Notes
My quick rating - 3.8/10. There’s something about seeing Ice Cube’s face on a sci-fi thriller poster that immediately pulls you in. Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe it's misplaced hope. Either way, this 2025 War of the Worlds opens with a promising setup, Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a top-tier Homeland Security cyber-analyst who monitors the nation through an Orwellian surveillance program. But when an unknown digital anomaly sparks chaos, Radford begins to suspect that the real enemy isn’t just from another world, it might be his own government. Sounds cool, right?
Yeah, I thought so too, but hold that thought.
What starts as a potentially fresh, techno-savvy reimagining of H.G. Wells' classic soon spirals into a cluttered, confused mess that feels like someone tried to make Host, WarGames, and War of the Worlds all at once, and then uploaded it directly to TikTok. And yes, at one point, "Shall we play a game?" is typed on a computer screen.
The storytelling is presented almost entirely through computer screens, phone footage, text messages, and drone feeds. While that “screenlife” approach has worked for films like Searching, here it just becomes exhausting. Ice Cube spends most of the film clicking around DHS surveillance feeds from his desk, isolated in what feels like a digital quarantine zone. There's no energy, no chemistry, and practically no human interaction, because no two characters ever appear in the same room. That might have been understandable during the peak of the pandemic, but in 2025, it feels like a strange creative constraint unless this really was a COVID leftover they finally decided to release.
The infamous Amazon drone delivery scene—intended, I assume, as satire—plays like a bad commercial mashed into a bad movie. It’s blatant, jarring, and unintentionally hilarious. And when the action does finally pick up, it’s edited like a YouTube compilation reel, clearly targeting viewers with a max 20-second attention span. Rapid cuts, flashy overlays, and game-like HUDs only distance the viewer from the stakes of the invasion.
To its credit, the alien invaders are actually quite well designed. They maintain some traditional elements, tentacles, and eerie movement, but are updated with an oddly biomechanical twist. Unfortunately, they’re never scary. We only ever see them through surveillance footage or a drone's eye view. There’s no dread, no suspense. You never feel like the aliens are coming for you. They're just background noise to a story that desperately wants to be about “surveillance vs privacy,” but forgets to be about people.
It's clear the filmmakers wanted to modernize Wells' tale with a twist that fits today’s digital paranoia. And in theory, that’s a smart move. But the execution is thin, the characters undercooked, and the final product feels rushed, like they tried to cram five phases of an alien war into 90 minutes without letting any of it breathe.
Still, it’s not the absolute bottom of the barrel. (War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, anyone?) But don’t be fooled by the online backlash; it’s not that bad. Just underwhelming. And while Cube does his best to bring some presence to the chaos, he’s trapped in a format that gives him little to do beyond yelling threats to his screen.
War of the Worlds tries to warn us about the dangers of blind trust in tech, but ironically, it feels like it was made by an algorithm. Disconnected, distracted, and ultimately forgettable.
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