In 2014, the form of ” desktop movie »Emerged, designating a film shot on a computer screen whose narration is essentially based on interfaces typical of our digital practices (Internet navigation, social networks, search engines, consultation of databases, telecommunications, instant messaging, etc.). After several pioneering experiments (from Chris Marker to a few avant-garde youtubers), two films in particular had devoted this aesthetic that year: on the one hand the series Unfriended de Lyonjan Chabriadze Et, de author, its equices Transformers : The Premake by Kevin B. Lee. If the two films had a common device, deep down opposed them. The attractive objective ofUnfriended was to update the codes of slasher in the era of web 2.0, when that of The premake was rather, from a reflexive perspective and media-criticism, to use the model of the film-interface in order to investigate the production and promotion of a blockbuster, Transformers: the age of extinction by Michael Bay. Produced by Universal and broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, The War of the Worlds Fits in the furrow of the first model (it is overseen by the same producer, Timur Bekmambetov), while acting the facelift by industry: it is a new adaptation of the famous novel by Hg Wells which sees Will Radford (Ice Cube), an agent of the DHS (the United States Department of Homeland Security), investigate from his computer on an attack by aliens threatening to annihilate humanity. Faced with the spectacular accumulation of windows testifying to the invasion, it is difficult not to think about the movie-Essai by Kevin B. Lee, in which the filmmaker documented from his computer the way in which Michael Bay’s blockbuster grabbed the digital space, but also the public space of the city of Detroit, concretizing in real life What the Hollywood saga did not cease to imagine (the destruction of the human race by invasive machines).
The parallel may be striking, The War of the Worlds is not the caliber of The age of extinction. Although Rich Lee’s film fantasizes in Hollywood spectacle, it is mainly similar to a B series in the first sense of the term-a production in the minimal budget modeled on previous successes, the device of the interface film allowing to make a catastrophe film with derisory means. The War of the Worlds Was turned for a bite of bread during the covid-19 pandemic, and this can be seen: most destruction images are the result of coarse inlays inside videos from Shutterstock type image banks. Between the false glitchs And the effects of cropping on elements of the interface in order to dramatize a situation in which no one believes (especially not the actors, who make them boxes), the aberrant scenes are linked click after click. Ice cube pilot remotely one Tesla to save her pregnant daughter pursued by aliens; A delivery man finds himself at the controls of a flying drone between the buildings in flames in order to deliver a USB key to prevent the apocalypse; A computer virus is made in two minutes by Sunday hackers sporting a black hooded sweatshirt as a profile photo on Microsoft Teams, etc. As for the assembly of the interfaces, it effortlessly reproduces the visual and sound effects of the most touting titles of the ” desktoploitation “, Above all Searching and his suite Missingwhich had the particularity of exploiting computer forms for their sensationalist attire (heap of information and large titles on the screen, spectacle of tool mastery, fascination for the tracking and overall surveillance, a bonus with the velocity characteristic of social networks)
In other words, the meeting between the desktop movie And the Hollywood disaster film gives birth here to an authentic nanar, whose kindly protesting conclusion (a federal agent who resigns to serve a group of anti -system hackers) goes hand in hand with a complete enslavement of the device with regard to digital giants – in particular Amazon, who takes the opportunity to multiply product placements. Transformers : The Premake had announced it ten years ago: even in the modular and intimate universe of our digital interfaces, advertising and security capitalism takes everything in its path, whether it be new forms allowing to examine the cogs, imaginations seeking to subvert it from the interior or discourse to denounce the countless drifts. The devourer of worlds that the caricatured characters of Rich Lee’s caricatured characters without knowing it is him.
