War of the Worlds (2025)
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
What the fuck are we doing here?
Ugh.
How much do you hate yourself?
Do you work a dead end job because trying to find something else may leave you jobless in this hostile, infertile economy? Do you bust your ass to get by, living paycheck to paycheck, treating yourself to the more expensive ramen if you’ve hit it big by an extra few dollars a month? Do you rely on the services of Amazon to get by, mainly because so many other forms of retail are endangered or outright extinct? Do you resort to Amazon because — in the long run — you save costs on shipping and streaming when you pool all of your needs together in one year? Does your heart ache for the people whose lives your choice has effected — as they work nonstop to fulfill instant deliveries of the twenty millionth SKU in the biggest warehouses in the world as quickly as possible (all because you needed that dopamine hit that comes from those new Christmas socks now, now, now)? Do you put up with the ads that Amazon and other streaming services have imposed, despite the fact that you are already paying for a service that doesn’t even need ads given that, you know, it’s Amazon? Do you put up with these adverts because you can barely afford Amazon Prime as it is and going the extra mile may cut you out of getting the better ramen packages this year, and life is hard enough as it is with a world that is on the verge of imploding itself or eradicating all life on it and you just want something to keep you going, and it may be in the form of entertainment? Do you ignore Jeff Bezos’ penis rockets just ever-so-delicately gracing the edge of space because you don’t want to believe that your Amazon dollars are going there and not to the pockets of the people who worked their twenty fifth hour in a row just to make sure your Christmas socks arrived on time?
How much do you hate yourself? If you don’t, please do not — I repeat, do not — watch the infamous War of the Worlds film that just dropped and is garnering some of the worst attention of any motion picture in recent memory. Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you. However, if you do hate yourself, even just the teensiest bit, War of the Worlds may send you over the edge. To see a film this atrocious that was made with your money — especially during the pandemic, no less — will destroy you. At least the penis rocket has some sort of marvels attached to it, including the science, engineering, and physics behind this technology. War of the Worlds is as regressive as a film in the 2020s can be: down to the very fact that this looks like a high school project should these students have afforded the resources of major celebrities and Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Then again, this is a disservice to the youth of today, because I have seen high school projects less frustrating than this. War of the Worlds began production in 2020 and it shows: this is as stunted as films shot during the COVID-19 pandemic get in every single way (more on that shortly). If you want to be reminded of what a shit time of our lives that was — and, let’s face it, continues to be — then please watch War of the Worlds and hear all of the Microsoft Teams notifications, take note of all the Amazon product placements, and feel yourself be at the mercy of technology in the confines of your living quarters when all you wanted to do today was find a film to take you away from feeling like the end is near yet again.
Ugh.
We follow — and by follow, I mean we sit with — Will Radford (Ice Cube), who is a surveillance expert for the Department of Homeland Security, who works his computer like a great-grandfather who needs the extra ten seconds to remember how to play a video with a massive “play” button on its thumbnail. In case you didn’t know (but you likely already did), War of the Worlds is one of those screenlife films where everything takes place on someone’s computer. All of the shots in this film are either of Ice Cube behind a green screen that would make Neil Breen shart out of excitement and approval, or of the screen recordings of Ice Cube’s work computer. Unlike Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching where you believe that you are watching John Cho’s character anxiously navigate his smart devices to try and find his missing daughter, War of the Worlds couldn’t be more blatant about how every single element that you see is separate. Every icon — and even the cursor on screen for a majority of the film — was painstakingly recreated via a program like Adobe Illustrator (I work in content marketing, your best efforts can’t fool me). All images and video clips were done individually and were tossed together in post (with many stock images and effects being thrown in, I might add; again, these marketing eyes have browsed through many portfolios). Not even the Teams meetings or video calls feel authentic; these people may not be in the same room (clearly), but they don’t even look like they lived in the same century at times.
That isn’t to say that it’s a problem to work with free resources and programs, but you can make it work (like how much effort was put into Everything Everywhere All at Once by a team of dreamers with little experience, and the endless amount of resources found on YouTube). War of the Worlds feels lazy; not like a film that took five years of over-correction to try and fix since it was such a misfire when made during the height of the pandemic, but, instead, a film that no one gave a shit to try and fix after all of this time. There are so many things that are so poorly handled that they are as fake as the redacted names on the Epstein list not being Donald Trump or Bill Clinton (see, I included both parties so you won’t wish death on me). When online files are mysteriously being deleted, there’s a glithy effect used when images and videos are clipping out of existence one-by-one; really, anyone knows that the files would remain until someone refreshed their page, and then they would all disappear at once (or you would get a 404 message, or nothing). During teams meetings, there is an effort made to make some callers’ screens lag and yet their audio is crystal clear (like, professional microphone clear). Hackers have the same consistent avatar (with a shoddy pixelated effect applied) that isn’t rooted in any semblance of reality. I could point out a trillion other minute details, but who needs to when the majority of the film is Ice Cube in front of an awful green screen. Way to keep the illusion alive, team War of the Worlds.
Ugh.
Sorry. I should be discussing the plot more. Ice Cube — er, I mean Will — spends the opening of the film using his DHS technology to spy on his pregnant daughter, Faith (Iman Benson); he also chastises his son, Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) for playing video games all day. He’s so busy being a judgmental father that he continuously ignores the calls of his NASA friend, Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria); I must point out that her Teams calls always come up as Sandra NASA (in case you needed the frequent reminder of where she works, because nothing in the script makes this character believable). Soon enough, he — and the rest of the world — is rudely surprised by an alien attack that is taking place pretty much everywhere. The worst part about these attacks is how shockingly diabolical the visual effects are, as if they would have been dated decades ago (honestly, War of the Worlds looks like it has aged more and worse than the tremendous efforts of 1994’s The Mask, and War of the Worlds literally just came out). Will must find out what is happening at once.
I could go into the twists and turns, like how the Director of DHS, Donald Briggs (Clark Gregg) Captain Phillipsed this shit by ignoring the red flags his surveillance system posed that attracted this alien attack, how Will’s son is more than just a gamer and can help his father as a master hacker, and how Will becomes the rebellion in the name of saving the world from the Cloverfield and District 9 demo reels, but it doesn’t matter. None of this matters. The story could have been decent and I would still hate War of the Worlds. In fact, the film has the strength of H. G. Wells’ brilliant source material which, as you know, has been made into numerous successful films in the past. However, you don’t need to be Steven Spielberg to make a great film, but you maybe need to be director Rich Lee to make a film this fucking bad (it is his feature length debut after numerous music videos for big names like Lana Del Rey, Eminem, Alicia Keys, and many more). I don’t want to judge Lee too harshly since his track record seems decent and I sense a lot of production-related nonsense came into effect here, but War of the Worlds possesses enough levels of cluelessness that I cannot help but feel like Lee is at least responsible enough; regardless, I’d be astonished if he gets the green light to make another feature film after this.
Look, I have no other images to use. It’s either the same Ice Cube shot that you will basically see for most of the film, or it’s cluttered, hideous computer footage. Ice Cube it is.
If War of the Worlds was just horrendous from the start and stayed this level of bad, I would deem it a disasterpiece but maybe not a complete zero out of five. There’s the slightest, barely-existing amount of nobility that comes from trying to make a film with limited means during a troublesome time. However, War of the Worlds proceeds to get worse and worse, crazier and crazier, and so ludicrous that Ice Cube references the Atlanta rapper of the nearly-identical name by telling a robot “Move, bitch, get out the way” (because a twenty-year-old throwback was truly needed here). The amount of implausibility that comes from a film that begs you to suspend disbelief (when I didn’t believe it for one microsecond its entire runtime) is insurmountable. There’s even the audacity for a pre-credits gag where a prompt pops up that asks if we are okay with our privacy being used which feels like an extra slap to the face knowing what we’ve given Amazon in exchange for a film this insulting. Before that final wake-up call is a multitude of bullshit, including a bait-and-switch conclusion that pretended that the film had heart for a millisecond or two, only for War of the Worlds to strip it away with one of the stupidest “gotcha” moments in recent memory.
In all honesty, War of the Worlds feels like the kind of film conjured up by a boomer who believes this is how technology works: the kind of internet prey that fall for AI videos of President Joe Biden dry-humping a sheep on top of the RMS Titanic and will warn all of their family members that this is somehow why rapper Jelly Roll will become the next Unabomber (or some other conspiracy-based nonsense that compels people to piece together brand new sentences in the English language like this). If War of the Worlds was made in the year 2000, it would still not be believable, but considering how computer literate most of the world is by now, it is a downright insult that Lee and company expect us to follow any of what takes place here. The plot is equal parts overly simplistic and convoluted (a paradoxical miracle!), the acting — especially by Ice Cube going crazy in a room by himself — couldn’t be worse and more stunted, and the dialogue is as cheap as the list of results yielded by ChatGPT being asked to come up with the most cliched lines for an alien film that looks like it was made by rabid raccoons with access to a smartphone.
Ice Cube continues to look like he is upset that his UberEats order is taking longer than expected. He sure is hangry.
So, yes. Focus on that same Ice Cube thumbnail, because this will be you watching War of the Worlds: a film that was somehow hated more by those making it than those viewing it. This Ice Cube shot is what you see for most of the film. When you see Ice Cube finally look different for a moment — in new clothes and a new backdrop that is edited in behind him via green screen — there’s no way that this shot didn’t come from the exact same day as the rest (I’m convinced that Ice Cube recorded all of his lines in one four-hour session, or less). Remember that your Amazon Prime membership costs as much as it does for content like this. Understand that years of prolonged development resulted in this: a film that looks like it came second last in a twenty-four-hour student film contest. Know that this film is truly useless because it isn’t even an original idea and that you have multiple versions of War of the Worlds to watch before you even consider this one. The fact that this was released when so many original artists and voices cannot get their works made is a highly depressing matter. Watching an entire film of this feels like when you go to the bathroom and wind up wiping far longer than you anticipated: War of the Worlds is tedious, never-ending (even at ninety minutes), and oh-so shitty.
I guarantee that Amazon still released a film this insipid and moronic because it will drive hate-watchers to Amazon Prime and increase both views and memberships. It must be, since the tagline of the film is “It’s worse than you think”, which is meant to be a double entendre of the magnitude of the invasion in the film and of how awful the film itself is (believe this warning). If this is the case (the only thing that makes sense to me), then I will ride this wave by shamelessly driving traffic to Films Fatale with a review for a film that doesn’t deserve a fart in its general direction. If they were hoping they had a future cult classic on their hands like The Room or Fateful Findings (films so terrible that they are cherished), Amazon has to understand that you don’t make these kinds of works: they happen by accident. War of the Worlds will never sniff the infamy of the so-bad-it’s-good culture because there are next to zero good intentions associated with it: the number one ingredient that adds charm to atrocity. Tommy Wiseau believed he was Tennessee Williams when making The Room. Neil Breen just wanted to make films he believed he could muster. There’s innocence attached to these monstrosities, but that’s severely lacking with War of the Worlds. Not everything can be manufactured, even by Amazon.
When I see a film this bad based on a beloved novel that has been done to death, I want to cry. When I witness a film that had this little effort put into it, I hurt for the starving artists out there. When I see a film so out of touch with reality, I dread how far away from the light we have strayed in these awful times. When I watch a film that has zero redeeming qualities, that is an assault on my eyes and ears in nearly every way, and know that it is being used for evil and corporate greed in the face of a suffering entertainment industry, I don’t see War of the Worlds the H. G. Wells story: I see Amazon declaring a war on film.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.