In 2025, when the streaming wars are more about who can bury the biggest turd under the most algorithms, Amazon decides it’s time to dust off H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds—you know, that timeless tale of humanity’s fragility against cosmic horrors.
The 2005 Tom Cruise version was edge-of-your-seat tension, practical effects that still hold up, and Cruise running like his life depended on it (which it did). It captured the raw panic of invasion, the crumbling of society, and the quiet horror of tripods vaporizing suburbs. Box office gold, and a cultural touchstone.
Now enter Amazon’s 2025 abomination, a “screenlife” fever dream shot entirely through laptop screens, Zoom calls, and glitchy webcams. Ice Cube stars as Will Radford, a Homeland Security analyst glued to his desk, tracking “threats” via mass surveillance until—surprise!—the Martians hit. His family (Eva Longoria and some kids who look as bored as I felt) huddles in quarantine, hacking away at the apocalypse like it’s a bad IT support ticket.
No sweeping vistas of destruction, no heat rays scorching cities. Just endless buffering icons and pop-up ads for Prime Day deals. If Cruise’s film was a heart-pounding sprint from doom, this is a Zoom meeting from hell that won’t end even when the aliens win. Let’s talk production, because this mess reeks of pandemic-era desperation. Filmed in a blistering 15-day sprint during the height of COVID lockdowns in 2020—back when everyone was filming TikToks in their basements and hospitals, this project had no real director.
A committee of unpaid interns armed with iMovie and expired energy drinks. No cohesive vision, just a patchwork of green-screen fails and dialogue that sounds like it was generated by a drunk Siri. Post-production dragged on for two years, which explains why the effects look like they were rendered on a potato.
Universal originally greenlit this for theaters, but Amazon scooped it up like a clearance-rack bargain, slapping in an Amazon delivery driver subplot because nothing says “interplanetary genocide” like drone deliveries saving the day. It’s the kind of cost-cutting that turns epic sci-fi into a glorified infomercial. And here’s where Amazon’s hubris shines—or rather, sputters out. They clearly thought they could pull a “so bad it’s good” magic trick, like those cult classics that thrive on irony (The Room, Sharknado).
Lean into the cheesiness, wink at the audience with over-the-top product placement, and watch the memes roll in. But nope. They failed spectacularly on both fronts. As a straight-up bad movie? It’s not even entertainingly awful. The plot lurches from one Zoom glitch to the next, with Ice Cube barking exposition like he’s reading a grocery list.
Longoria’s character? A virologist mom who “hacks” the alien code using—get this—a free trial of Amazon’s cloud service. The kids? One’s a hacker prodigy who defeats tripods with a TikTok algorithm; the other’s just there to cry about Wi-Fi. The aliens? Pixelated blobs that look like rejected District 9 rejects, “invading” via malware that somehow turns smart fridges against us.
It’s not scary; it’s sad. The pacing drags like a laggy stream, and the “climax” involves a gift card bribe to a homeless guy for plot convenience. Laughable? Barely. More like eye-roll inducing, the kind of boredom that makes you check your phone mid-invasion.
As for the “so good” angle Amazon chased? Forget it. This isn’t self-aware camp; it’s corporate cynicism masquerading as content. Wall-to-wall Amazon plugs—Prime drones airlifting survivors, Alexa whispering evacuation routes—aren’t clever satire on surveillance society. They’re just icky, a $50 million ad buy disguised as a movie.
The film’s “present-day themes” of technology and privacy? Subtweeted so hard they vanish into the ether. RogerEbert.com called it zero stars for a reason: It’s morally bankrupt, stranding talents like Cube and Longoria in a screensaver from purgatory. Rotten Tomatoes sits at a flat 0%, and Reddit threads are a graveyard of “I watched so you don’t have to” confessions.
Even the score by Jon Natchez feels like elevator muzak for the end times. War of the Worlds 2025 isn’t a film; it’s a warning label for streaming excess. Amazon tried to invade our queues with irony and failed to conquer either trash or triumph. Stick to Spielberg’s version—or better yet, read Wells. This one’s DOA, buried under algorithms it deserves. If aliens ever do come, pray they skip the Prime trial.
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