WAR OF THE WORLDS Review: Ice Cube Saves Humanity From Amazon Aliens

Thank you, Timur! May the meme be with you.

War of the Worlds (2025)
The film is now streaming exclusively on Prime Video..

Hilariously bad, until it becomes risibly ridiculous, the new, Screenlife version of H.G. Wells' classic War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube as Will Radford, the chief (and only?) terrorism analyst in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). (Timur Bekmambetov and Patrick Aiello produced.)

Will works alone in a large, nondescript office, entirely alone in the DHS building -- perhaps all the other employees have already been deported? This allows him to divide his time equally between safeguarding the security of the entire nation and spying obsessively on his two children.

In what little free time he has left over, he mourns the passing of his beloved wife. Oh, and once in a while he joins Zoom meetings along with other top-level administration officials -- notably his boss (Clark Gregg) -- and speaks very authoritatively to everyone.

Is there any doubt that this is the man who will save the world! It's Ice Cube, baby!!

In between barking orders at his children and/or fellow top-level administration officials, Will checks in with NASA specialist Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), who frets about unusual, natural disaster-level weather. But then Will goes back to fretting about his videogame-playing son David (Henry Hunter Hall), his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson), or her boyfriend Mark (Devin Bostwick).

To complicate matters further, the opening sequence also introduced something about an anonymous hacker who announces his plans to release secret government files -- nothing to do with any corrupting minors or anything like that -- and Amazon gets mentioned every 10 seconds.

(Full disclosure: I pay for the ad-free version of Amazon's Prime Video service, and I truly did not expect to end up watching a 90-minute infomercial for Amazon.)

Ice Cube never loses his cool, unless it's justified, which is a lot. We know that Clark Gregg must be hiding something, because Clark Gregg is always hiding something. Eva Longoria shines in her supporting role.

And, it must be acknowledged, Ice Cube is terribly good at playing Ice Cube In An Office. Well done, sir!

This version of War of the Worlds works very hard to be a version of H.G. Wells' classic story that has been updated for modern-day audiences. Plainly, the resolution of the old version stopped flying some years ago, a victim of increased scientific knowledge, among other things. This version, however, is unable to come up with any sort of satisfying substitute.

Now Streaming covers international and indie genre films and TV shows that are available on legal streaming services.