War of the Worlds (2025) REVIEW
“Move Bitch, get out the way” — Ice Cube
When an idea for a story comes to mind, the first thing a writer does is think about how to make it unique and interesting. A concept is the foundation of a story, but how do you turn that concept into something original and memorable?
Over the years, people often say that as long as you have a good concept, your story is bound to be great. However, even if your concept is unoriginal or has been done countless times, you can still make it work through its execution.
Just look at Companion, a movie where the love bot goes rogue. We’ve seen that concept before, but the film sets it apart by switching the roles of the human and the bot. Challenger has the idea of a tennis movie, but it’s really a film about power dynamics and how one uses the other to control and leverage to get what they want. These two movies feature concepts that are familiar to everyone, but they succeed by being different.
The Original
War of the Worlds is a classic story about aliens invading Earth. It’s the first of its kind, but by today’s standards, it’s just your average alien invasion story. A few clues are left behind throughout history, but humans are too oblivious to notice them, so the aliens land and start their killing spree. The aliens want to take over, but some humans manage to stop them and save the world.
It’s cliché and has been recycled so many times, so in 2025, how would you adapt a story like this? How do you turn a concept that’s so boring and cliché into a masterpiece? Do you provide an in-depth look at a human turning toward the alien’s side because of humanity’s cruelty? Do we see it from the alien’s perspective? Do we focus on it through the eyes of a mentally ill person?
Let’s not do any of that. Instead, we take this classic story and turn it into a desktop motion picture. The entire film won’t feature scenes of actors running around, but instead, shows people sitting in an office reacting to what’s happening.
The Impact
One of the most notable impacts of War of the Worlds is that, in 1938, Orson Welles narrated the story over the local radio station. He narrated it so convincingly that people started to panic, thinking he was broadcasting a real alien invasion. Once it was revealed to be fiction, it seemed pretty stupid, but someone thought maybe they could use this storytelling method to create that same level of impact, which led to this film. Since modern audiences no longer listen to the radio, they thought of using the internet to tell the story.
When doing something like this, there are two key aspects to consider. The first is the writing. You need to have excellent storytelling to truly capture people’s hearts. The second is the narrator. Only someone with the skill and talent to present such a story can evoke the right tone and feelings. Without either, you’re left with a scrambled mess of nothing.
2025’s Version
Narration
2025’s War of the Worlds doesn’t succeed in either area. Let’s start with the narration. Ice Cube plays the protagonist, reacting to what’s happening. To say the least, he’s a terrible actor.
Every time he reacts to a big or crazy moment, it comes across as more funny than serious. His reactions are similar to those of reaction YouTubers. We all know they make exaggerated expressions just to get views, but in reality, they don’t care much about the content they’re reacting to. That’s what this whole film feels like — a reaction YouTuber movie where they make faces in front of the camera.
It doesn’t help that Ice Cube is reading from his script with no emotion at all. When a pivotal moment like the potential death of his kids happens, he just delivers some lines, and that’s it. There’s no emotion or sadness behind it. It’s not completely soulless, because he somehow turns these emotional moments into comedy, but that’s not what the film intended.
I know Ice Cube is somewhat popular, but I had no idea who he was before this movie. Watching him here makes me question why they even cast him. It’s another case of studios using a rapper or singer’s popularity to boost star power and attract their fans. Usually, that doesn’t work because singers or rappers aren’t trained actors. They can try to make it big, but it takes a lot of directing, a great script, and passion for acting to become a good actor in Hollywood. Sadly, Ice Cube lacked all of that, so they just had him reading the script and making faces in front of the camera.
Writing
As for the writing, it’s one of the worst scripts I’ve ever seen. There are so many reasons why certain moments or elements are just terrible. You have characters who are either too smart, caught in coincidence, or just too artificial to believe.
Ice Cube’s entire family somehow has the knowledge and power to save the world. His son happens to be a brilliant hacker who’s avoided the FBI’s hunt for some time. It would have made sense to develop this character more with physical interactions, but due to the film’s concept, we learn nothing about him.
Ice Cube’s daughter gets stabbed in the leg, and Ice Cube has to find ways to help her in his office. She’s also pregnant and has an Amazon delivery guy as her husband, who was there just for the sake of advertising. Her inclusion is just so the plot can move forward in the climax, and also as a way for Amazon to promote its services.
The way this film creates tension, suspense, or even an ounce of emotion is all executed in the worst ways possible. For example, Ice Cube is a weirdo who uses top-secret government technology to spy on his kids. He stalks his daughter to see if she’s eaten by hacking the fridge. He hacks into his son’s computer to delete his game and into his daughter’s laptop to check her messages. It’s weird, and we’re supposed to care about this character because he’s a dad who cares, but his behavior looks more like that of an obsessive psychopath.
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There are scenes where a character is hurt or nearly dies, and it’s supposedly very suspenseful, but all I could do was laugh. As I said, Ice Cube’s daughter was stabbed, and he can’t get out because the building is on lockdown. He could have easily hacked the building to open a door, but he didn’t. Instead, he sits in his office and hacks a Tesla to self-drive to a safe place. That’s not all. When she’s in the Tesla, he begins to apologize for stalking and all the other stuff he did, even as she’s literally stabbed and dying.
There is one scene where Ice Cube’s son is running away from the aliens. The suspense is whether he makes it to safety. The big moment comes when his camera glitches and stops, so we’re supposed to be in the dark about whether he survived, but it’s so poorly done that it’s hard to feel the suspense. In fact, the effect feels more comedic than suspenseful.
By the climax, there’s a reveal that his son was the mastermind behind the FBI’s most wanted cybercriminal. It also turns out the government has been lying. The whole family starts saving the world. Ice Cube uploads a YouTube video of himself with some of the cringiest visuals. His son creates a virus in minutes. His daughter has an organic virus she can alter into a digital virus, despite being a biology major, not a computer expert. At this point, the absurdity is so extreme you’d think nothing could get crazier, but it does.
By the end, Ice Cube needs a pen drive for the virus, and the only way to get it is via an Amazon Prime Delivery Drone. An Amazon Prime delivery guy asks Ice Cube to place an order so the drone can activate itself. The film then shows an entire Amazon store segment where he orders the drive.
The climax essentially becomes Amazon saving the day, and it gets even crazier. At one point, the drone is flipped by an alien, and a homeless guy happens to be nearby. Ice Cube’s daughter finds the homeless man’s number and messages him to flip the drone. The guy refuses, so they bribe him with a $1,000 Amazon gift card, which motivates him to risk his life. The blatant product placement here is ridiculous — I can’t believe someone would write “Amazon drone” or “Amazon saving the day” into a script.
Product Placements
The amount of product placements in this film is excessive. There’s Microsoft Teams, Facebook, Zoom, Gmail, CNN, and every website imaginable. Some of these integrations are so bad that they feel more like contractual obligations, or else they tried to make it make sense in an absurd way.
Ice Cube has a dead wife, and he keeps her memories on Facebook. I’m serious — the last message he kept from her was a voice message from Facebook Messenger. Does anyone really use Facebook Messenger to communicate? Do couples even do that?
Some apps like Microsoft Teams or TeamViewer make sense, but then when you think about it, it feels weird. Do top government officials really discuss secret agendas on Microsoft Teams? I know office workers do, but government officials? When their Teams already has a meeting function, why use Zoom? Maybe it looks more professional, but I am pretty sure government officials meet in person during an invasion that could end the world instead of FaceTime each other.
The funniest integration is Gmail. Ice Cube wants to write his final message to his kids in case he dies. He’s been chatting with them over Teams or WhatsApp, but for this last message, he opens Gmail to type it out. It’s so funny — he’s literally talking to them and then switches to another app to do so. Even funnier, because emails are usually more formal, he chooses to write his message in an email as a form of formality, even though they are a family. That just cracks me up.
The whole point of this film is to show everyone how cool this genre is, but it never fits the story they’re telling at all. For one, this is a standard alien invasion story with few, if any, unique elements. Characters are just archetypes of what we expect from a story like this. The only unique thing is the genre it’s in. When you have a story like this, it’s more engaging when the characters go and experience it rather than just sitting in their rooms reacting to it.
Action
An action movie has cool fight scenes because we see them happening. We experience what the protagonist is going through. But if the protagonist were to sit in their room all day reacting only to action beats, it would be incredibly boring. That’s the whole story of this film in a nutshell. It takes the bare minimum and turns it into trash. Nothing works on any level.
Theme
Thematically, it attempts to explore themes such as government surveillance, data records, and corruption; however, none of these elements are effectively conveyed or deliver any compelling messages.
The film pauses for a character to say how ironic it is that Ice Cube never wanted to leave the office, but now he’s trapped in it. That line comes out of nowhere, especially when the character is bleeding and dying.
It’s like the writer is trying to show how smart they are, but good writing doesn’t need you to tell the audience that. The audience will figure it out on their own.
Conclusion
In conclusion, 2025’s War of the Worlds is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It has some entertaining elements, like the genre and Ice Cube’s exaggerated performance, but the story and everything it tries to do fail at every level imaginable.
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War of the Worlds (2025) is now streaming on Amazon Prime
