War of the Worlds will inevitably go down as 2025’s worst film, with its coveted Metascore of 6 and Rotten Tomato rating of 4. But if you thought that might mean the end of sci-fi movies based around surveillance footage, boy do I have a trailer for you. The first promo for Chris Pratt’s MERCY just dropped, and it stinks worse than sewage-filled socks.
I love/hate everything about this trailer. The central premise is so stunningly stupid: a near-future world where people are tried for crimes by an AI via, um, strapping them into a chair in the middle of a colossal auditorium and then having them scour all surveillance, mobile and TV footage for proof of their innocence, but only with the run-time of a movie to do it all in. Should they fail to evidence their own lack of guilt in 90 minutes, they’re instantly murdered. It’s as stupid as a hundred ’80s Arnie movies put together, but delivered without a wink of irony.
LAPD officer Pratt has been accused of the murder of his wife. BUT GET THIS! He’s also the very guy who designed the MERCY system! What a piece of screenwriting mastery! Will he learn a valuable life-lesson about authoritarianism? Well, given the trailer begins with a murder mystery and appears to end with car chases and an entire city blowing up, I’m going to guess no.
Look, I’m mostly ambivalent about Chris Pratt. Yes, he’s irritatingly ubiquitous and frustratingly average, and certainly his gross personal views are far from my own, but then I enjoyed him as Star-Lord and there’s no taking away from his performance in Parks & Recreation. Which is to say, I didn’t head into this trailer with an agenda. I sure came out of it with one! And I’m not even sure what I think about the usually excellent Rebecca Ferguson after this shitshow. She’s playing an AI, sure, but oh my goodness, even the current awful LLMs have more personality than is on display here.
This really has everything. A woman fridged from before the film even starts; a cold, calculating female antagonist faced off against by the big, buff man; a countdown clock for literally no possible reason; animated percentages measuring guilt popping up like scores in a game; and just some of the most excruciating dialogue you could hope for. “I shouldn’t be here! I helped create the MERCY program!” “Do you honestly think that I killed my wife, or were you just programmed wrong?” Glorious stuff.
But what I’m enjoying most of all is just how much it reminds me of War of the Worlds 2025. Those same faux-surveillance camera angles, the crappy quality phone footage, actors trying to do naturalistic while sounding like elementary school nativity performances (I’m talking to you, Jamie McBride). The only disappointment is that Pratt’s clamped into that chair so he can’t get up and rattle a glass door.
Perhaps Chris Pratt was just tired of all the running and jumping, and wanted to make a movie where he just got to have a sit down? Fair play to that. And look, I’m willing to admit I can be wrong. I am, after all, the person who (oh God, why can’t I just delete it?) wrote the post, “War of the Worlds Via Found Footage Looks Like A Good Time.” I’m really hoping this is the yang to that yin, and this time I’m ensuring that MERCY is an all-time classic. It is, after all, from the “Academy Award winning producer of Oppenheimer“!
Well, um, sort of. One of the listed producers of MERCY, Charles Roven, was a producer on Oppenheimer and that movie won Best Picture. So, technically? But far better, MERCY‘s director, Timur Bekmambetov (best known for the wildly overrated Night Watch and Day Watch), was a producer on War of the Worlds! Yay! Why wasn’t that mentioned in the trailer?!
It’s out in theaters January 23, 2026, although I rather strongly suspect it won’t be the longest wait before it hits streamers after that.
