Hey, everybody. Welcome. I’m having a conversation here with Colin from the Nostalgia Pit. You can see that right there. Link. E slash Nostalgia Pit. You can go see it and check it out. I sat with you and your co-host, which I’ve forgotten his name, even though you just said it like two moments ago for a show. And I got you. What do you want to say? I begged you not to do this. Well, you kind of challenged me not to do it because I think I mentioned it and then you took it as a challenge. I feel like this is like one of those episodes of a bad sitcom. You’re like, well, I’ll do it. I will do it. And I’m like, no, you don’t have to do it. It’s okay. You don’t have to do it. I have a love for bad movies. Okay. They’re not all bad movies are created equal. But when, when, when I hear something that like, Hey, this is potentially the worst movie that’s ever come out before. Yeah. I’m like, you know,
that tickles my intrigue. I guess it set you off good because you’re like, I will, you took a challenge that was, I wasn’t even throwing down the gauntlet at all. I’m just like, yeah, this movie sucks oh yeah no and then you you said i’ll bet you five dollars that you won’t sit through the whole thing. Did I say that you did it’s on record on the podcast. I never remember exactly. So I owe you five dollars so we’ll barely I’ll get your Venmo or something at the end here. Set it up somehow. Or maybe I can just send you some swag. Whatever works. I’ll take it. So the movie we were talking about is the latest incarnation of War of the Worlds. This one’s starring Ice Cube. The kid from Diary of the Wimpy Kid who played the older brother, which I cannot remember his name.
And one of the Desperate Housewives, as well as some other people. It’s got a computer. And it’s got every computer tech giant program that you want to advertise. Yeah, maybe. It seemed to be reliant a lot on Zoom and Teams. Well, Zoom and Microsoft Teams are very big. Yes, that is big. But also, I mean, he’s on Google. He’s on YouTube. Oh, yeah. Facebook, you know, watching stuff on CNN, Fox News. Like it’s, you know. It’s an advertisement. It’s never. Yeah. Yeah. It’s an advertisement. All right. Well, I wouldn’t call it an advertise a good advertisement at this point. All those people probably distance themselves from this movie, in my opinion. But I don’t know about that. I think that I think it’s it’s it’s.
working in the ways that it needs to work because it’s generating clicks. Clicks are, it’s like, it’s one of those things where rage bait and like click bait are, are two real things in this, you know, commodification of, of information in this age. And so a lot of people will post things to make people angry and like trolling or whatever, you know, you see it in the food world. Or some of these recipes, they’re presenting it like it’s totally absurd. Or like it’s totally real when it is totally absurd. And then it gets the people going in the comments. And then they share it. And then people start reacting to it. But all that stuff, it’s the same as good clicks, bad clicks. Sometimes a click is a click. And so I feel like their numbers are pretty good because of how many podcasts and everything are talking. That’s all I’m saying. We could have totally fallen for their shtick.
stuff here with i’m just saying exactly you know they’re like how can we make this so effing cheap and yet get so much exposure out of it? Well, Rob said when we were talking about it on the nostalgia Pit, Rob, my co-host, who you know i forgot i totally forgot he’s totally a forgettable guy. I forget his name off and all i be honest with you, I forget everybody’s name that’s that’s one of my superpowers okay well i put my name up there just so you won’t thank you that’s why i can i cannot have to remember it. Exactly. He said that he read somewhere, I’m not sure where he read it, that it was like $65 million for the budget, which I find kind of amazing. How would you have done that? It seems like it’s the most cheaply done movie that’s ever existed. But maybe they spent a lot of money on trying to get the post-production, the CGI and all that, the aliens and all that.
you know, I didn’t make it that far. I have no idea what they look like. Well, all I can say is that a lot of people are questioning as to when this movie came out, as opposed to it’s filming, like it was filmed during the pandemic. Obviously, you know, there’s no actors that are really in the same room, maybe two actors in the same room at the same time at a shot. Uh, everything about that is very obvious. Why was it released in 2025? You know, like it, maybe it would have hit better, made more sense to people. If it came out during the pandemic. Well, my theory personally is that they were waiting for AI to be the generative AI to be, uh, become good enough to where they could use it in this, in the, in, in creating the CGI that they weren’t able to do for a lesser budget because, you know, Oh really? I mean, like if we go look at the, where are the worlds, right? The Spielberg version, right? The Spielberg version. Yeah.
Like the budget was 132 million. I mean, like not always, but I feel like a good amount of CGI and movies, if you want it to be decent, kind of costs a lot of money. But that’s why I think that they kind of put it on pause and waited for a simple generative AI program that could have done all that stuff simply. No, I hate to disagree with you, Carl, but I have to. Maybe that’s what this is all about here. I mean, I thought this was an agreement. I thought we had to agree with everything. considering that we started out with a disagreement and can continue this trend here. I think they made it. They thought this is the worst thing we’ve made in a while. Let’s not do anything. And then five years passed by and somebody is like, we, somebody is looking at the spreadsheet. They’re like, we spent 65 million on this piece of shit. We need to do something with it. Let’s throw it out on, on, on prime, you know,
during a dead time and burn this thing off and try to make up some money. That’s certainly very possible. I mean, I feel like, I feel like just with all the ads, they offset their budget. You know, a lot of it, like a lot of the people probably paid for advertising. There’s so many different companies. It’s insane. Maybe it took five years for them to get everybody. They’re like, we’re not going to release this until we get, you know, it’s 10 million from Microsoft, 10 million from Zoom, you know, Maybe they had to wait for them to build their coffers to where the 10 million was not a hardship formula. Yeah, I’ll give you 10 million. Oh, who’s in it again? Clark Gregg, you mean the guy from Marvel? Hell yeah, we’ll give you 10 million. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just the sales part of it came together after five years. But I really don’t think that they were waiting on the technology because if they were,
Maybe they would have used it in other areas as well. I mean, for Christ’s sake, can’t you get Ice Cube out of the room? You know, they could have. He could have just been running in place and been someplace else with better generative AI and so forth instead of just sitting in the one room the whole time, which half the time didn’t even look like it was fully rendered. No, that’s part of the thing about it. It’s like, I don’t know if it was a creative choice to go with I don’t think it was, but I mean, theoretically it could have been argued that to be a creative choice to have like the laggy zoom live stream type of camera work, you know, that was happening in it. But I honestly think that it was just because they were recording on phones during live stream, you know, either FaceTime or zoom, you know, like it was, it was very interesting. I just think that the smoothness of a lot of the CGI at the end makes a lot of sense to,
one of the new… It starts with an M. I can’t remember. The generative AI software that came out recently that’s really good for videos. It’s been messing with a lot of people because they can make very realistic stuff. It starts with an M. I’m trying to think of what that is. I’m trying to remember what the name of it is. Once again, Rob, my co-host, he’s typically the guy who knows the most about these. Towards the end, it seemed like the smoothness of some of it seemed like that program. um since since i only watched probably about 10 or 15 minutes of this movie, I watched the whole thing. Would you, would you take us through the chronology of what happened? What happens in the movie? Okay. So it starts out and it is ice cube logging on to his computer at the dhs and he starts searching the internet and you think it’s going to be like,
pretty quick that he’s just searching the internet or something like that. But he just is the start of the movie is he’s just searching the internet. So what the camera, what you’re seeing is, is the computer screen, right? It’s like zooming between different programs. Once again, Microsoft teams, zoom, et cetera, all that stuff. Uh, Facebook, you know, whatever, when he’s just escape, the way it is shot, it’s just like window, window, window, window. Right. And probably 50, at least 50 of the movie. There’s probably no dialogue. It is just like visual exposition. You having to read what he’s typing, sending messages between fbi agents, other fbi agents, his friend who’s a nasa person blah blah all that stuff. So it starts out and it’s just him scrolling the internet and, you know, checking out on potential threats.
terrorist well that and checking in on his daughter. He was like, and also stalking his daughter. Yeah. He’s stalking his daughter at one point in time later in the movie. I think he calls her on the phone and is like using the camera that’s in her fridge and telling her that she needs more protein and she can’t have soy milk with the baby and just like all this like really creepy shit. And he’s, yeah, he spies on his kids and ass load. And it’s, it’s very right and and he he converses with, His, uh, I guess to be son-in-law or something like that, I guess. Yes. Who’s an amazon uh delivery driver. And that’s a huge part of the plot is his yeah and dude he ends up spoiler alert okay i’m gonna flash forward a little bit amazon driver here, there’s a point in which he stops the bleeding of a very vicious, like a very messed up wound that his wife gets. She gets a large
piece of metal that blasts off when one of the aliens is going by blasts off a building hits her in the thigh. And I don’t know if it’s the femoral artery or whichever the big artery is. That’s femoral down your thigh. Okay. Yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s hitting that, but either way it’s lodged in there. She needs to get to the hospital. Ice cube ends up hacking a Tesla and putting it on a route to the hospital to where there are no, doctors because they didn’t have money for extras so the amazon delivery driver dude has to get there and he ends up using packing tape taping her leg closed and then being like okay it’s all good now she’s the bleeding stopped and it’s just like that’s as simple as it is he just uses packing tape and then she’s all good everything’s all good she survives totally even though she was bleeding everywhere like a lot of blood now i don’t i don’t want to poke holes in your theory here, but
I worked for three years shoveling boxes for UPS, and packing tape is a miracle medical device. And you can literally tape fingers back on with packing tape. I believe it. I’m not going to say that you can’t do that. You can use a lot of different tapes, right? Yeah. I get it. Basically, the only reason I still have skin on my fingers is because of packing tape. I don’t know. This is a bit of a side story, but… When you work in the parcel service loading trucks in the wintertime, especially where you have winter, where I live at, your fingers split open. Literally, your finger will just split open and bleed because the boxes take away all your oil and the cold weather freezes your fingers. And then you bump it on something and your finger literally just opens up like a pod and
from a horror movie, and you just start bleeding everywhere. I used to wrap my hands in packing tape to save them. I don’t know if I would do the femoral already, but I will say that at least it won’t protect your fingers. Okay. I believe that. You weren’t as impressed by that story as I wanted you to be, Colin. No, I believe that. Super glue is very super helpful. There’s a lot of things that staples. I mean, if you need to, you got to do it. If you got to use a sewing thread to, you know, stitch something up, you know, you got to do it. You know, I’m just saying there’s a lot of non typical medical things that can be used for medical stuff. My point is that I’m sorry. My point is that this, this was like a bolt blasted off an explosion deep in your thigh. I don’t know. I don’t know. It might not work. Right. Yeah. But just, and they were just like, yeah, she’s okay now. Bleeding stopped. And then she’s just totally fine for the rest of the month.
Was the Tesla have a white interior when it showed up? Of course. And then you got to have the blood smear on it. Yeah, it’s all over. And yeah. Proceed. I’m sorry. Oh, no. I mean, yeah. So skipping back, right? He’s he Ice Cube is besides stalking his daughter. He’s looking out for domestic terrorist threats. He needs to. He’s looking after this person named Disruptor. He ends up hacking. people describe him as a master hacker, you know, but all he does is just message someone on Microsoft teams that he needs like an IP address, or he needs like a scramble, like a way to hack into certain devices. So he’s just, he’s just sending messages on like zoom and, and text. He’s a master. He’s a communicator. He has a huge network. Okay. He has a master network. And so he’s just able to get whatever he wants at any point in time. And one of the ways that you hack into cameras, like,
just right. Right. Clicking it. It’s like hack. Yeah. You know, and it’s just the simple menus and stuff. It’s well, the scary part is for the government. That’s probably as easy as it is at this point. Talk to Edward Snowden about that. I’m not, I’m not saying that it’s not a possibility, but what I am saying is that it was ridiculous. Yeah. It seems ridiculous, but yeah, I think, uh, I think they’re watching us right now if only they’d be watching us right now. Yeah. I mean, Are they going to do one of those shadow watches and pretend like they’re not watching? Because if they want to just use a bot and get in and help our numbers out, because that would be great. All I’m saying is, you want to watch, watch. I’m putting it out live for whoever. Make it be somebody else as well. I’m sorry. We’re getting into the hospital where there’s no doctors. I flashed forward. Now we’re going back. We’re going back because he’s looking for this person disruptor, right?
He’s a really bad like he works for the DHS, but apparently he can get warrants for anything. So he finds he hacks the IP address of this person that he thinks is disruptor. He sends all the cops. He like he says, I need a warrant now. And he’s messaging someone. He’s like, hurry up. I need that warrant now. And like immediately he has like a whole SWAT team like swooping down on the place. Like before they’ve even looked, they haven’t like they can hack any camera. OK, anything, right? He’s always hacking people’s phones, hacking people’s AirPods, hacking people like so like anything. But for some reason, they can’t hack into the building and like look at, you know, or like they can’t see into the apartment or they just choose not to. And so they send all the people there. He’s a bad cop, man, because there’s no one there. It’s just like, oh, you just wasted all these resources. Yeah. Point is, flashing forward again, Disruptor turns out to be his son. Oh, there’s a twist for you. There’s a twist, right?
And his son knows why the aliens are there. He’s basically stalking his daughter. He has no interest at all in his son. It’s almost like Superman. Let’s see. My son was at the same place as Disruptor was. How interesting. I never put two and two together. Well, Disruptor, he’s better. He’s more techie than his dad. So he’s pinging his IP address off of something else. They have a very simple explanation. Onion router doing a Tor network. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, exactly. And so he’s making it simple, but he is been telling everyone that there’s this massive surveillance operation known as Goliath. Okay. And Goliath is the reason that the aliens are there because the aliens feed on data and they need to eat all of the data that we are collecting. And so one of the things that they do is they go around to all the different, you know,
major cities and stuff like that and strategically drain all the data. So there’s like one point in time ice cubes on his phone because, you know, there’s a side plot here that he’s grieving over his wife who passed away. Okay. And so he keeps going back to Facebook to, to listen to this one very benign voice message. That’s like five seconds long where she’s like, Hey, pick up some groceries or some shit. I can’t remember. Right. But it’s like, it’s the only, you know, like voice recording of his wife. So he keeps going back to that. So as these aliens are going around the world and they’re eating everything, eating all the data, okay? Like that thing gets deleted and all of his pictures get deleted and stuff like that. And they never really, you know. But all of the data is being eaten because these things are strategically going to all these data centers and consuming everything. And so satellite systems are going down. Entire countries are going down, everything out. Like NASA’s satellites are down.
lot of places can’t communicate at all, but for some reason he still has access to every single camera and everything that he has and all the people he needs to talk to works great. But you know, everything is being deleted across the world except for conveniently everything he needs to do. And spoiler alert, Amazon, because Amazon, when the world is ending and these things are destroying everything, just put in your amazon order and i’m going to send a drone. new amazon prime air okay it’s going to send over to your house maybe that’s another reason why maybe that’s another reason why that they uh delayed the uh release of the movie because it was all an ad for amazon prime air once it gets to the end that’s the whole thing the whole thing is leading up to this one moment where amazon saves the world and i’m telling you.
Like the only thing that would have been like more ridiculous of an Amazon ad is if Jeff Bezos saved, just came down and saved the world. Like, like just, you know, just him swoops in, not even in the movie up until that point, he just swoops in and just like hits a button. You can have the blue origin rocket land. Hey guys, I heard you needed some packing tape for your wound. That would have made the movie better. Almost like I just, just the absurdity of that, you know? but the Amazon, so there’s a, there’s a part where ice cube at the end. So as I was saying, the, the aliens, they need data. So they’re going around to the data centers and they’re taking everything out the way that him. And like, so he ends up teaming up with his son. And so he’s stuck at the DHS building and his son is, you know, hacking with all of his master hackers and stuff like that. Cause he’s got a whole ring. Cause you know that he’s disruptor. Okay. Disruptor. And the, the guy who delete,
goes against the disruptors. They become one and they hack together. And so they figure out that they need to put a virus into the data bank that, okay. Again, Goliath conveniently located in the dhs building that ice cubes in he’s right there he’s sitting on top he’s sitting on top of it the whole time. It’s so convenient. So, um, they, they decide that they need to put a virus into that. So the, they will get infected, and then all of them will die. And if you remember… So they Independence Day-ed it. That’s Independence Day. That is Independence Day, yeah. And it’s essentially… Yeah, it is Independence Day. Did they use a Mac whenever they did it? Wow, did they? I don’t think they did. They did that on Independence Day with a Mac. No, I think… I mean, AirPods and a couple other small…
uh, uh, advertisements for Apple, but mostly Apple, not really in this. This is, you know, like you said, zoom, Microsoft teams, you know, there’s a, a Google, you know, there, those are like the main advertisers. Definitely. And Amazon. Right. And Amazon. Right. But yeah, but not, not so much Apple. Right. But I mean, if you remember in the 1953 war of the worlds, which by the way, I looked it up, there are, I think 10 different movies that have been based off of. Yeah. A lot. A lot of them. Not to mention the radio play that got everybody upset with Orson Welles. Exactly. But this is a very highly referenced novel and referenced work. The interesting thing, though, is that they decided to call it… Everyone has a different name up until this point, and they just called it War of the Worlds, which is exactly what
Steven Spielberg called it in 2005. Even the original one was called the war of the worlds. There’s a slight differentiation, except for now they’re just like, we’re the worlds, we’re the worlds. Just like I did it. But so they need to put this virus in. And just like in the 1953 version, if you remember at the end, they all just die because they couldn’t handle the bacteria that was in our house. I was kind of like, Oh, that was a convenient, you know, like little loophole. Um, so in this one, yeah, all you gotta do is like get it into one and it goes to every one of them cause they’re all connected. And so, yeah, like the Borg or something. Yeah, exactly. So, um, And then everything is all happily ever after at the end, once again, you know, gal taped her leg up because of Amazon prime. So he saves his, he saved Amazon, saves the gal because they have trained there. They saved the world, right? So they’ve trained their drivers.
to be able to, to act quickly under pressure. So that’s the most important thing about it. He saves his wife, his future wife’s, uh, uh, leg and life by taping it closed and knowing baby and baby and the baby, the baby is totally, you know, totally good. And then he also, like I was saying, so ice cube needs to get the, the, it needs to get the, uh, virus into the data bank. And the only way that he can do it, he can’t do it online. He can’t do it through anything else. He’s been doing that the whole time. He’s been doing it the whole time, but he needs to get to this specific data bank. He has to go in and hardwire it, right? So they need to get the virus on a thumb drive. But because he works at DHS, they can’t have thumb drives. They can’t bring stuff in, you know, theoretically, or take stuff out, right? It’s a security risk to give anyone a thumb drive or the ability to remove anything from these computers. And I was like, okay, that makes sense, right?
And so he’s like, Oh, the, the, the Amazon driver’s like, okay, I can get you a thumb drive. I, you know, cause he has one on him for whatever reason. Well, they give them away like candy. Yeah. Well, so he’s going to just has one in his pocket and he’s like, okay, but I need you to go put in a prime order right now. And so he puts in a prime order for this. I’m telling you like, like the aliens are blasting into the building that he’s in. Yeah. He needs to get the virus. Like the stakes are high. Like bombs are potential. Like, F like like fighter jets are potentially coming to bomb the place to prevent the aliens from getting into it and kill the aliens. And so everything is going to happen. And he’s like, I need this USB drive. So the guy’s like, put in a prime order right now and I will get this to you via, you know, like via drone. And so he’s flying the drone, gets it through the blasting aliens into the building. He gets the USB drive, ends up putting it in the thing. And so Amazon saves the world.
And they’re all happily ever after. Everything’s happy. Happy, happy. I can, yeah. Totally believable. So believable. Amazon saves lives, saves the world. Saves everything, yeah. And he probably got, if DoorDash would have been on board, he would have got some Chinese food or something. I mean, I’m surprised there was no DoorDash or anything like that. Uber Eats? Uber Eats. You should have gotten a delivery like at some point into the DHS building from like the DoorDash guy. Yeah. All of a sudden Jake from State Farms there. Like I’m telling you, you could have gone harder into the ads if you wanted to, but this was definitely. I’m surprised Amazon doesn’t have a food. I mean, they do deliver groceries, but have like a, you know, restaurant delivery service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t own. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t like own one of them. Grubhub or something, you know? Yeah.
trying there’s a bunch of different ones. What was the um postmates yeah postmates is a really old one. I don’t know if people even know that no people still use Postmates. Do they? Okay. Not as much they’re they’re like i feel like a lot of people were using them and now it’s it oh that’s a good point. there’s a good point. Okay, now we gotta look up who owns postmates because that’s the odd man out here. Okay, so grubhub is owned by Wonder, which is a new york based food haul delivery chain. Okay. So who owns Postmates? Are you looking that up? I’m looking it up. If I can, if it’s one word or two word, that’s what I was thinking. Oh, it was always founded by Bastion layman, Sean place and Sam street in 2019. Oh, currently a subsidiary of Uber. Uber eats his Postmates. Okay. So they ate it up. So that makes sense here. Can I don’t use DoorDash. And for the reason that it is a publicly traded company,
Owned by its shareholders, significant institutional holders include Vanguard, BlackRock, and JP Morgan. That’s funny. Interesting. Well, I don’t use DoorDash for the mere reason that every time I’ve ever seen a DoorDash person at a restaurant, they take your food into the bathroom. Wow. I’ve never seen that. You’ve never seen it? I’ve never seen it. And not just here where I live. I was in Chicago once. i went to Chipotle, door guy comes in, gets his order, goes right into the bathroom with it. I’m like, what did i just what did i just see he couldn’t have gone to the bathroom first? Yeah, that’s up dude yeah and then i saw it i saw it closer to home, too, on St. Louis. I saw a doordash guy come in, grab the food, go to the bathroom.
We’re saying the door dash drivers out there must be built different. Cause I ain’t never seen that. And I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants that had them coming in. Well, I don’t know. They got to pee a lot. I don’t know what they were. I didn’t time them. If I, as a person working at the restaurant saw that happen, I’d be like, yo dude, no, I would flag that shit because you don’t want that person getting sick. Cause it’s going to be more food, right? Well, there’s a sticker on it. So it’s all good. It’s true. But, Still, bro, I mean, that is but yeah, I’ve seen it multiple times now in various places, and I’m like, no, I don’t want to have anything to do. I mean this you know this person the chances are too high, even though, you know, it’s probably infinitesimal, the percentages, but I’m like I don’t I’m going to be the guy who gets it you know it’s part of it is that like part of it is like yeah it might not even be likely that you’re going to actually get any bacteria from that, but
The other side of it and the bigger part of it is a person who’s willing to do that. I don’t know if I want them touching. Exactly. With no thought. Yeah. At the very least, my, you know, instinct is I don’t even take like if I’m finished eating, I don’t even take a drink to the bathroom. I do. That’s my instinct is to take nothing to the bathroom. But what I myself, I would I would get naked to go to the bathroom if it was publicly. Okay. Well, I mean, if you can lock the door, then I mean. Well, no, but once you’re in, you’re in. Oh, so you’re saying you need like a mudroom for the bathroom. You need an enclosed mudroom. Oh, yeah, especially in a public bathroom, for Christ’s sake. Also calling it a mudroom to get into the bathroom is just kind of funny, right? Yeah. It’s just kind of funny. But I mean, you know, we need this separation, space separation, right? Yeah.
but I, maybe I’m a little germaphobe or something, but yeah, I need one of those where you step in, it’s like Silkwood or something where you get hosed off and then you go to the, but you come back and get hosed off and then you go out. So, I mean, did you ever see that show? The league? Yeah. Yeah. They like, didn’t he give him like a bathroom cubby, like a wedding as a wedding gift or something? Like one of the guys gave him like a bathroom. I don’t think I saw that. I didn’t watch the whole series. Okay. I feel like there was an episode that, had something like that where there was a person that was like germaphobic that was like, now you don’t have to bring your cell phones into the bathroom. And so, because they were talking about like poop on the screen, you know, which is- Right, exactly. Right. Just from, you know, nowadays, you know, it’s like the newspaper, you know, used to be the thing. Now it’s just the phone. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And you got, you know, fecal matter flying. The Mythbusters did that thing with the toothbrushes and the fecal matter. Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah. I like that.
And I think it tested. I believe it. You don’t want to keep your toothbrushes too close to the toilet is what they said. Yeah. Because when you flush, stuff just goes everywhere. I mean, it’s microscopic, but. Yeah, that’s why I’m always skeptical of the toilets that don’t have the top lid. Like when you go to the public bathrooms, you know, there’s no way. It’s just just that. Yeah. Anyway, we’re way off topic on this one. So but. we are talking about viruses in a way, kind of, but anyway, I mean, yeah, this is, this is viral. Talking about shit on a podcast. So the yeah. So, I mean, but did the movie pick up after about the first 25 minutes or so? No, not really. Like, like I said, it was probably about 50% actual dialogue and communicating with people, like people communicating between each other.
a lot of it actually, I’m sorry, it was communicating with other people, but it was like tech, you know, you didn’t want to employ extras, you know, it’s much easier to just message people and have them message them. There’s so many ridiculous aspects to this movie. The one thing that I will say is a, not a negative, but a neutral. Okay. There’s one thing that I think there’s a neutral about this movie. I want to give it, Points for originality, even if that originality is absolute garbage. They made a garbage sculpture, almost. Not a sculpture. I mean, a different type of garbage. I don’t know. I’m going to give it points. Not a point, but a neutral point. It doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t push anything up. But I’m saying, I’ve never seen anything like it.
I never will see anything like it again. I’m not saying that people might not try to copy this as like a cheap way to do something like this, but I will say that I will never watch anything like it again. So if I start watching something and it is like this skip, you know what I mean? It’s even if you get challenged. No, because if it’s replicable, like if it’s, if someone can do something like this again and they’re going to try to do something like it again, it’s, it won’t have nearly the, the charm of something new that this had. Right. Because like I said, points for something like doing something that I have never seen anyone do before. Right. I don’t think, I think there’s a reason that no one has ever done it before because it’s not good, but it’s like, I will never, I’ll never watch it again, you know, and I’ll never watch anything like it again because if,
something starts like that, I’m definitely not sticking with it through the end, not for $5, maybe for like a couple thousand. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I got, I got you. I got it early. So I got it cheap is what you’re saying. Yeah. Well, I’m just saying anything like this specifically again, you know, uh, it’s that being said as stupid, as ridiculous as it was. Um, I’ve heard, there’s a lot of people that have been talking about it. Um, a podcast that I work on called Cinephobe. Uh, they, they just put up, they, they have a segment called this, uh, look at this photograph, um, where they take, you know, photos from every movie that they do. And their whole gimmick of their podcast is 40% or under on rotten tomatoes. And they give it a fair, you know, look at it to try to ascertain if a fair shake or not, you know,
And so they did look at this photograph on war of the worlds. And I think the episode will be out later, but they had to put that out early, but some, it there’s, there’s so much that you can analyze about this movie where it’s like, there’s clear Photoshop, clearly horrible, bad green screen that everything about it. I think that the person you sent me a message where it was a person, um, breaking it down and being like, you know, one out of 10 for this score, I think that person was actually too. generous, generous in most, in most instances, this movie was like truly awful, right? The sound design was horrible. Like there’s a sound that the aliens make that is, you know, fucks with people’s eardrums and stuff. And that shit is so loud in comparison to everything else. Like it was not normalized. Um, it was not professionally sound design. Like there’s edited. Well, there’s, there’s shit like that. A lot of it. Yeah. It’s like,
blatant green screen and like really bad green screen too. Like, I think that, uh, there is a scene where it’s the president of the, of the United States. And I think that it’s honestly just like one, a zoom background that is the oval office. I don’t even think it’s green. Like I’m telling you, that’s great. That’s great. I’m saying, so there’s like things like that where it’s like, Jesus Christ, this is awful, but I’m kind of glad that I, witnessed it so i have this this cultural reference point that that is going to be referenced by a lot of people moving forward you know that being said i don’t know i don’t know you know the funny thing is the guy who they had playing the president is a comedian um yeah jim mess messican and he’s also been in a lot of commercials yeah
Well, that’s the thing, you know, a lot of these actors, especially like not a lit, maybe even some a list actors are like actors at their ultimate height are just doing commercials now because there’s so much more money in commercials than there is. Yeah. Yeah. Because the way that like, they haven’t figured out how to like commodify the streaming as, as much as they want to, uh, they’re like working on it. But right now, like you can, it’s just, it’s shrunk on how many, uh, uh, big contracts they’re putting out. It’s not going to be like robert downey Jr. making like 40 million a movie. I don’t think as many people are making like that much money per movie. Right. Yeah. No, I think you’re right. I think uh well i think that uh that aspect of things has really changed a lot because the box office isn’t there and streaming is not as profitable as uh dvds were
You know what I did see in the theaters a couple days ago that thrilled me beyond all of my wildest dreams. Made me very happy. I saw the 35th anniversary retro screening of the classic 1990 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The first one? The first one in theaters. Oh, okay. Yeah, they’re doing a lot of that here lately, so. Yeah. Yeah. It was all over. Right. It was all over. I’m 36 years old. I grew up on that movie, but i was too young to see it in the theaters and be cognizant of it you know oh really so you just saw it on TV. I’d only seen it on v i’d watched the vhs all the time when i was a kid. Yeah. Oh, okay. And then i watched it on streaming. Right. So I got to see it in theaters. So I’m saying i do love a good theater experience i’ve seen i you know, my partner, she loves,
movies in the theater. So we go see a decent amount. And yeah, I, but I, I do completely recognize because when I was a kid, you had to wait in line for these movies, you know, like, I mean, now you have secure, you know, reserved seating, which helps. Right. Yeah. Which in all honesty, that’s a change that I love. I wish you could have reserved seating back when, but back, remember back when we used to just stand in line. Yes. Hopefully the movie hasn’t been sold out yet. I did that many, many times. So much different about it. But it was fun. I mean, yeah, you had to watch a movie from the side corner in a seat that you would never choose. Now, anytime I go to a movie, I’m dead center, back row, exactly where I want to be. Just because there’s not really… I think the reserved seating move was because they weren’t selling out the movies, and so it sounds like it’s more exclusive. So, oh, reserved seating. So if you want to…
get your seat that you want. You got to get in now. It’s just another way to, to goose people into going to the movies a little bit. Yeah. Interesting. So obviously this didn’t play at the theaters. If it was at the theaters, would you say that your experience would have been even worse? Oh, infinitely worse, infinitely worse because I watched this movie front to back. Okay. So once to preface it, I was started talking about this a little bit in the pre part of the show. To preface it, I was extremely exhausted. I had started a new kitchen job and it was a burger place and it’s burger week in Portland. And I was getting my ass handed to me. I haven’t worked in kitchens like this on the line in five years. Okay. So I’m all cocky going in and I have just worked two 10 hour days and had my ass handed to me. The first day, the first of the two days, it was a hundred and like
in the cart that we were working in. It was very hot working the grill and 102. Um, so i was like dehydrated, felt like i was going to pass out. We closed because it was too hot for a couple hours. Um, it was an intense work day. Okay. And then i had to do it again the next day. I worked my ass off the end of that second day. We’re recording the nostalgia pit the next day. And Rob, my co-host has said, we’re going to watch this movie war of the worlds, and we are going to talk about it. on the pot. And so I stay up after I worked this 10 hour shift in the kitchen and I’ve just had my ass handed to me and I watched this movie and I watched the whole thing and I stay up late and I watch it. Now, the biggest reason that the theater would have been an infinitely worse experience was because a, I could just smoke weed if I needed to. Okay. And you’re, you bet your ass I had smoked some weed because this shit was
Ridiculous. Okay. And I’m like, I got to get through it. Okay. You know, sometimes you gotta, the meal isn’t going to be the greatest smoke, a little bit of weed. It tastes a little better. You know, you create, there you go. Point is I stayed up. I have the ability to pause it. I had the ability to just be like, what the hell? And then take some notes on it because I took a bunch of notes for the nostalgia pit that I was recording the next day. And I, if I was in the theater and I did not have the ability to hit pause, I didn’t have the ability to just be like, what the fuck is happening? Go smoke some weed or, or, you know, go take a piss and go do that. Like I would have been so lost. It would have made no sense. It would have been an awful theater experience because again, all of it’s on the computer screen. Right. Right. So it’s like, it’s almost a movie for phones. Right. Yeah. You know, like, like, I mean, but then again, you know, some of the texts might be kind of small on you, but yeah,
And also I’m just hoping, I think that they were hoping for a smaller screen viewing because you wouldn’t have been able to see as bad as the green screen. And a lot of the effects were, you know, if it was on a smaller screen, the point is Rob did not watch the movie. And so I recorded, I didn’t record the next day. And Rob’s like, he left you hanging. Yeah. He left me hanging, man. That’s rough. I know. What a, So after, after, even after I warned you to not do it. Well, once again, I, I don’t regret it. Okay. I don’t regret it. Uh, now I have this, uh, absurd journey that I went through that I can relate to random people about, you know, um, sometimes that’s good to have in life because a lot of the times I let the, whatever’s popular pass me by and I just don’t get into it. And then I just don’t have a bunch of points of engagement because
And as we’re all familiar with, you know, especially those of us who grew up once upon a time before social media and stuff. Right. It used to just be communicating movie quotes to your friends. That used to be, that used to be like the form of relating to people is like your ability to quote movies with them. Cowabunga dude. Anything from cowabunga dude to, you know, just like big gulps, huh? All right. Like there’s so many different, different little quotes. Anchorman obviously was a huge one. Yeah. So I don’t know. I often will let these kind of moments pass. And so not having did that, I’m like, you know what? I feel kind of like that. You’re in the mix. I don’t know if you want to be in the mix later. That’s what I’m saying. Every now and then it’s cool to get in the mix and just shuffle around the party for a second. And then you Irish goodbye. You leave real quick. There you go. Because you don’t want to actually be there the whole time. No, you don’t.
I don’t, I don’t think so. I thought this movie was so horrible. So now did you watch the fifties version? Have you ever seen that? I’ve seen it. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t watch it for this, but I did. You’ve seen it in the past at least. Yeah. So obviously even that one’s better than this one. Well, yeah, that one, like the thing about the movies, you know, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, like a lot of those. And even before that, I mean, the practical effects, even if they didn’t sell you, like they had an endearing quality to them. Um, maybe it’s just cause I grew up on them, but like, I didn’t grow up on a lot of like Buster Keaton films. And then like watching how those special effects works, like that’s so much more fascinating to me than the green screen. And like Rob and I, uh, on the nostalgia pit, we watched, um, some Hitchcock movies and I think they were in the fifties. Right. And like the, the one classic, uh,
thing that they used to do back in the days they had the car on the sound stage right but then the uh the cityscape or whatever that they’re driving through projected on a project on a screen behind rear projection yeah like that i think looks better than green screen and stuff like i just watched we we watched uh uh the indian uh the indiana jones trilogy for minnesotans We have a segment that we call limited recall, where we go back and watch something that it’s been at least 10 years that we recall being really good or having memories about it and kind of assess those memories versus what it is now to you. Right. And it’s just kind of that juxtaposition of how memory is fallible, as well as, you know, looking at things through the current zeitgeist. Right. So we watched started out with Temple of Doom and then watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and then Last Crusade.
I realized I’d never seen last crusade. I thought I had, had not. Okay. No memory of any of that movie, but the, there is green screen that they use in last crusade. And I think also, I mean, there’s some green screen that they use in, the other movies as well. But like yeah those green screens though Yeah. Those green screen scenes in the last crusade look way worse than hitchcock’s rear projection and that style of things. So it’s like, okay. I think that they do. Yeah. I think it’s, it’s extremely noticeable. They just don’t hold up as well on 4k uh yeah you know, I guess so you get as our tvs start getting better. Now there’s 8k TVs. I haven’t seen, but i know that those exist you know they exist yeah there’s yeah
6k even. 16K. I want 16K. Yeah, that’s what i want. The, um, but the interesting thing is that now, I don’t know why they didn’t do this with, uh, War of the Worlds. They don’t use green screen now either. oh They use what is, uh, uh, I don’t even know what they call it, uh, like an official name, but it’s basically they go into a sound stage that’s nothing but, uh, high-resolution panels, LCD panels, and they have a generated background, and it moves. It moves with them. All of Mandalorian was shot like that. A lot of the Marvel movies were shot like that. I don’t know why they didn’t use that technology for this. It would have looked so much better. Zoom, baby. I can’t remember what it’s called, but anyway, basically, you go into a virtual…
Uh, soundstage. And as long as you’re not shooting the floor yeah everything moves in accordance with your actor. because they, they basically create a digital world to go on these screens that makes so much more sense for so many reasons. I mean, obviously the technology, but like the, the biggest problem with green screen in a lot of those situations is the actor doesn’t like, they’re reacting as much to their imagination as possible, but they’re not like actually seeing like what’s happening. And so like having that ability is probably extremely good for getting like a more realistic. Yeah, they’re getting changed. I mean, if you think about it as layers, so if you ever do any work in Photoshop or any of the, you know, shops, you know, you have, you can put a layer in front of the lens
as many layers as you want. And then you have the actor and then you have the background, which you can put as many layers. But if the background is a live background that they’re in an environment. And then the other thing is it lights them, right? So they are lit from behind because of these screens, especially if it’s, you know daytime kind of setting. Whereas with the green screen, the lighting is, you don’t get lit. I mean, they do put lights behind them, but it’s different because they can’t light the same way because of the green screen. because you can’t, spoil the green screen effect, right? So it’s a totally different look to it. It’s not as natural a look where just like the rear projection you talk about with Hitchcock and so forth is lighting the back of the actors, right? Because they’re projecting onto that screen. So yeah, it is interesting. I was really, because, and I’ve had this conversation with a lot of other people, I’m like,
Movies today that are being made, and I wouldn’t say just today, but for the last, let’s just say the last 10 years even, the production values are so much better, even on the shitty ones, that you can’t complain about it, right? You can watch a really, really, really poorly acted, poorly edited everything, and it looks spectacular. This didn’t look spectacular. This didn’t look spectacular. It’s like, how did they accomplish this? Because… we’ve had almost 10 years now of spectacular looking films and they didn’t, they couldn’t pull it off. I guess because it was made, I was looking on the wiki. It was made during COVID. So yeah. And it said they started production in 2020. And my guess is they, they basically, this was a salvage job. This was all supposed to happen. You know, this was in pre-production 2020.
And it’s going to go into production right when COVID hit is my guess. And they’re just trying to salvage something. And my guess is it was probably supposed to be a totally different movie. Well, yeah, apparently no, they started production six months into COVID. Okay. Yeah. So like this was fully like intended to be what it was. Really? Gosh, I can’t imagine. Yeah. It’s a, Screen life technology is, is what it is called. It’s a screen life for computer screen film as a form of visual storytelling in which events are shown entirely on a computer tablet or smartphone screen. So that’s just on the production section of, of the Wikipedia article for world. Okay. Right. There’s a little screen life hyperlink, but I remember hearing something about that. And one of the things that I listened to, but yeah,
And so screen life technology is like this storytelling concept, but they were intrigued by the idea that it would be used as an entire film and looked at it as like an opportunity during, Oh, to try it out. Gotcha. I mean, I don’t know if they saw it like that or if it was pitched because of it, but you know, either way it worked out because of it. Now everyone could be in isolation still, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, they could have, uh, just had them all stay home. I mean, theoretically they did, you know what I mean? Theoretically they did. Yeah. Um, uh, that’s too funny. Yeah. I don’t, I just, the thing that I don’t find, uh, any information or I haven’t found any of the information about is exactly why it took so long in post-production. Yeah. It had to be cause it was shit. It had to be. I mean, so ice cube is wearing glasses.
His character wears glasses. He’s smart. He’s smart, right? He’s a hacker. Just like you. You’re smart. You wear glasses. If you zoom in on the reflection of his glasses, multiple times there’s just pieces of paper sitting right in front of him. He’s reading the script. The point is that I don’t think that he took take twos of anything. I think this is like a first time through the script, act it. you know, like a dry run and they were like good we’re gonna do the read-through everybody have their pages ready and then we’re just gonna record it. Every, yeah, everyone has two takes, but i mean, maybe that’s, I don’t know. That’s all i’m saying is like, you can just see his script like reflecting in the glasses they didn’t bother to even get rid of it. I didn’t even notice that so yeah it’s i didn’t notice a lot of the things that have been pointed out by other people, but that’s why it’s so maybe they watched it more than once.
maybe they watched it more than once or they just have, you know, different people have different eyes for different things, you know? Uh, so then if you had to rank, so we talked about the 50s version, the spielberg 2005 version and this version, where, where do you rank each one of them i mean high to low, start with the high and work your way to the low. I didn’t think it would take this much thought call. Well, I’m just putting, I’m trying to put the fifties one up against Spielberg’s right. We’re like, I don’t particularly enjoy that movie that much. I think it’s good, but it’s not like one of those that like, it’s like more of a mid good. It’s, it doesn’t like jump out at me. I mean, and the, where the world’s the fifties one, I would say I’d put that at the top because it’s got a little bit of the endearing qualities of,
old filmmaking. It’s ridiculous. The 2005 one would definitely be the second. And this one is, this would be the last, you know? Yeah, you’re right. You know, now that you mentioned is the interesting thing is i don’t think they ever showed a full alien in the 50s version they showed hands they showed perspective yeah uh and they had these sucker fingers, which is kind of creepy. And, uh, even when they died, it was like a guy’s hand and a glove. you know, a monster glove, you know, coming out of a thing and then falling over, right? Dropping down. I’m dead. That was the way they, they showed it. They never actually fully realized the alien and they used a lot of the, they had a, which I thought was very interesting. The, the, the electronic eye was, it was RGB. I don’t know if you, so it was red, it was red,
uh, blue and green, right. Which is the colors that we see in, right. We see in, in, uh, you know, most of your, uh, things you work with and so forth are, are in that color spectrum. And so it was interesting that they utilized that, which, you know, was kind of weird, but also kind of interesting in, in a lot of ways. Um, as the aliens, you know, kind of visual thing. So honestly, as I’m speaking about it, the aliens in that version had an experience much like ice cube has in this version. If you think about it, they were all behind the console. We never really, but we never really saw them and they used all these devices to reach out and see the experience, the, the world. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, but I will say that a lot of people, they get upset when you watch something and it doesn’t show the alien or the creature or whatever. A lot of people like to see the creature. They want to know all these things. Yeah, but I think the lack of it was better for that because it wouldn’t have been good. Exactly, exactly. And so that’s one of the things that it can be a cop-out when you don’t have the budget to create the full thing, right? Or don’t have the technology. But it also… Sometimes it’s just better to have the imagination kind of run wild. I don’t know. I think that, you know, have you ever seen, I know you’ve seen them. So all these AI things now are taking a concept and then running it through the filter of a time period. So they go Star Wars from the fifties, right? And then you’ve seen those videos, right? I want them to take this movie and then run it through the AI filter and
and make it, you know, a different time period or make it a different movie that’s better. I can only imagine it would be better if they took the concepts from this and then totally had it, you know, generated from, you know, nothing, right? So totally generated movie based off of this script and say, you know, from the, you know, with a perspective of, you know, the 50s, right? Or something like that. It would have been a much more interesting experience, I would think. Well, yeah. Part of that is because you couldn’t do it from the 50s because you can’t be like you can’t have a person that’s on screen the whole time. I mean, or, you know, online the whole time because they just don’t know. But yeah, it would have to be reimagined and be like a phone operator. Maybe, you know, yeah, just like all the calling a bunch of let me patch you through, sir. Yeah, you could do it. I mean, I don’t know if it would be more entertaining. Maybe it would.
I guess if Kubrick had a chance at this or Hitchcock. Well, they already have the Kubrick. You can force things through the Kubrick perspective, just like the Wes Anderson perspective, the Hitchcock perspective. All this stuff is happening right now that people are fiddling with various results. Well, Colin, I want to thank you for doing this, even though I warned you not to. I couldn’t. You couldn’t stop me. Free will, my friend. If there was ever an argument for free will, this is it. This is it. Can’t tell me what to do. Tell us again. You’re at the Nostalgia Pit. I’m going to throw this back up here again. My link tree is there. You can find us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever on
or at the Nostalgia Pit, search that. We’re on YouTube at the Nostalgia Pit. We’re on Instagram at Ruining Your Childhood. There’s an underscore and a period in there because someone else had Ruining Your Childhood. That was the original podcast was. It was called Ruining Your Childhood, The Pitfalls of Nostalgia. And then I thought about it and I was like, that’s kind of a long name. Maybe I should shorten that. So we’re the nostalgia pit. You can find me and my cohost, Rob, the forgettable one. Yeah. The forgettable one. Yeah. Yeah. We’re there. The one who leaves you hanging, takes you down or takes you down a pathway. And then, uh, Oh, I’m not going that way. I’m not. There’s a trope emerging. I’ll tell you that we can, this is the prediction for the future. Okay. Right. There’s going to be a sitcom about this. People doing podcasts and their partner, uh,
constantly lets them down, but they keep hanging on and do these things. Yeah. It’s almost like a, you know, 21st century odd couple kind of a situation. Yeah. And so, yeah. So you did my cohost, normal cohost miles constantly does this to me. Now you’re telling me Rob does the same thing. It’s going to be a trope. Hey, you know, it’s a, sometimes you have good chemistry with someone and you also, if you know, you can, And you have the ability to recognize that sometimes letting you down is funny, you know? There’s humor in it, you know? It can be funny after you cry. I mean, you know, sometimes, you know, a tear, sometimes you got to be laughed at. Sad clown, okay? The bittersweet. The sad clown. All right, thanks for having me on. Well, thanks, Colin. Hang on for just a second. You got it.
