Ice Cube’s sci-fi flops on Amazon Prime

There’s no mistaking War of the Worlds (2025), dumped at the end of July on to Amazon Prime Video, for Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s acclaimed 2005 War of the Worlds. Or Byron Haskin’s Academy Award-nominated 1953 War of the Worlds. Or the BBC’s 2019 TV version of War of the Worlds, which expanded the story to 24 episodes. Or even The Asylum’s 2005 straight-to-DVD War of the Worlds, which looks like it was produced for several thousand dollars.

There are many, many adaptations of H.G. Wells’ 19th-century sci-fi novel — some good, some bad. This year’s version lowers the quality bar so far it’s practically Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

That’s because War of the Worlds (2025) takes place entirely on a computer screen — part of the ever-expanding “screenlife” genre — and, consciously or not, makes the case for a technocratic societal reboot where Teslas cars are rescue vehicles and Amazon drones swoop in to save the day. It’s also a complete misfire, to the tune of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. The only redeeming quality: Ice Cube now has a place on Mount Razziemore in a movie I can only hope earns its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Ice Cube stars as Will Radford, a surveillance technician working for the Department of Homeland Security. When he isn’t spying on his daughter and son using the nation’s Big Brother camera grid — what a guy! — he’s averting national crises by snuffing out extremism in America’s suburban neighborhoods. His latest target: “Disruptor,” a classic hooded hacker with Jigsaw-from-Saw voice modulation who intends on exposing a vague U.S. conspiracy, codenamed Goliath. Despite his ability to monitor and screw with every person on Earth with the click of a few buttons, Will does not believe the government would ever pull a fast one on the American people. His hunt for Disruptor is interrupted by a sudden, full-scale alien invasion.

If you squint, you can see how director Rich Lee — who has directed some visually intoxicating music videos for Eminem, Lana del Rey, and Billie Eilish over the years — might see the screenlife format as a modern update to Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the found-footage fakery of its day. And there are shimmers of how Lee’s background in action previsualization for movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy could create thrilling ground-level visuals during a tripod attack. But the experiment fails as War of the Worlds’ disparate elements — Ice Cube’s over-the-top performance, SyFy-level special effects, and what appears to be literal phoned in performances by notable actors like Clark Gregg — collide in a cacophony of pop-up windows. The scope of the apocalyptic situation, so grand-yet-human in Spielberg and Haskin’s blockbuster versions, is suffocated by Microsoft Teams (maybe a Zoom version would have been slightly better).

I don’t blame the screenlife genre as a whole. Unfriended remains unmatched, while Shudder’s Host rode the unfortunate circumstances of 2020 to video-call cinema glory. Last year’s Red Rooms even proved clicking around a computer screen in the dark could make for a gut-wrenching watch. Lee’s ambition for War of the Worlds isn’t necessarily lower, but the execution is jumbled. As the destruction ramps up, and tripods run amok across the globe, we’re mostly stuck with Ice Cube gawking and screaming into his computer like he’s an audience member of a much better movie. “Took your ass out!” he bellows as he watches fake CNN clips. I felt jealous.

I am typically pro-Cube. I want the best for Cube. From Boyz in the Hood to Friday to the Barbershop movies and even junk like XXX: State of the Union, his natural no-BS charisma has proved versatile. But a Quentin Tarantino or Safdie brother needs to come rescue this guy. Zero chemistry breaks through the computer screens.

A maudlin screenplay credited to Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman apes the Spielberg “single dad” conceit, with Ice Cube attempting to parent his pregnant daughter and conspiracy-prone kid via video chat while he races to investigate the invasion from afar. Unfortunately, Will is a bit of a dick, and his kids are all plot pawns — she’s a biologist, he’s a hacker! — for a contrived conclusion that clumsily winds back to the original source material. Thankfully, their strained family bickering has the rhythms of a Saturday Night Live disaster-movie parody. We’re not supposed to laugh, but it’s OK if we do.

Partway through War of the Worlds, Lee’s movie veers over a cliff, passing from well-intentioned into straight rotten. I at least found it delightfully obscene. In the end, the surveillance state — ridiculed by Will’s son, defended by a father losing faith in what he knows — is the hero. When Will and his NASA pal Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Langoria, the only person asked to run around on foot in this film) discover that the entire war is a distraction effort to allow tiny alien robots to hack the world’s data servers. Though Ice Cube mentions multiple times that global servers are down, voila!, his keyboard is the almighty savior (this, despite the fact that he appears locked in his control room in one of the most comical bits of the movie). Using the power of Big Tech, Will and Sandra devise a plan that relies entirely on… Amazon… to deliver a flash drive… in the nick of time. Thank you for your service, “Buy Now with 1-Click.”

And yes, before all that, someone really does escape a tripod in a Tesla.

War of the Worlds is a movie in which the phrase “fake news!” is yelped before characters actually do uncover a Deep State plot. If the movie were any good, I might fear the implications. But it seems like the reasonable pitch — to Cloverfield-ify H.G. Welles — maaaaaay have gotten away from everyone involved. There might be an audience for it: Those who hope Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will have the clearance to get their playthings up in the sky before we actually have to defend ourselves from Martians may see it another way. Which actually makes Prime Video the perfect straight-to-streaming home for this bizarre 2025 reject.