It should have been a slam dunk: aliens, explosions, government surveillance.
But while Steven Spielberg’s 2025 adaptation starring Tom Cruise was quite well-received, Prime Video’s latest sci-fi reboot of War of the Worlds feels like a pointless Zoom meeting that should have been an email.
Hovering near the top of Prime’s streaming charts, presumably thanks to confused clicks, this reimagining of HG Wells’ 1898 novel is somehow both overblown and utterly lifeless.
The pitch sounds promising enough: Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security desk jockey monitoring possible terror threats via a buffet of surveillance feeds.
One minute he's tracking a hacker named “Disruptor,” the next he's ignoring Nasa warnings from Eva Longoria about looming meteor storms.
The meteors turn out to be alien ships, of course, because this is War of the Worlds. They crash land and release giant tripods that start obliterating cities. Only… you don’t actually see much of this.
The carnage is mostly glimpsed through buffering livestreams, static-heavy newscasts, and the occasional blurry TikTok. If you’ve ever tried to follow a breaking news story on Twitter while your internet connection died, you’ve already had a more suspenseful experience than watching this movie.
Director Rich Lee, best known for music videos, attempts to mimic the “screenlife” style pioneered by films like Unfriended and Searching - stories told entirely via laptop and phone screens. Except here, that concept is loosely applied at best. One minute we’re inside Will’s desktop. The next, we’re watching him from a fourth wall-breaking angle that critics are calling jarring, inconsistent, and not remotely immersive.
Even if the format worked, the writing, acting and plotting would still crater harder than the film’s alien meteors.
Cube spends the film’s runtime furrowing his brow at various screens, occasionally grumbling about his kids, Faith and Dave, who are respectively pregnant and addicted to gaming. There’s some fatherly angst, some brief attempts at world-saving, and plenty of deadpan delivery, including a now-notorious line that demands the aliens “take your intergalactic asses back home.”
And then there’s the Amazon product placement. The film stops just short of showing Prime delivery drones taking out alien craft, but it’s close.
There’s even a moment in the third act that feels like a low-key pitch for same-day shipping. If Orson Welles used radio to make War of the Worlds terrifying in 1938, this version uses Amazon’s branding to make it unintentionally funny.
Shot in 2020, this was part of a wave of lockdown-friendly productions that didn’t require actors to share a room. The idea was clever: tell a sci-fi story through screens. But while Searching and Missing turned that constraint into a creative strength, War of the Worlds lets it fester like a forgotten group chat.
Despite earning a withering 0 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has found an audience... or at least viewers curious enough to press play. Whether they finish it is another story. But Prime doesn’t care. The title is recognisable. Ice Cube is recognisable. And the content, like many aliens in past versions of this story, is disposable.
