The 2025 War of the Worlds is a staggering case study in cinematic failure. Not the fun kind of failure — the kind that’s bizarre and watchable — but the corporate, joyless, “how did this get made?” flavor that leaves you with a mild headache and a strong urge to cancel Prime Video. Directed by Rich Lee, a former music video director best known for Eminem collabs and previsualization work on Pirates of the Caribbean, this take on H.G. Wells’ classic novel is a Frankenstein’s monster of bad CGI, awkward product placement, phoned-in performances, and tone-deaf seriousness.
This movie isn’t just bad — it’s historic. A monument to corporate overreach and creative misfires that will be taught in film schools… as a warning.
✦ PLOT (Spoiler-Free)
A U.S. government computer security analyst, played by Ice Cube, finds his routine upended by a full-blown alien invasion. Used to combating virtual threats, he’s thrust into a world of tripods, destruction, and deep government secrets. The invaders? They don’t just want Earth. They want our data.
Yes. Our data.
Set almost entirely through a series of Zoom calls, surveillance feeds, and online shopping carts, the movie attempts a “screen-life” format (like Unfriended or Searching), but forgets the most important part: crafting an actual movie around the gimmick. What unfolds is a slog through poorly-rendered explosions, wooden acting, and the single worst use of product placement in a film since Mac and Me.
✦ CHARACTERS
Ice Cube as Homeland Security Analyst:
He’s got a dozen laptops, a custom drone interface, and all the enthusiasm of a guy who realized halfway through filming that this would haunt his IMDb forever. At no point does he leave the room he’s in. He mostly reacts to stock footage, spills his coffee, and shouts things like, “That’s crazy!” with the conviction of a man reading cue cards off a teleprompter.
Eva Longoria as Government Official:
Appears in a few Zoom calls with fake weather apocalypse graphics in the background. She tries to warn the government, but is mostly ignored — like the audience trying to tell Amazon not to release this thing.
The Disruptor (Identity Redacted for Spoilers):
A mysterious hacker is being tracked by Ice Cube. His identity is meant to be a shocking twist. It isn’t. The movie only has five characters.
The Aliens:
Tentacled data vampires who drink information through glowing USB straws. Their arrival coincides with a military collapse, not because they’re invincible — but because our bullets apparently stop working when our internet goes down.
✦ THE GOOD
Let’s get this out of the way — there are tiny nuggets of accidental humor:
- Ice Cube’s facial reactions range from disinterested to “mildly inconvenienced dad.”
- Product placement is so egregious that it becomes surreal. (“Place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone” is an actual line.)
- There’s one scene where a CGI plane forgets how gravity works because it’s been “data drained.”
But those glimmers don’t justify the hour-and-a-half it takes to get through this mess. You’re better off reading the Wikipedia synopsis while watching Birdemic.
✦ THE BAD
Where do we begin?
✦ 1. The Visuals Are Atrocious
- Tripods look like outdated PS2-era graphics.
- Video glitches are fake-looking, and not in a stylized way — more like “student accidentally added the wrong filter” way.
- One scene features Ice Cube’s daughter escaping danger through a city… except the background footage clearly shows people casually shopping and licking ice cream. The filmmakers forgot to edit the destruction in.
✦ 2. The Plot Is Unintelligible
- The aliens are after our data.
- The government has a top-secret data collection program called Goliath.
- Ice Cube’s kids are all conveniently data scientists, codebreakers, or rebels.
- Data is portrayed as a physical substance, like gas or electricity, and the aliens “drain” it from servers using suction tubes.
✦ 3. It’s One Giant Amazon Commercial
There’s no subtlety. Amazon logos are everywhere. Plot points revolve around Amazon orders. Characters are literal Amazon drivers. There’s even a drone delivery sequence that saves the day, powered by a gift card. If you told me Amazon’s marketing department wrote the script using ChatGPT-1.0 on a dial-up modem, I’d believe you.
✦ 4. Awful Dialogue
Lines like:
- “Order the Chimera drone on Amazon now!”
- “Data is the most important human resource.”
- “Immediate data drain! The Space Force is blind!”
You can’t make this up. But someone did.
✦ SPOILER ZONE (⚠️)
Turn back now if you’re worried about spoilers — but trust us, you’re not missing much.
- The hacker Ice Cube turns out to be… his son.
- The aliens crashed in 1947 and have been hunting human data since then.
- The government built a program to collect Amazon cart data, which tipped off the aliens to attack us.
- Ice Cube’s daughter sends DNA to her brother, who converts it into code, which is then used to infect the alien mothership. Yes, DNA to code in under a minute.
- The final act involves a drone flown by a delivery guy who jukes and jives around alien tripods… and defeats them using a gift card.
✦ THEBIGBOIS’ VERDICT
TheBigBois — known for their ability to find joy in even the worst B-movie disasters — had a terrible time.
“Ice Cube fights CGI tentacles… and somehow that’s not the funniest part.”
“It’s not good-bad. It’s bad-bad.”
“This is generationally bad. Worse than Slingshot Cops. Worse than Atlantic Rim.”
“It felt like three hours. I checked the clock 10 minutes in.”
The collective rating:
One (1) out of 10.
The only reason it’s not a zero is that it technically functions as a movie (beginning, middle, end).
✦ SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
No.
Unless you’re planning a movie night with heavy alcohol, a group of snarky friends, and you enjoy suffering as a group bonding exercise.
Even then, Dragonball: Evolution might be more entertaining.
✦ TL;DR:
Aliens invade Earth to steal our Amazon cart data. Ice Cube defends humanity with a drone delivery and a thumb drive. The CGI looks like Beast Wars. The acting is sleep-deprived. The message? Our most precious human resource is… data.
You can’t make this up. But Rich Lee did.
And now we all have to live with it.
War of the Worlds (2025): A catastrophic misfire that manages to ruin a classic story, waste real talent, and insult the viewer's intelligence — all while hard-selling Amazon Prime. Avoid at all costs. – Asmodeus