The modern executive overreach of wannabe moguls has spanned media companies both traditional, like Warner Bros., and nascent, like Amazon. But no matter which fleece-vested Scrooge has decided that they know how to do someone else’s job, it comes with the same exhausting, creatively bankrupt problems. For example, in Brad Stone’s book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos And The Invention Of A Global Empire—released in 2021 but once again making the rounds online—the author describes how the MBA version of the earthworm from James And The Giant Peach envisions a checklist-driven kind of storytelling. “Look, I know what it takes to make a great show,” Jeff Bezos reportedly told his studio head. “This should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have basic things in common.” As a man with three IMDb acting credits to his name, he should know. Bezos then listed 12 elements “off the top of his head” that should be included in every Amazon Studios TV production—or else.
That got us thinking: Does Bezos’ broad set of arbitrary buzzwords also apply to Amazon Original movies? Could one find all the half-baked ideas leaking from his AI-addled brain in any piece of the streamer’s media output? Say, for example, the company’s widely panned, worst-of-the-year film War Of The Worlds? As the Film Editor of The A.V. Club, I should have better things to do with 90 minutes than watch a particularly unpopular Amazon Prime commercial. And yet, for science, that’s just what I did. Below are the dozen surefire ways to make a billionaire-approved piece of media, as per Jeff Bezos. Accompanying them is whether or not they can be found in War Of The Worlds, a screenlife trashterpiece where Ice Cube sits at a computer for an hour-and-a-half and whose climax depends on a successfully completed Amazon delivery.
1. A heroic protagonist who experiences growth and change
The first, and presumably most important piece of Bezos’ solved equation for perfect fiction comes from playing a game of Telephone with Joseph Campbell. This pseudo-monomythical champion doesn’t have A Thousand Faces in War Of The Worlds. Instead, Ice Cube, who plays Department Of Homeland Security cubicle jockey Will Radford, makes the same face the entire film. An avatar of the surveillance state, Radford has access to magical levels of technology yet is constantly Boomer-baffled by pretty much everything that dances across his screen. Almost every line is “What?” or “Damn!” and Cube maintains a permanent cringe, as if—despite what the audience sees on his screen—he’s watching a feature-length compilation of people getting hit in the balls.
But let’s break this down: Is Radford a hero? War Of The Worlds makes this extremely clear, ending with—and this is not a joke—this universe’s version of Joe Rogan tweeting out a YouTube video entitled “Heroes for privacy rights save humanity,” which features Radford in the thumbnail. Not just a hero for saving humanity, but a hero for privacy rights to boot. Take that, the government.
Does he experience growth and change? Radford begins the film as the most surveillance-happy guy on the planet. He’s tracking everything and everyone. He’s keeping tabs on his daughter’s heart rate and eating habits (creepy) and watching whatever’s on his teen son’s monitor (playing with fire). He’s even got eyes on his daughter’s boyfriend, who just happens to be an Amazon delivery driver. (This latter character is also a hero, completing a literal Prime order via miraculous drone flight.) By the end of the paranoid film, though, Radford realizes that he needs to loosen his grip on his kids a little, and to stop spying on random civilians for fun. Sure, he comes to this conclusion thanks to a cataclysmic intergalactic force, lured to Earth by a technofascist conspiracy lurking within America’s own security forces, but at least he gets there.
A final note regarding growth: As Radford gets longer and longer speeches, he sounds like he’s just learning how to read, with Cube’s off-screen delivery moving with the shaky cadence of someone following the script’s words with their finger.
2. A compelling antagonist
War Of The Worlds understands the simple economics of tech execs: Two villains are twice as good as one. First, there’s the onslaught of robotic aliens who “eat data.” Then, the film tries to one-up the ugly tripods with Clark Gregg, the traitorous Director Of The Department Of Homeland Security, who presumably does not eat data. Him not eating data is a critical error, as this is the best and funniest thing about the towering aliens. The ghost of H.G. Wells is admitting creative defeat; he may have dreamed up these marauding beasts, but he could’ve never imagined that they came to our planet in order to eat Ice Cube’s old Facebook photos.
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