War Of The Worlds (2025) – War Is Hell!

Released: 30th July
Seen: 30th September

In recent years, a new genre called “Screenlife” has grown in popularity, resulting in films like Missing, Searching and Host where all the action takes place on a computer screen. When done right, it can be a truly fascinating way to tell a story, allowing the viewer to jump from video calls to emails, and even see messages being typed and deleted, giving a glimpse into a character’s mind. It’s simple, effective and genuinely a versatile way of making a film… however, when done badly, you get something like War of the Worlds, a contender for every “Worst of 2025” list that you’ll see in a few months.

By now, you surely know the story of War of the Worlds, it’s the alien invasion story that all others are measured by. This one puts us at the computer terminal of Will Radford (Ice Cube), a surveillance expert at the Department of Homeland Security who is just having a normal day at work when the invasion happens. He spends the whole day using his absolutely comical hacking skills to keep an eye on his pregnant daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), and his slacker son, Dave (Henry Hunter Hall). Occasionally, while trying to protect his kids and save the world from the comfort of his office desk, Will also needs help from Faith’s boyfriend Mark (Devon Bostick), a super awesome Amazon driver who can do anything because he works for Amazon and therefore is akin to a God in this universe, ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY AMAZON WHERE OUR DRIVERS TOTALLY DO NOT HAVE TO PISS IN BOTTLES!

Let’s get the nice stuff out of the way right now. The idea of telling War of the Worlds using the screenlife genre is fucking brilliant. Straight up, no caveats, telling the story of an alien invasion from the perspective of the computer is a brilliant way to modernise the story in a way that gives it a chance to have a visceral impact. Since nowadays most news is delivered via our phones and our computers, it only makes sense to try and tell a version of the story where the first time we learn about the invasion is through a notification popping up on screen. It’s a style that allows for a relatable and engaging take that could easily put the audience in the shoes of the main character via how they react, how they type and delete panicked messages or how they panic while waiting for a call to connect. It’s a great style to tell the story in and a really good director and writer could make it work… but we don’t have that, we have abject shit but hey, they had the right idea at some point.

Ice Cube is not a good actor, let’s just all agree to that. He certainly has his place, if you need to cast an Ice Cube type, then he’s the right guy for the job, but he is not the right guy for the job when you need a role to portray nuance, terror, emotions that aren’t “oh, that happened”. You want to pinpoint the main thing that War of the Worlds fucks up? Casting Ice Cube would be that point. There is not a single second of this film where he makes sense in this role. He barely changes his facial expression; half the time, he seems disinterested in what’s going on and barely changes his tone of voice from scene to scene. You could literally edit his reaction to his daughter almost bleeding to death in the back of an Uber and his reaction to his house being blown up, and you couldn’t tell the difference. It’s a performance that can best be described as “I needed something to do during Covid and I couldn’t be bothered learning how to make sourdough bread like a normal person” and it’s the biggest fault the film has. Fortunately, the film has many faults because it is a bad film that was badly made.

You would think that a rich, fertile story like War of the Worlds would be an easy one to tell; it’s been told numerous times over the years, so surely working out how to make a cohesive script for it would be easy… It’s not, if this film is any indication, because the script is garbage. Structurally, it’s just all over the place; the characters are defined purely by their job and the dialogue ranges from laughable to pathetic. If someone were to try and convince me that this film was improvised by everyone on video chat, I would believe them because that would make more sense than the idea that people wrote this… but then I learn that one of the men who wrote this also wrote Show Dogs so it makes sense that the film is badly written, they hired bad writers which will naturally lead to a bad script.

Even with a bad script and a bad lead, maybe you’d think War of the Worlds could be salvaged by a keen directorial eye… sadly, we don’t have one of those, we have a guy who can’t hold still and thinks shaking everything and a lot of fuzz will make things look intense. You can certainly feel an effort being made here, people are trying to produce something of value but none of the actors have been given any decent direction, the people behind the cameras seem to be lost and the VFX are so clearly just temporary stand ins that weren’t meant to be seen like this… at least, the effects that aren’t just actual war and disaster footage with spaceships edited in (oh yeah, this film does that… so that’s awful!). 

Then there’s the product placement, oh my god in hell, the product placement is some of the absolute worst that has ever been done. Having the main character’s daughter be saved by a Tesla that the main character hacks would be bad enough, but one could learn to live with it (even despite the owner of Tesla being a fascistic little fuckweasel) but then there’s the bullshit with how War of the Worlds deifies Amazon. The Amazon delivery driver can save lives with his packaging skills. They repeatedly talk about spying on people’s Amazon shopping carts and the entire climax is just “Will the Amazon Air Delivery make it in time?”. It’s a level of product placement that should have caused everyone involved to start projectile vomiting in shame for agreeing to it. My genuine hope is that this was a mandate by Bezos to get the movie released on Prime because if this was part of the original plan, then everyone involved needs to be punished by a day in the stocks in the middle of a town square. I’ll bring the rotten tomatoes to throw at them.

What really hurts the most about this film is that if there was ever a time to tell a creative version of War of the Worlds, during the pandemic was absolutely the perfect time. We were all paranoid, anxious and terrified to go outside because of an airborne virus that could kill us at any moment (It still can, COVID is not over, stop acting like it is!), and that is the perfect environment to tell this story of an alien invasion that destroys the planet. It could’ve been done so well, the perfect reason to tell it all through a webcam, combined with a perfect time to play on our anxiety, and they fumbled it so badly that they ended up creating borderline unwatchable garbage.

War of the Worlds is a classic story for good reason, and it’s been done by so many great filmmakers before, from Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg… and now it’s been made into absolute shit. This version of War of the Worlds is just dreadful, a great idea let down by every element of the filmmaking process. It’s almost impressive how this film manages to fail in every possible way that a film could fail in, like it took a dare to be the biggest piece of shit that a film could be and damn if it doesn’t look like it might win that bet. It’s a bad film made by people who really shouldn’t try to make another film again. If you drop a ball this hard, you shouldn’t be allowed to try again.