It doesn’t generally speak highly of a movie when it’s quietly dumped on a streaming platform after only being announced — equally quietly, with zero fanfare or marketing — a few days prior. But such is the case for War of the Worlds (2025), also known as War of the Worlds: Revival, and War of the Worlds: The One With Ice Cube On Zoom, yet another adaptation of the classic H. G. Wells story that gets extremely modern by reimagining an alien invasion as a screenlife thriller with some sprinklings of found-footage for good measure. Originally slated for a theatrical release, Universal thought better of it and slipped it onto Prime Video, presumably with the intention of pretending it never existed in the first place.
But it exists, folks — oh boy, it exists. And as a fair and balanced critic who doesn’t relish the opportunity to lay into movies that are inevitably going to be ripe for mockery online anyway, I just want to point out that this is a novel, intermittently effective idea, and in a parallel universe where it wasn’t directed by music video director Rich Lee, written by the mind behind Meet the Fockers, and didn’t star a horrendously miscast Ice Cube as a Department of Homeland Security domestic terror analyst providing passive aggressive running commentary — “Take yo’ intergalactic asses back home!” — it might have been pretty good. We don’t live in that universe, obviously, but it’s worth thinking about.
The movie we got finds Cube as Will Radford, a chronically online government surveillance expert who has dealt with the loss of his wife, Erika, by locking himself in his office at work and sending her annual Facebook messages reading, simply, “I miss you.” He keeps himself busy by ignoring his kids, Faith (Iman Benson, The Midnight Club), a pregnant scientist at Georgetown University, and Dave (Henry Hunter Hall, The Watcher), a pro-gamer conspiracy nut, and tracking down a domestic terrorist known as “Disruptor”, who is claiming that the surveillance-industrial complex has secretly created a mass data-gathering platform known as Goliath under the nose of the public.
Will’s so determined to find Disruptor that he ignores blatant warnings from Sandra (Eva Longoria, Only Murders in the Building, Land of Women, Flamin’ Hot), a NASA scientist who we know is a NASA scientist because she’s saved as “Sandra NASA” in his contacts, that a spate of unprecedented weather events heralds some rather negative developments. This is a forewarning of a sudden invasion by an extraterrestrial machine race that feeds on data, and when a coordinated attack on its infrastructure blindsides the world, it becomes Will’s responsibility to stop it by making Zoom calls, sending WhatsApp messages, and hacking Faith’s MacBook.
War of the Worlds isn’t supposed to be a funny movie, but it’s hilarious, usually for the wrong reasons. Ice Cube’s shtick is totally ill-fitting in the context of a disaster movie, let alone a conspiratorial government thriller, and the scenes where he’s required to express earnest emotional sentiment to his children play like parody, as if he’s seconds away from offering them both out for a fight. He treats both of his kids with the same aggressive disdain as Faith’s boyfriend Mark, an Amazon delivery driver with a unique set of day-saving skills all pertaining to Amazon’s excellence as a delivery service, which leaps so far across the boundary of good taste that it is now technically impossible for any movie to be more cynically corporatized than this one.
One or two half-decent ideas in the screenlife premise — such as Will hijacking a Tesla to ferry Faith to safety, driving it remotely while she lectures him about his emotional unavailability from the back seat — are consistently undermined by clunky, needless uses of the format, like in a bit where Will needs to reroute Sandra’s cell phone to the DHS satellite, says out loud, “Hold on, I’m rerouting her cell to our satellite”, and then we have to watch him click a button labelled “reroute cellular to satellite”. Stuff like that happens constantly, creating a patina of fussy mundanity over what should be an engaging alien invasion story.
Of course, this version of War of the Worlds isn’t intended to be an alien invasion story, at least not entirely. It’s much more of a cautionary tale about government overreach and the endless battle between security and privacy, but the themes are completely garbled in a movie with a climax that is unambiguously an advert for Amazon Prime Air. It’s no surprise this was dumped without ceremony on Amazon’s streaming service; what is surprising is the blatancy with which it reveals that with or without an alien invasion, the entire human race may well be doomed.