It’s almost refreshing when you discover a movie that is so bad it becomes a feat of amazement. Pitching a War of the Worlds remake primarily starring Ice Cube staring at his work computer sounds akin to pitching a Pride and Prejudice remake starring Jojo Siwa and it’s entirely about her gardening. You could do something like that but why would you? It’s almost like some setup for a joke. This movie was originally made in 2020 and has sat on the shelf for five years, enough so to make one wonder why anyone felt like now was the time to release it, especially in this final condition. I’m dumbfounded simply thinking about this movie. It’s so misguided in about every creative decision, from its stylistic approach to its thematic emphasis and especially making what may be the most boring alien invasion movie into an afterthought about government surveillance laws. Sheesh.

Author H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, and it’s since been turned into many popular radio serials, movies, and TV series, including the 2005 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg hit. Whenever a filmmaker or production company shakes the dust off a story that we already have many versions of, the question arises what this new version will bring to the table. How will this one stand out? How will it connect in a way that the other movies had not? In short, why do we need another version? Naturally, Hollywood doesn’t think about the creative necessity of movies, only their profitability. The core difference with the new 2025 movie is that it’s a “screenlife” movie where everything we see is meant to approximate a computer screen. It’s a variation on the found footage genre. This technique was used to great effect in 2018’s Searching where John Cho tried to uncover his missing daughter’s digital footprint. That was an inventive updating of the detective thriller. Here, I cannot imagine a more boring way to illustrate an alien invasion. We’re watching one man behind a computer screen react to the news and cycle through camera feeds for exposition, having Face Time conversations with loved ones and Zoom meetings with government officials, and he apparently seems to be the only guy capable of doing his job during this war of the worlds. It reminds me of 2010’s Skyline, a smaller alien invasion movie that tried to mask its limited budget by following a group of characters trapped in an apartment that would worriedly look out the windows. It’s a bad approach, making the events feel too limited and like we’re missing out on more interesting events. Suffice to say, when the world is going to war and aliens are destroying cities, you don’t want the focus of our movie to be Ice Cube staring at you and furiously typing key commands.

Another significant blunder was making this less an alien invasion movie and more about government overreach when it comes to data mining. There will be spoilers in this paragraph, dear reader, but honestly I would actively advise you to read them anyway to just better appreciate how ridiculous this all is. The powerful aliens aren’t here for our natural resources, for turning people into food, or even a hostile takeover of the planet as their new home world. Oh, it’s far worse than that. What these dirty dirty aliens are really hungry for is… our personal data. Yes, you read that correctly. The aliens literally consume electronic data. What dull lives these creatures lead. This is less an alien invasion and more a stark literalization of data mining. These aliens are advanced enough to travel through space but need to be in such close physical proximity to harvest our data? They can’t just hack the Pentagon wifi? It turns the aliens into big dumb technological mosquitoes who just need to be directed elsewhere. I’m astounded that War of the Worlds presents an alien invasion and says that nosy government is the real problem. The movie tries to argue that these advanced aliens wouldn’t even be here if Big Government wasn’t wantonly collecting our data for their nebulous spying purposes. It’s an attack on the post-9/11 surveillance state born of the Patriot Act, but it’s also 15-20 years too late for this to be politically relevant.

The movie also picks the wrong character to serve as its moral awakening. It’s nonsensical that Ice Cube could be a trusted DHS official and be unaware of these systems and their reach. He seems to be the guy that the FBI is waiting on for door-breaching warrants that he tidily uploads as PDF files. He’s the guy NASA wants to clue in on their latest reports. He’s the guy the Secretary of Defense calls directly. He’s not the head of Homeland Security; he’s just a guy in the office, and seemingly the only guy in the building (was it a holiday weekend?). Ice Cube plays a man with some extreme boundary issues. He’s literally using government surveillance to spy on his pregnant daughter, hacking into her fridge, and I think even installing cameras into her apartment. He’s using government resources to criticize his daughter’s grocery choices. He’s overstepping his bounds and taking full advantage of that same government surveillance state that he decries at the end of the movie. At three different points someone will say incredulously about the government spying on people’s “Amazon carts,” and it’s just remarkable that something like that would politically galvanize this man when he’s already spying on his kids with that same surveillance apparatus. He’s knowingly breaking into their messages and social media and personal data. This can’t be a “what have we become?” epiphany when he’s always been there.

I like Ice Cube as an actor. He showed surprising depth in Boyz n the Hood, was hilariously applied in the 21 Jump Street movies as a stern sourpuss authority figure. There’s a natural intimidation factor, which was recently played for clever laughs with his appearance on The Studio. This is a performer that can be a great addition when aligned with his strengths. However, range is not a word one would readily use when describing the acting capabilities of Mr. Cube. Hinging this entire movie on Ice Cube’s emotional journey is too much of an ask. Having this man listlessly read gobs of exposition is not good for anyone. He doesn’t have that kind of arresting voice that could hypnotize us, like a Morgan Freeman or Jeremy Irons. It’s even worse when you feel the lackluster effort on his part. Strangely, despite his children being in direct danger, and the whole alien invasion backdrop, the moment that draws the most dramatic response from Ice Cube is when the aliens delete his deceased wife’s Facebook account (I would have accepted you consuming the planet, but when you delete Facebook pictures, now you’ve gone too far). The movie was filmed in the early days of the COVID pandemic and feels it, restricting everyone to their own little screens with nary the physical interaction. When you’re watching Ice Cube race through empty rooms of Homeland Security to insert a thumb-drive in the nick of time to save the world (along with shouting to the unconvincing alien special effects, “Movie bitch, get out the way”) it all just reminds you how painfully myopic and agonizingly restrictive this alien invasion approach ultimately proves to be.

Special mention needs to be made for the over-the-top Amazon product placement in this movie. The company is referenced several times, even used as a motivator for a homeless man (what computer?), but it’s much worse when one of the characters is a proud Amazon delivery driver and he’s going to use their cutting-edge drone delivery tech to make sure Ice Cube gets that all-important thumb-drive in record time. Amazon helps in saving the world thanks to their logistics in package delivery. Thank you corporate overlords, and please enjoy this movie on your life-saving Amazon Prime account, dutiful citizen.

War of the Worlds 2025 is a fascinating and maddening case study in bad adaptation choices. It feels more like an anti-government surveillance state thriller that got awkwardly grafted onto an alien invasion. The way the movie just abandons its larger scale drama for lessons in modern-day privacy laws is creatively criminal. This is an astonishingly bad movie that gets just about everything wrong at every turn. I’m almost tempted to recommend people watch it just to try and reconcile it for themselves. There have been dozens of adaptations of this classic science-fiction tale, and I feel confident in declaring this one the absolute worst even if I haven’t seen every one of them. There can’t be a worse one than this.

Nate’s Grade: F