virus.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Literally the how they solved the alien invasion in Independence Day,
and that was back in what was that, like nineteen
ninety eight or something.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
We have not really progressed a lot the hackers agree
to work with ice Cube. At first they're like, he's
the government, why should we trust him? And then ice
Cube is like, oh, well, I'll delete all of your
criminal records from a government data which he can just
do by right click the leaked government records on said hacker.
Easyps done, hit that easy button because you're done. It

(57:00):
would have been a great time to make use of
that button again.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yeah, they could have brought it back there. That would
have been great. That would have been funny. What a miss.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
So, I will say, the scene when they're they're like
getting the ragtag crew of hackers together reminds me of
an actual good bad movie about this kind of thing,
Hackers with Matthew Liard. Have you ever seen that movie?

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Oh, yeah, of course, it's a classic.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Oh. I had a little bit of a crush on
every person in that movie. I feel like Angelina Jolie
has never looked foxier, and they're all kind of like
hot gender queer punks wearing oversized trench coats and like
weird colored little sunglasses and shit. I had the hots
for everybody in that movie. It was. It really made

(57:41):
an impression on me when I saw it, and I
think it gave me this attitude that if you're a hacker,
you're wearing like a cool like a like a trench
coat and like a cool hairstyle. You know. It really
set what I think was the aesthetic for what we
were told hackers would be in the nineties.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Absolutely the truth. As somebody who entered college as a
freshman in nineteen ninety nine as a computer science major,
that was very much the world that I thought I
was stepping into, and I quickly learned that I was incorrect.

Speaker 1 (58:10):
I like, first things first, I gotta buy some black
leather fingerless gloves to let the world know I'm a hacker, right, Gotta.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Have the figerless gloves. Gotta have a trench coat, probably
some like Doc Martin boots.

Speaker 1 (58:21):
Yeah, space there it really. I mean, when we're ready
as a country to talk about it, Matthew Lizard in
that movie, that's all I'm gonna say. We're not. We're
not ready yet. And I'm the lone voice who is
going on record. But when folks are ready to talk
about the truth, I'll be here. I'll just say that.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
I mean, you haven't really gone on record. You just
said his name. A couple times and then trail.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Well, I think people know what I'm getting at right here,
I'm just saying, I'm just saying.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
All right, just asking questions.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Yeah, okay, I'll say it. As a country, when are
we going to be ready to have the conversation that
Matthew Lizard the hot That's all I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
You heard it here. First, let's take a.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Quick break at our back.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
So ice Cube has now been like recruited to team
up with this crew, this ragtag crew of hackers, and
he says, okay, Disruptor, let's disrupt this shit. And he
puts all the Project Goliath evidence on the disruptor's YouTube channel,
essentially becoming a whistleblower. And this goes viral and blows
up on social media, which again is somehow still up

(59:42):
and running even though there's a total global communications blackout. Genuinely,
do not overthink it. As I said, and as I
wrote an underlined in my notes, at this point, this
is a very bad movie.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
Yeah, like aliens are collapsing cities. I have to assume
hundreds of millions of people are dying, and somehow this
like government surveillance program becomes a viral sensation like that
shit is happening in our government right now, and nobody
gives a.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
Damn no, Like the alien's part of it, I don't
know about that, but like, this is not even a
conspiracy theory. This is happening now. So the hackers unleash
this virus, but it does not work, and the tripods
end up hacking the hackers, and they become even bigger
and also can fly. For some reason, the movie really

(01:00:34):
starts going off the rails here. The Tripods start attacking
the hackers in their homes with lasers and explosions. Ice
Cube's house, where ice Cube thinks his son is, is
exploded by the tripods, but luckily, his son has been
at his friend's house the entire time to confuse the tripods.
After finding out that his son did not get exploded

(01:00:55):
by aliens, ice Cube immediately says, why didn't you set
up your IP address to show that you weren't at
our house so that your friend's house would be exploded?
I don't have alien explosion homeowner's insurance. Yeah yeah, yah, yeah, yuck.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Yeah, what a line.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Somebody realizes that the aliens have blood and silicone, which
means that they are both hybrid cyber and biological creatures,
which is why a virus alone did not kill them. Sure,
so I guess all about it means that these creatures
have DNA, and luckily ice Keep's daughter Faith works with

(01:01:32):
DNA at Georgetown that she does a research on that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Why do I feel like blood and silicone is going
to become a rallying cry of the tech bros.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
It actually has a little bit of if it does,
I want credit for that. It has a little bit
of a ring to it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
It kind of does. Also another big thing I'm sorry
to keep like bringing these up. But another thing that
this movie doesn't address at all is like the implications
of these aliens having DNA, meaning that they're related to
all life on Earth, Like did they come from Earth?
Did they populate Earth in like a way similar to
like the Aliens movies? Is this proof for the existence

(01:02:09):
of God that all organisms throughout the universe were created
from the same DNA? Like none of these are just.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
They do not even address it. It is not even
a question that is posed at any point in the
film by anybody. They do not even address it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
Yeah, sure, so these aliens have DNA, got it? Yep?

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
So because the aliens have DNA, they decide that their
plan is to upload ice Cube's daughter Faith upload her
DNA cannibal code into Goliath. I genuinely don't know. I've
just said that sentence. I'm gonna keep on going.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
Yeah, they just need to upload Faith's DNA cannibal code
into Goliath.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
Was that the sentence that I said that. I paused
the movie and I said that to you, and we
just requiet for a minute, and then this left.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
I think that happened a couple times, Like there actually
is a lot happening in this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
I remember we were like fifteen minutes in and I
was like, oh, well, Shirley, we're almost done here, and
it was like only fifteen I mean, the movie has
a slog They're like, for a movie that is kind
of dull and doesn't make any sense, there a lot happens.
I like, like, there's a lot going on in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
Yeah, that's a good point that I don't think we've
touched on that. It like it is a slog like
it's it's just not fun to watch.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
No, it's not. It's not. For a movie that's this bad.
They could have made it more fun. And that's what
I do. I know you don't agree, but I do
stand by it that there is a fun bad movie
like deep deep deep in this like several rewrites and
several edits and several reshoots, maybe it would take, but
there is there is a little something there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
I agree. There's a little bit like the The General
taking its calls from the golf course. Uh, there's there.
There are a couple little things in here, but they're
just buried by plot holes and bad dialogue and choppy,
grainy video that is shaking because somebody is running.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
And lighting being weird that they're like the final scene
is all shot in red light, I believe as a
way to distract from the horrible CGI. It's like, oh,
the CGI looks so bad, we can't put this on
the air. M make it red.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Nobody in a little the difference, No redder, no more redder.

Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
It's like an Argento film.

Speaker 2 (01:04:36):
A certain point, Ice Cubes starts repeating his lines backwards.

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
Yeah, like, shit gets real weird. Next thing you know,
it's an art house film. Got a little David Lynch
in there. Mm hmm, Okay, So this is part of
the movie where I genuinely I might this might be wrong.
This is my interpretation of what I saw, so, like,
I genuinely don't know, I'm if I'm reporting this as

(01:05:02):
it actually happened. My understanding is that Goliath is underground
under the DHS building where ice Cube works. So, in
an attempt to protect Goliath from the Tripod aliens, Briggs,
the DHS boss, has ordered the military to bomb DC
within a five mile radius of DHS. DC is not

(01:05:26):
a very big city, so that's essentially all of DC.
So I'm gonna die, I guess, in an attempt to
collapse the DHS building, which houses that big data center
project underground to keep the aliens from getting to Goliath.
I don't know why this would be a protective measure,
Like why is it harder for the Tripods to get

(01:05:47):
to Goliath underground if the DHS building on top of
it was destroyed. I don't know. If this is not
a question I can answer, but that's is that your
read of what's going on at this.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
Point of the movie something like that, Yeah, Like Goliath
is under the DHS building, and so they're going to
bomb effectively all of DC to I think they were
going to try to like destroy it. You know, maybe
they're gonna use one of those big bunker buster bombs
to penetrate through the building to blow it up, I guess,

(01:06:20):
But I mean sure, you know, like they run this
damn thing, couldn't they just like right click and hit
delete Goliath program.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):
Well that's why at what point I thought, perhaps this
was Briggs' way of sort of covering up the evidence
by bombing DHS so that no one would know that
he was unveiling Goliath against protocol and against orders. But
then I was like, wait, they've never even hinted at that,
So I'm forced to take the exposition at its word
because I don't know what else would be going on.

(01:06:53):
I don't want to overthink it. That's my sense of
what was happening. But at this point I have to
admit that I was having a little bit of trouble
following along. That's literally what was happening and why Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
And also at this point in the movie, it has
become clear that like shit does not make sense, and
so my brain just starts to turn off. At that
point of a movie where it's like I no longer
have confidence in the filmmakers that like any of this
is going to make any sense, So I'm not going
to put in the effort to even understand what the

(01:07:25):
hell is happening.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
You're not seeing the vision. You're not seeing the vision.
I get it. So war kind of off the rails
at this point. But here's what I think is happening.
They need to get ice Cube's daughter Faith. They need
to get her DNA cannibal code to ice Cube in
the DHS building, which is currently locked down, because the

(01:07:48):
military is going to bomb DHS to protect Goliath from
the Tripod Alia by destroying it and also destroy the
whole city, just wipeicking out all of the district of Columbia.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Yep, that's uh, that's where we're at, you know. So
ice Cube and his son team up to hack into
Goliath and to crash the surveillance system with a virus,
because then the aliens won't have anything to eat anymore
and they will get hungry and go home. And yeah,
and if they do this, then the bombers won't need

(01:08:27):
to drop those bombs. And like we keep seeing I
think stealth bombers in the air, like they can see
that from their surveillance system. I don't know what camera
is filming these bombers just like flying around I supposedly
en route.

Speaker 1 (01:08:41):
To d C.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
They keep saying they're like five minutes out from DC,
but they're showing them flying over like giant mountains and
fjords and shit, which like that's not what the area.
How DC looks like a lot of this is supposed
to be DC doesn't look like it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
That's actually one of my little nippicky pet peeves about
not just this movie, but so many these when they're
showing like a plane flying into DC. I was a
big X file span and I will say X files
sometimes got this wrong, where they would say dulls Airport
and they would depict it in ways that just like,
that's not Dullest airport. Sometimes they would show like big

(01:09:16):
skyscrapers and be like Washington DC, and it's like, well,
DC has a height ordnance and so there are no
big skyscrapers in DC. Those are illegal here. Or they
would show I've seen it where they show big mountains,
like big cavernous mountains, and it's like, well, it's definitely
not DC. It's very flat, but yeah, this is this
is a I don't know what the cameras on these

(01:09:39):
Fighter jets are showing, but they have access to it.
So at this point, ice Cube needs to put Fate's
DNA cannibal code on a thumb drive. Buddy doesn't have one,
but luckily Mark works for Amazon. They're a wonderful company
and he has access to Amazon Prime Air Drone. It's

(01:10:00):
the future of delivery. But Mark has to place an
order with Amazon if he wants to use this wonderful
delivery option from Amazon. So they actually take the time
to show ice Cube going to like Amazon dot com
and clicking purchase on a thumb drive and being like, oh,
it'll come to you between seven am and eleven am

(01:10:22):
today and he actually like clicks through on his cart
to complete this Amazon transaction, and they show all of this.
So again, even though we have been told that global
banking information has all been wiped out to the point
where the entire world is bankrupt and there's no communication system,
Amazon somehow is still up and running.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
Like, I don't remember what method of payment he used.
I believe they showed it to us or but yeah,
all the financial systems have been taken down, so how
did he pay for this?

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
Thankfully, the Amazon Fulfillment Center logistics is still up and
running at normal capacity. The end of the world being
like essentially at the precipice, and Mark is able to
get this thumb drive shipped out immediately.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
Sure, And it's also funny that, like I don't know
if Mark just like can't or won't violate company policy
until ice Cube places that order, Like the end of
the world is at stake here, and he's like, no,
I'm sorry, man, I could not put that thumb drive
on a drone until you check out that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
Order for this like twenty dollars sub dra Yeah, the
Amazon promotion here is really shameless, Like it's over the top.
At this point, they give you Marx like pov operating
the Amazon delivery drone using like virtual reality, a virtual
reality headset, and it has an Amazon Prime Air logo

(01:11:47):
up at the core. The fate of the world is
literally hinging on the logistics of Amazon's delivery services. Amazon,
They're a wonderful company. More after a quick break, let's

(01:12:12):
get right back into it, so bear with me here.
Ice Cube has to make it down to the basement
of the Department of Homeland Security building where Goliath is.
Mind you, earlier it was a plot point that he
was essentially locked in his office because he couldn't get
to his daughter face. That's not a problem anymore. We
don't know why his intention is to put the cannibal

(01:12:36):
DNA code that is on this thumb drive into Goliath
that Mark is sending via Amazon Air delivery drone. I
had to pause the movie at this point and I
said that plot point out loud to you, Mike, to
make sure I was not losing my mind, and they
both just like laughed at the ridiculousness of this plot point.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
Yeah, but I think I think that's it. I think
that's what was happening. You's gotta rush this thumb drive
that contains the cannibal DNA code to the DHS building
so that ice Cube can insert it into the servers
and infect Goliath with the cannibal DNA code.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
And it's also a race against time because they're they
have to do all of this before the fighter jets
hit the DHS building and annihilates all of DC. But
oh no, the drone gets knocked down before it gets
to ice Cube. They're able to commandeer a different surveillance drone,
one of the you know typical ones that is flying

(01:13:37):
around DC is doing nothing in particular.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Yeah, and they specifically they call it a Reaper drobe.
That's one of the ones that they use in like
like Yemen and they're using an Afghanistan. These like these
are like serious drodes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
They can kill people. They're just hanging around DC. Anybody
can operate that. You could just right click on any
computer pick from a dropdown.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
Yeah. They one just you know, looping around over the
zoo just in case.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
So I gotta make sure none of those zebras get
out of line, you know how it is. So they're
able to commandeer this drone and they see like a
random on housed guy on the street near the drone
carrying the thumb drive, and they're able to hack into
his cell phone to ask him to run out of
his tent to turn it over, even though these alien
tripods are basically destroying the city. First, they say, if

(01:14:26):
you do this for us, the government will give you
free internet. And he's like, what so they can track me?
Pretty clever? Pretty clever.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
Yeah, he doesn't know that. They just like saw his
image on a surveillance camera in the alley way that
they somehow have access to. And we're able to like
right click, identify person, identify phone number, and start texting
him because of that. But I respect that this homeless
guy doesn't want to be tracked.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
No, I respect. I mean, like he's right, he just
doesn't know how right he is. I bet so then
theough okay, a sweeten the deal. They offer him a
one thousand dollars gift card too. You guessed it Amazon,
And of course he goes for it, because who wouldn't Amazon.
They're a wonderful company.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
They have all the best products everyone wants.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
I gotta say, I'm genuine this was the one time
I feel like Amazon showed a little bit of a
straight because I am genuinely surprised they did not have
a scene where the viewer sees the perspective of the
guy like browsing Amazon and making a purchase that turns
his life around and helps him get off the street
and back on his feet and reunited with this kid
and giving back to the community. Like that is the
level of Amazon advertising that is embedded within this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Baby, They're gonna give him a series, like a spinoff series.

Speaker 1 (01:15:41):
Yes, So, I gotta say for an action movie, this
is the big ending sequence. It is so tedious. It's
just Ice Cube running around in an office building basement. Again,
the whole scene is shot in red, which I think
is meant to kind of distract from the horrible graphics
and see. Yeah, at one point he punches a tripod

(01:16:03):
and then quotes the rapper ludicrous. For some reason, he says, move, bitch,
get out the way, which topical, guys, really topical. He's
able to get the thumb drive into Goliath and the
cannibal code uploads. I could not tell you what any
of that means, but it is a sentence, and I
have just said in any event, it works. The tripods

(01:16:24):
power down, they retreat, so it all works out. In
the end, the family ends up being heroes for data privacy.
Ice Cube kind of becomes like an anonymous whistleblower figure.
His former boss Briggs of DHS, is arrested. At the end,
we see ice cubes computer desktop and it just has

(01:16:45):
an image of his space and his son's face wearing
a hoodie, and it has all these big bold all
caps expressions and phrases written around them like big media lies,
illegal surveillance, false flags rights and in the end, even
Earle friend of the show, Joe Rogan is tweeting about

(01:17:06):
how they are heroes of data privacy. At the end
of the movie, ice Cube is asked by the President
to start a new data collection project, but one that
doesn't invade people's privacy. Ice Cube says, no, you know why,
because there's more important things to do on this earth
and worry about what's in other people's Amazon carts. I'm
done watching us from now on. I'm watching you guys

(01:17:30):
like a real who's watching the Watchmen vibe over here?
Am I right? So?

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
I hated so much about this movie. I yeah, it
was not good, but I think the thing that I
hate most is that this comes out of absolutely nowhere,
Like ice Cube was not grappling with the implications of
surveillance at any point during this movie. It was his
whole thing, his whole job, his whole relationship with his kids,

(01:17:55):
everything about him was surveillance. He loved surveillance. He was
just really into surveilling. That was like his favorite thing.
And then all of a sudden, like now he's into privacy.
How did he get here? What journey did he go
on that we the viewers did not get to see.
It's you know, literally the only adverse consequence of excessive

(01:18:18):
surveillance that we've seen in the movie is that it
attracted aliens who eat data. So is he afraid that
that's gonna happen again? And I think maybe the reason
that it really bothers me is because it is such
an actually important thing, Like that's why we're talking about
on this show. It's why it's why we do this show,
because you and I and our listeners really value privacy

(01:18:39):
and understand what is at stake when everything is given
to surveillance. And certainly I'm down to like have fun
with a serious topic. But it's not even like they
had fun with it. It's just kind of like thrown
in after the fact in a totally non serious way

(01:19:01):
that I guess I kind of resent a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
As one reviewer put it, if the movie were any good,
I might fear the implications it lays out.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. In the
old A Dodge like, show me, don't tell me. They've
just told us. They haven't showed us anything.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
What a fucking slug this thing is. I will say
there is something the movie I think inadvertently kind of
gets right, and one that felt especially true in twenty twenty,
which is the mundanity of living in a tech dystopia.
If aliens truly were invading Earth, we would all still
probably be answering teams calls and getting slacks from your

(01:19:41):
boss that say emergency zoom meeting now while watching the
footage of global landmarks being destroyed, like on mute in
another window. This movie makes a lot of use of
that friendly little Microsoft team's chime, you know, get a
new with that little noise that going off constantly, and
then the person on the other end of the team's
call when you answer it is literally being attacked by aliens.

(01:20:03):
I think that is like how shit would go down
if there was an alien attack. Also, the way that
the aliens are tearing apart the world and the film's
main characters are largely just sort of going about their business,
that also rings true to me.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
Yeah, I agree with that. I think, you know, I
think a lot of people feel that that's kind of
what's happening right now. It's not happening over the course
of a single afternoon with aliens smashing things, but there
are any number of things happening outside my window right
now that arguably are threatening humanity, threatening civilization, and you know,

(01:20:44):
people are still going to work, taking teams, calls, do
it all the mundane stuff. So yeah, I and I
think you're right. I guess the movie does capture some
of that, although the acute urge agency of the alien
invasion kind of masks it a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
I think, yeah, I agree with that more after a
quick break, let's get right back into it. I don't

(01:21:25):
even know that it's worth asking the question of what
this movie gets wrong, not just about technology but about filmmaking, storytelling, acting.
But insofar as I want to ask what the fuck
is going on in this movie, I do have a
sense of what I think the filmmakers were going for.

(01:21:47):
I think this movie is meant to be about surveillance
as a proxy for protection, love and connection. Like at
the end of the movie, ice Cube has queued up
this scheduled email to his case kids, explaining that he
promised their late mother that he would keep them safe,
along with screenshots of the various surveillance that he's done

(01:22:07):
of them over the years. And at the end of
the movie you kind of get the sense that ice
Cube has gotten to a healthier place. He is able
to attend the baby shower with his daughter and Mark.
But ultimately we are still meant to feel that his surveillance,
both of his children and of everybody in the country
is a good thing because ultimately it led to everybody

(01:22:28):
being kept safer. At the very end of the movie,
we are to understand that he is still doing this
kind of surveillance because the very last seat of the
film is him spying on Mark in this Amazon delivery van.
So the message does seem to sort of be surveillance
can be a reasonable expression of like wanting to protect people,

(01:22:51):
but also be wary of it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
I guess, I guess, yeah, Like honestly, I don't think
that they even know, you know, it's it's just feels
kind of muddled.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
Muddle is a good word for it, And.

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
Yeah, muddled and told to us. It's like a lesson
that is told like eat your vegetables, don't do surveillance,
don't you know. But it's like, but tell me why,
like help help me understand the why of these things
so that I can I internalize them. That's that's what
I want from a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
It's heavy handed and not subtle, but also says nothing.
That's how I feel about it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
So that's a really good way to put it. It's
heavy handed and not subtle, but says nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:23:42):
So father and son resolving their issues is not the
only kind of hero of this movie. The big hero
of this movie is big tech surveillance along with Amazon,
a company that we know is a wonderful company. This
movie is really just like a real hand job to Amazon.
It's essentially one long ad for Amazon, even though you

(01:24:04):
have to watch like two minutes of actual Amazon ads
before it starts.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
Yeah, clearly produced by Amazon. You know, Mark is an
unlikely hero, the capable Amazon employee, and just like subtle
things like the Prime drones.

Speaker 1 (01:24:26):
Yeah, I do think in the universe of this film,
Amazon is sort of positioned as aligning with privacy, like
government surveillance is equated to the government snooping at Watson
people's Amazon cart. The reality is is that Amazon has
a direct hand and the exact kind of government surveillance
The movie is, I think criticizing. Here's how one review

(01:24:49):
from Wired put it. These scenes in War of the
World would have been just outrageous enough to be shocked
up to comedy if it wasn't for the films heightened
focus on government surveillance without any mention of the tech
industry roll in all this, from anonymous style live streams
featuring the US Constitution to ice Cube digitally stalking as
children to the secret data stealing project that becons the

(01:25:09):
aliens to earth. The true enemy is clear the US
government and its technology. In fact, the only time privacy
is threatened as it relates to private business is when
the government interferes with it, like in that Testla scene.
So it just really seems like a big, weird, glaring
omission for a movie made by Amazon to not deal
with the ways that we know Amazon itself is involved

(01:25:30):
in surveillance, not keeping people's privacy safe, and also is
mixed up in the kinds of government surveillance that I
think the movie is critiquing.

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
That is also such a good point and I think
helps me understand part of my reactance against this movie.
That is, it is such a huge omission, you know,
when I think about why I am not cool with
total surveillance. Yes, governments valance is a big part of it,

(01:26:01):
but it equally huge part of it is surveillance by
companies like Meta, Google, even Apple. A whole smattering of
other companies that we haven't even heard of that are
just trying to mine our data so they can sell
products to us or just sell our data to other people.

(01:26:23):
That is an enormous part of the concern about privacy
and surveillance that we are confronted with in twenty twenty five,
and it is completely absent in this movie that purports
to be saying something about surveillance. It's just like an
unforgivable omission.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
And as if all of the different messages the movie
is trying to grapple what it did not ring hollow
enough that omission. You can't take any of this seriously
with that being such a glaring omission.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
Yeah, exactly. And I did really struggle to take this
movie seriously. And one of the questions I keep asking
is like, are the al Eating's a metaphor and if so,
a metaphor for what? Like are they a metaphor for
intrusive government, for private entities that want to surveil our data?
Or capitalism? Like it feels like they have to be

(01:27:15):
a metaphor for something, and yet I have no idea
what it might be. I'm just left grasping at common
metaphors that sloppy movies use, you know, like, oh, it's capitalism,
it's society. But I don't know, maybe they're just aliens.

Speaker 1 (01:27:33):
Maybe the real data eating aliens or the friends they
made along the way.

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Maybe are friend's bad? Are my friends gonna eat my data?

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
So the reviews of this movie are a delight to read.
Can I read you one?

Speaker 2 (01:27:49):
You know what? I was reading ahead on our script
and I misread that as we got to read some
bad news and I was like, oh, no, is she
going to talk about any number of terrible things? I mean,
but no, want to read some bad reviews. Absolutely, yeah,
we got to read some bad reviews. Let's read some
bad reviews and enjoy it. Let's have a good time.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
Okay, So this is my favorite from Defector. To call
this movie half assed would be to overstate its qualities
by order of magnitude. There might literally never have been
a less asked creative undertaking than this one, and thus
it is entirely unworthy of your attention. In a world
any less cynical than ours, War of the Worlds would
have never been released. You should take its present on

(01:28:30):
the home page of a streaming service that you pay
for in real dollars as an insult. Maybe you consume
some entertainment calories in early twenty twenty one that you're
not proud of today, But it is time now for
self respect and grown ups to reach a little higher
for diversions that this or that diabolically conceived the tension
scam manages to stumble into moments of viral grade entertainment value.

(01:28:52):
Does not mean that you should sacrifice to it any
of the irreplaceable moments of your one precious life. Skip it, man. Still,
I cannot deny that I felt some affection for poor
lost ice Cube during the final acts of this mess.
There he was schlubby, physically creaky, hysterically wayward along multiple

(01:29:13):
acts of existence, rattling around and abandoned. We work like
the universe's most screwed ghost, and the two of us
having paid the much greater cost for having arrived together
at this moment. And then that review is filed under
the tags ice Cube and bad art.

Speaker 2 (01:29:31):
So that's good art. That's an artful review.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
That's a good art about bad art.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
Yeah, and the reviewer is right. I totally agree. We
deserve better, We need to demand better. We can't just
keep watching the worst of the worst. We got to
raise the bar here, Come.

Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
On, people, Yeah, we deserve art like Problem Child and
Police Academy for and the garbage pail.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
Coupesoo, maybe we should just give up.

Speaker 1 (01:29:59):
I don't know, Mike, I know you didn't want to
do this episode. Thanks for being a trooper, and thanks
for folks who I don't know validated this delusion that
this would be a good idea.

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):
Yeah, it was fun. I'm glad we did it. I
really appreciate the people who took the time to write
in and tell us they wanted us to do it
and share their thoughts about it. You know, I complained
a lot, but it was actually fun. It's always fun
to do something like this with you, Bridget, and I
hope listeners enjoyed it too.

Speaker 1 (01:30:30):
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I
just want to say hi. You can reach us at
Hello at Tegodi dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No
Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Todd.
It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative Jonathan Strickland
as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and
sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host,

(01:30:51):
Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate
and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
check out the iHeartRadio app, a podcast or wherever you
get your podcasts.

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