WAR OF THE WORLDS (2025): Delicious, Delicious Garbage

There’s a new War of the Worlds movie. It stars Ice Cube and is streaming on Amazon. It’s terrible. But it’s so spectacularly, wonderfully terrible that it’s become an unmissable experience, the kind of absolute trash that only comes along once a year (usually in Sony supervillain origin movies). It is terrible in a way that’s very nurturing for the soul — the world needs terrible films, after all, just as much as it needs good ones.

War of the Worlds, produced by Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and helmed by music video director and VFX artist Rich Lee, attempts to boldly adapt H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classic for the modern age, the way that your digestive system boldly adapts a five-course dinner into excrement. The action mostly happens over the course of a few hours on William Radford’s (Ice Cube) computer. The aliens are here to eat our delicious data, it turns out, and Ice Cube is the only man who can stop them.

Aliens Invade, Hungry For Our Data

The best way to lampoon the movie is to merely summarize the plot: Ice Cube (as I will refer to his character from here on out) quickly finds out about a global alien invasion because his friend at NASA (Eva Longoria) — saved in his contacts as “Sandra NASA” because of course she is — tips him off to unusual weather patterns. And this is Ice Cube’s job because he’s apparently the only person working at this enormous Department of Homeland Security bunker. “I watch people, not weather,” he tells her. Ice Cube looks at lightning and tornadoes while he alt-tabs on a SWAT team raid and video calls his son (Henry Hunter Hall).

The FBI send him a search warrant via Microsoft Teams, and the file is titled “FBI_Search_Warrant.pdf,” as though that’s the only one they ever use. Ice Cube has a Staples “That Was Easy” button that he slaps every time he accomplishes a task, like pinpointing a cyberterrorist’s location or getting a signed search warrant, because he’s a pathetic Boomer. “Say it again,” Ice Cube commands, slapping the button again. “That was easy.” “Damn right,” Ice Cube says.

Ice Cube thinks his son needs to spend less time on video games and more time studying, so he hacks his son’s Steam account and uninstalls his favorite game. He thinks his pregnant daughter (Iman Benson) needs to eat more hard-boiled eggs (they’re right next to the muffins!) so he hacks her smart fridge and then yells at her. A few short but eventful minutes later, the aliens have attacked, his son is nearly killed numerous times, and an explosion lodges rebar into his daughter’s leg (wouldn’t have happened if she’d just eaten the damn hard-boiled egg!). Ice Cube, thinking quickly, ignores Zoom requests from his boss (Clark Gregg, presumably just here for yucks) and hacks a Tesla to drive his daughter to safety. He doesn’t hit the “That Was Easy” button for this, though — this is serious business, no time for celebration.

It’s hard to say how long all of this takes, since the film condenses about eight hours into 90 minutes without telling us how much time has passed. Still, the timeline doesn’t make any sense — reporters are on the ground delivering news broadcasts about the alien invasion within 20 minutes of the first meteors crashing, and jets are being scrambled before noon. Yet his daughter, Faith, leaves home to go “back to the lab” at 9:40, is in the city by 10:15, and the Tesla that Ice Cube commandeers takes an hour and 15 minutes to get her back home.

An Amazon Delivery Driver Saves The Day

Ice Cube cannot leave his DHS bunker, because the film relies on him sitting in his office for 90 minutes, so he calls his daughter’s boyfriend, Mark (Devon Bostick). Mark is an Amazon delivery driver, as we’re reminded constantly, and though the film was supposedly written and shot for a theatrical release before being acquired by Amazon, Marc Hyman and Kenneth A. Golde’s screenplay is undeniably deferential to the multibillion-dollar company. It’d be pathetic if it weren’t so consistently funny. So Ice Cube hacks Mark’s Amazon delivery van and somehow speaks through the one, two, three, four, five cameras in the van, commanding Mark to go save his daughter. (In reality, Amazon vans have four cameras that monitor driver performance, because megacorporations are almost as psychotically surveillance-happy as Ice Cube in War of the Worlds.) “Mark, you listen closely,” Ice Cube shouts. “Faith is losing blood. And you get your skinny ass over there. Now!”

Bostick’s performance is something special. The actor is perhaps the most accomplished thespian in the cast, having been in three Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, and Oppenheimer. And now he’s in War of the Worlds 2025, playing an Amazon driver who seems high off his gourd in every scene. Mark looks like he did a righteous bong rip before leaving for work that morning and is now having the worst day anyone has ever had in the history of next-day delivery.

Disrupting Some Shit

It’s nearly impossible to take in War of the Worlds’ inanity on a first watch. For every utterly idiotic line in the script, two more just whiz right past you. Late in the film, Ice Cube joins forces with the cyberterrorist known as Disruptor to take down the aliens. “We gotta go old-school. The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Ice Cube says. And when you’re reeling from the stupidity of the “we have to infect the aliens with a virus” plot point, ripped straight from Independence Day, Ice Cube hits you with “Now one thing I know — no way, no how can you and I write this virus alone.” And then he puts the cherry on top: “Alright, Disruptor. Let’s disrupt some shit.”

Ice Cube’s occupation is perhaps the oddest aspect of the script. As a “domestic terror analyst,” he seems to be a relatively high-ranking person in government, given the countless covert operations he casually has access to. Ice Cube also has the power to give Disruptor and his hacker friends “total immunity,” though they were only hours ago “high-level threats” on the Domestic Terror Watchlist.

But Ice Cube can’t be too powerful, because then he’s not relatable. There needs to be some government higher-up who’s the big bad guy behind it all, so Ice Cube is also portrayed as just a regular desk jockey.

That he can easily access the cell phones, smart watches, and smart fridges of every person in the country is a pretty monumental premise, yet the film skirts right by it. Ice Cube’s character is obsessed with surveillance, almost psychopathically so. He’s even bookmarked his kids’ devices because he spends about 80% of his workday spying on them instead of capturing terrorists. He loves spying on people — just loves it! — and he has zero boundaries. If you play Valorant, Ice Cube knows your exact loadout and which players you’ve recently called the N-word. If you use an app-assisted vibrator in your alone time, Ice Cube knows your favorite settings. Given that he at one point seems to instinctively access his daughter’s smart watch to read her heart rate, this man has definitely spied on her having sex.

War of the Worlds Isn’t That Bad, Actually

Many, many, many people have thoroughly shat on this movie — and rightfully so. In response, I have a few nice things to say about it besides the usual backhanded compliments. First, the editing is pretty good, and it at the very least successfully delivers the film’s funniest shots: an extreme closeup of Ice Cube adjusting his glasses, a shot of him holding his head in despair, a slow zoom into his face….

Screenlife movies have a hard time holding an audience’s attention, and Lee and his editors, Charles Ancelle and Jake York, rework the style to make War of the Worlds extremely watchable, if not particularly compelling. They treat the computer screen as a canvas, moving around it in small chunks, zooming into important file names or messages, and cutting quickly around the nonessential stuff. That efficient editing is likely one of the reasons that so many people have actually watched all of War of the Worlds, while many worse movies go underseen. Pacing — alongside consistent moment-to-moment absurdity — is what turns a bad movie into a good-bad one, and War of the Worlds feels like it’s been edited with today’s attention-deficient younger generation in mind. I especially like the opening sequence, where Ice Cube logs into his office shift and cycles through a bunch of security cameras around D.C., set to Wolfgang Valbrun’s “Keep Your Head Up.” If you stop to think about it for a second, of course, it all falls apart — why is Ice Cube’s job to click on every public building, listen to one conversation, and then click away?

Second, the visual effects aren’t that bad. With a director from a visual effects background, they should be much better, but it’s hard to mask cheap effects when they’re being shown in broad daylight. The nighttime scenes look properly creepy and atmospheric, though they’re few and far between.

Ice Cube, for what it’s worth, couldn’t have done much better if he tried. (And I don’t think he tried.) You could cast Daniel Day-Lewis in this, and with this script and a camera that never leaves his desk, he’d only do a marginally better job. There’s definitely a ceiling to what Ice Cube’s performance could have achieved here. And with something this monumentally awful, I’d rather have Ice Cube steering the ship than a more respected actor. I’d probably just feel sorry for them. With Ice Cube, the star of Anaconda, Ghosts of Mars, and the xXx sequel, the casting feels exactly right for the project’s caliber of stupidity.

Conclusion

War of the Worlds is a terrific entry into the pantheon of so-bad-it’s-good films. Like The Room, Samurai Cop, or Neil Breen’s entire catalogue, it’s a great movie to pop on with a bunch of friends (and maybe some mind-altering substances) and laugh at. But like The Room and Samurai Cop, it’s also not even close to the worst movie ever made.

Luckily, I saw The Room and War of the Worlds after each had already been cemented as a cult-classic terrible film. I pity the critics who saw these movies when they first premiered — the first soldiers on the beach, in a sense — because it was their unenviable job to watch these films blind and write about their terrible scripts, terrible performances, and terrible direction. But the reason War of the Worlds is so beloved despite being so very bad is that it’s made with a kind of admirable cluelessness that makes it supremely endearing and endlessly rewatchable. The hero is a Homeland Security desk jockey who spies on people for fun, and an Amazon delivery drone saves the day.

Terrible movies are good for society. By showing us a shining example of bad art, they help to reinforce our understanding of good art. But most importantly, terrible movies like War of the Worlds are good for the soul. I don’t believe you can put this on and not have a good time. It’s far too stupid to not be entertaining.

War of the Worlds is now streaming on Amazon Prime.