War of the Worlds: Extinction (2024)

War of the Worlds: Extinction Review

War of the Worlds: Extinction is a follow up to The Asylum’s 2021 movie War of the Worlds: Annihilation, and like it makes its premiere as a Tubi Original. However, its opening montage flips the script entirely, showing that instead of Earth being invaded it was us doing the invading, attacking and trying to colonize the planet Emios after we made Earth uninhabitable.

Almost immediately after that montage, we see the one returning character, General Skuller (William Baldwin, Minutes to Midnight, South of Hope Street) leading his troops against the Earth forces, apparently in defiance of orders to stand down and welcome what are referred to as refugees from Earth. Any chance of that happening disappears when he sees his daughter vaporized by an enemy craft while trying to lead some of those refugees to safety.

Understandably pissed off, he goes completely rogue and sends Alice (April Mae Davis, The Booze, Bets and Sex That Built America, The Night) to Earth to find something called the Terra Modus which can destroy all life on earth. While she’s doing that he puts together a crew to take a ship through the wormhole connecting the two planets and destroys Nairobi as a show of force.

Earth’s defences are led by General Alfaro (Michael Paré, The Beast Comes at Midnight, Desert Fiends), whose ex Sybil (Kate Hodge, The Ones That Have Fallen Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) and daughter Jill (Jessy Holtermann The Christmas VenueThe Thursday Night Club) just happens to be studying the Terra Modus. And when Sybil is captured by Skuller’s troops it’s up to their daughter Jill and Scott (Jack Pearson Top Gunner: Danger Zone Time Pirates) figure its secrets out before Skuller can use it to destroy Earth.

Marc Gottlieb whose scripts range from good Triassic Worldto dismal Megalodon, The Frenzy takes the odd position that Skuller, who is literally defending his planet from invasion and colonization, should have stood down and welcomed the invaders. This is taken by director Christopher Ray (Assault on VA-33Attack of the Meth Gator) and run with it, leaving the viewer to either root for the destruction of Earth, or cheer characters who are by all objective standards the bad guys.

Maybe they’re trying to use that paradox to let War of the Worlds: Extinction point out how loyalties cloud our perception, or maybe the absurdity and futility of war in the age of planet destroying arsenals. But this an Asylum film so I’m probably giving them too much credit. More likely someone thought this was a great idea and nobody bothered thinking of just how this would make most of the film play out.

Instead they pile on cliches about aliens and ancient civilizations and squabbling siblings and punctuate it with newsreel footage of disasters and footage from some of their previous films. There’s a couple battles between Skuller’s cruiser and Earth’s fighters. They’re nothing special although the effects while average at best are impressive for an Asylum film especially compared to several of their recent theatrical releases. The hideous green screen work in the film’s final scenes are on that level though.

War of the Worlds: Annihilation was good and I was very excited to see War of the Worlds: Extinction. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie The film doesn’t even start to look at who is responsible until there’s only a few minutes left, whereupon it does so with a couple of cheap mea culpa moments then unconvincing redemptive heroics before finishing on one corny as hell last scene.

I give them credit for trying something new but this just creates problems different execution is messy and what could have been an important point made about war in a world like ours (full of wars) turns into nothing more than a plot device.

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