War of the Worlds (2025) Review

By Justin D Williams

A government surveillance expert, Will Radford (played by Ice Cube), discovers an alien invasion while monitoring threats through a massive surveillance system.

How do you show faith in a film? It's not putting it out the same week you dropped the first trailer. Amazon's War of the Worlds is a film that tries to give a fresh take on the classic H.G. Wells novel. Unfortunately, as the younger generation would say, this ain't chief.

Unlike most alien invasion films that thrive and succeed on spectacle and visual effects. War of the Worlds unfolds its story entirely through the digital lens using computers, tablets, Zoom, and smartphones. The movie shows the event through security feeds, desktop notifications, video calls, and endless windows. Director Rich Lee, along with writers Marc Hyman and Kenneth Golde, attempted to modernize Wells' tale for a new generation whose lives are essentially immersed in screens. The concept makes sense, but the execution and pay do not. It follows the format of similar films like Unfriended and Searching, but this is War of the Worlds we're talking about. This needed to be a spectacle, and based on my research, this was filmed during the pandemic, so restrictions played a huge role in why we got the product we got.

The movie falls into the so bad it's good category. It is unintentionally funny, and the sad part about it is that there are some very talented actors in here, like Clark Gregg, Eva Longoria, and Ice Cube. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a surveillance system expert for Homeland Security who is an overbearing, overprotective father of his children, his pregnant daughter Faith, and his gamer son Dave. The script calls for the emotional weight of Will to show a balance between the drama of what's happening to the world and the concern for his family. I love Ice Cube, but he was miscast in this film. His facial expressions, delivery come off unintentionally funny, so I thought this was a parody of a B-movie I would see on Tubi. The film tries to balance and make commentary on family, privacy, and trust beneath the alien chaos. Will's surveillance of his children is the core central focus. The film wants to tackle the topic of security vs privacy but it this would've, could've been way better without the whole War of the Worlds element. Ice Cube could've easily played an overbearing Homeland Security dad whose past experiences leave him paranoid and take a dark path to keep his kids safe. Will Radford in this film doesn't come off as a hero in fact he comes off as creepy. Needless to say, other characters are one-note and one-dimensional. Clark Gregg plays NSA Director Donald Briggs, and Eva Longoria plays NASA Scientist Sandra Salas. They both play generic characters that receive no real characterization and come and go.

Finally, the biggest sin of this film is the constant Amazon promotion in this film. This film has Amazon Prime Air helicopters, to uniforms showing the smile logo. The product placement is unforgivable. It feels like a two-hour advertisement for the services and products rather than an actual film at times. The alien scenes are laughable. Clunky CGI effects kill any form of immersion, and the constant cuts showing multiple panels like a comic book are a distraction and hard to focus.

Final Rating: War of the Worlds is a swing and a miss, but it truly is so bad that it's good that you must see it for yourself. The overuse of branding and underwhelming effects kill any immersion it attempted to have.