War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008)

War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008)

Directed by: C. Thomas Howell

Starring: C. Thomas Howell, Christopher Reid, Fred Griffith

Yeah. War of the Worlds… Two. You may have thought it was a travesty to remake a classic story that already had a great movie with Tom Cruise, but I bet you didn’t even know that my favorite ripoff artists at “The Asylum” made their own version, did you? And THEN they decide to make a sequel! Because, you know, War of the Worlds really needed a sequel. After, you know, all the Martians died. I suppose you could make it just a standard post-apocalyptic sorta thing with people trying to cope with a mostly destroyed planet, but as you can tell from the DVD cover and the subtitle, the aliens come back. And this time, WE FIGHT BACK! Sigh…

The story picks up two years after War of the Worlds. For those of you not familiar with the story, the basic gist is that Martians came to Earth and make giant tripod robot tentacle monster things that destroy most of the world, until they all succumb to Earth’s viruses that they had no immunity to and die. Anyway, two years later they come back and they’re all feeling much better (better than being dead, that is), and go back to the invasion and capturing people to feed off their blood and all that. Our main character gets captured by the aliens and is transported back to the mothership on Mars. Inside the mothership he meets a crazy old sick guy in a simulated environment meant to simulate Earth (this is secret code for not having to make any more alien world sets), who is infected with a ‘super flu’ designed to kill all the aliens for good. This super flu apparently took two years to kill this guy, but still, SUPER FLU! Our hero injects this crazy sick guy’s blood into himself, then hooks himself up to the mothership and gives them the superflu through his blood that way. Oh, and there’s something about F-14’s flying to Mars through a time portal.

Yeah, this movie is terrible. There’s a lot of stuff in here that’s just… awful. I’m trying my hardest not to think about it too much, because then I start getting all angry and nerd-ragey at movies, and I really need to stop doing that. But seriously, half of this damn movie is these idiots in their planes flying through space (thanks to a vague “upload.” COMPUTERS ARE MAGICK!!1!) to Mars to fight the mothership and a bunch of tripods with their lasers in very Babylon 5-esque sequences. In that they look like B5 graphics (which were cheap in 1995), not in that they were even the smallest bit interesting. Oh, and the amount of reused footage in this movie is amazing. Without the repeated shots of the same planes flying or the main character driving down the same road repeatedly, this movie would’ve barely hit the hour mark. And what the hell is with the alien ship that was just curtains hanging around a hallway?! ARRRRRGGGHHH!!!

Why do I keep watching Asylum movies? All that does is enforce their retard behavior of releasing movies with similar names to big movies that come out at the same time. I think this movie makes Asylum number… four for me. It’s like a car wreck, I guess. I can’t wait to see what new and imaginitive ways they totally fuck up ideas.