I didn’t care for War of the Worlds (2025) that much and it didn’t help that Ice Cube was the lead. It was released on July 30, 2025 and instantly gained immense criticism by both movie fans and professional reviewers. It was distributed by Universal Pictures on Amazon Prime Video. It has a total runtime of 89 minutes. The film is another take on the novel written by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. There were four films and two radio dramas that adapted the novel before this.
Rich Lee directed this film and it was his first too, before this he mainly directed music videos. Patrick Aiello and Timur Bekmambetov were the producers. The screenplay was written by Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman while the story was by Kenneth A. Golde. It stars O’Shea Jackson Sr. (Ice Cube), Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Henry Hunter Hall, Iman Benson, and Devon Bostick. I think the most impressive actor in this cast list is Clark Gregg, who played Agent Phil Coulson in most of the movies in phase one of the MCU.
The story is shown through the computer screen of Will Radford (Ice Cube) who works at the Department of Homeland Security and has the power to observe every single person he wants through any camera, drone, and even social media account. Will is struggling to stay connected with his two children after their mother’s death while they grow up. At some point the Earth becomes littered with meteors that contain aliens that are trying to get the data all over the world. Will has to juggle his own family issues while also trying to save the world.
I have quite a few issues with this film, some more important than others. The smallest was the computer graphics, there were a few cases where the aliens looked extremely fake. I also thought the computer point of view wasn’t very good, it just didn’t look authentic and Will Radford was able to do almost anything through it even if it just didn’t make sense. The product placement was one of the reasons the movie went viral, one of the characters is an Amazon delivery driver and that was the one trait of his and it led to some moments that had such obvious promotions for Amazon Prime. Also some of the acting was quite bad, especially from Ice cube.
In conclusion, only watch this movie if you aren’t expecting to be blown away, it was a little funny at some moments but still not anything of note. I’d give this movie a 2.1/5, that sounds good but I only gave it 2 because that’s my baseline, it has the length of a movie (or a long episode off a show) and people still worked very hard to make this film come true.
