War of the Worlds (2025)

• Directed by Rich Lee
• July 30, 2025
• Prime Video
• Supposedly based on H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds

While a Department of Homeland Security officer helps FBI agents try to find a mysterious hacker, meteors hiding aliens begin falling all over the world. If you cannot figure out who the hacker is then you will find this good.

Sometimes a movie comes along and it’s a good idea executed poorly. Sometimes (and more bafflingly) it’s a bad idea executed far worse than probably anybody involved thought it could be. War of the Worlds 2025 is the latter and it makes you question who greenlit this movie. Were drugs involved? Did those behind this movie have compromising information about all the right people?

This opens with the obligatory acknowledgment of the H.G. Wells novel, but I have absolutely no idea what it lifts from that book (and I’ve read it) other than liberal uses of the title to describe the events in the movie by news blurbs and various disembodied voices. Right away I was struck by how this felt like a mockbuster trying to cash in on the name recognition of a theatrical movie. But there are no War of the Worlds movies coming out right now.

There are so many baffling decisions made in this movie. The biggest questionable decision was the casting of Ice Cube as Will Radford who is a surveillance and threat assessment expert at the Department of Homeland Security. When speaking as Will, Ice Cube often sounds baffled by the technical jargon he struggles to say convincingly. His speech slows down as he tries to get the words right. To make the audience believe you need to speak with authority o your character’s topic. Cube talks like he is lost.

That visual field is another very questionable decision. With the Facetime/Tik Tok aspect ratio you have a cast of characters never in the same room often reacting to noises and action happening out of the field of view. That makes for a very boring movie. In War of the Worlds 2025 you’re basically watching a series of phone calls strung together. This goes hand-in-hand with the cheap effects that are on par with a YouTube fan film.

Emotional moments are completely on earned. The heart to heart between Will and his daughter Faith (Iman Benson) is just tossed in there but they never really hashed out their differences. And why include her occupation? It does nothing for the story. Her boyfriend Mark (Devon Bostick) is an Amazon Delivery driver and that does something for the story. What a coincidence that this is released on Prime Video!

Faith and Will have some serious issues that one would think a heartfelt apology from her dad would not fix. She is bitter over his smothering and controlling attitude to the point she was not inviting him to her baby shower. The sounds like the first steps of cutting him out of the child’s life. It does not help things that he is using his work time to spy on his family.The moment of reconciliation seems to be little more than an “I am sorry” followed by “It’s okay.” Then they move on. It might’ve helped if the characters had been face-to-face.

I guess this War of the Worlds wanted to make a statement on the surveillance state. Will’s son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) is a hacker by the name of ‘Disruptor’ that exposes government secrets. One is a program called Goliath capable of hacking and monitoring everybody. The aliens feed on data. Not sure how that works. Also I do not know how the aliens can sense data as demonstrated by the sample containing data they went after but cannot find the data centers they are looking for? An intriguing idea that they are here to collect data but to what end? Like Brainiac or The Borg?

The acting is just terrible. Ice cube is completely miscast and the other actors that play his family just can’t carry the parts. Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, and Michael O’Neill do not even try. It is clear they are phoning it in with Gregg coming off the worst of the cast. Eva Longoria though seems quite happy to just be working!

If you ever wanted to watch a movie that looked like it was released on TikTok, then the 2025 version of War of the Worlds is for you! With bad acting and bad cinematography and bad everything, it’s not worth your time. Slamming your head repeatedly into a door might be a better choice of your time.