War Of The Worlds (2025)

It’s a copper-bottomed Hollywood high-concept pitch: what if the fate of America was riding on Ice Cube’s ability to cut and paste really fast? There’s a shit-ton of typing in Amazon’s re-do of H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds, the alien invasion seen from the POV of Cube’s domestic-terror analyst’s computer desktop. Depicting the attack via security cameras, phones, Facebook and CNN reports, the result is a Roland Emmerich-esque epic shot on 13% battery: a poorly played, clueless, witless affair that fumbles the one or two good ideas it has.

If Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War Of The Worlds tapped deeply into post-9/11 anxieties, this latest update feeds into all the fears of today — the invasion of privacy, the dangers of data farming, the duplicity of governments, where Amazon will dump your package — but doesn’t have any idea about how to make them feel real or pertinent.

Cube is Will Radford, a Department Of Homeland Security wonk who works in an empty office but has access to every surveillance camera in the US. Early doors, he uses this privileged position to spy on his scientist daughter Faith (Iman Benson) — he has a camera in her fridge, presumably to check her Yakult stocks — and his layabout computer-geek son David (Henry Hunter Hall).

Cube’s response to all this is his trademark resting scowl face and it’s an expression that rarely changes when fireballs flame across the sky, crash into buildings and, in a rare impressive moment, tripods emerge from downed meteors. Yet, as the world seems to be falling apart and in-between briefing POTUS, Radford mostly ignores the carnage and diverts all his resources to checking on the safety of his kids. More than any of the weightier themes the script invokes, this is what War Of The Worlds, 2025 edition, is really about: it takes a full-on alien attack causing global devastation to teach Will he needs to let go of his grown-up children.

In his radio dramatisation of the story in 1938, Orson Welles used the medium of the moment to create widespread panic, and there is something in the idea of telling the (oft-told) story through contemporary media. There are also some interesting tweaks here: the red weed and the killer virus get a fun modern makeover. But this is weak: poor filmmaking (Eminem promo director Rich Lee has no idea how to depict people talking on screens convincingly), cheapo special effects, dumbass plotting, terrible dialogue (choice cut: “Take your intergalactic asses back home!”), poor performances and a climax that sees an Amazon service save the day. Prime nonsense.