I Wasted Time Watching Ice Cube Scroll Through Alien Attacks and Zoom Calls, and You Can Too

'War of the Worlds' | Rich Lee

Aug 07, 2025

Dear Moviegoers,

Giving “hack the planet!” a whole new meaning, the new War of the Worlds “film” “adaptation” has arrived via Amazon Prime, to totally and absolutely meme our s**t up. It’s a meme factory, if the masses of internet jokers can make famed rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube’s visage into .gif artwork that is. The movie, only having been released roughly a week or so before publication of this review, has become the talk of the streaming conversation, topping the Prime watch chart and dropping its Rotten Tomatoes score to a quick zero percent. So bad, so enticing?

Yes, and it could be unstoppable.

Produced by screen-life genre evangelist Timur Bekmambetov during the height COVID-19 pandemic period, War of the Worlds could be seen as an experiment against environment and time, for which that is admirable. Through the perspective of a desktop computer and many FaceTime apps, the film rarely has any actor having to act with one another in the same shot, not unlike some of the shots in the production of Sin City from the mid-2000s. In that circumstance, it was a flex of filmmaking that fought actor schedules to a creative zenith. In this, the flexing is, apparently, purposefully built-in, making the team behind it all responsible for its poor qualities.

Photoshops of faces onto different bodies are reduced to half-assed copy & paste jobs. Integrating people onto green screen backgrounds and virtual special effects becomes a laughable and horrific task, embarrassing for both creator and viewer. Who cares if alien spaceships aren’t perfectly rendered when the video itself isn’t!

The picture was shelved for years, only to be dumped on the lot of us now.

Much like an alien attack.

Alas, bad effects can be passed over if there are other bits of a movie that pick up the slack. Ice Cube, in what is on the surface one of the worst casting choices ever, plays a U.S. Government surveillance administrator, using his computer skills to do multiple things at once, from briefing the President to spying on his pregnant daughter’s refrigerator.

When the aliens attack Earth, shown on screen in shaky cam explosions and, in one awful case, real footage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster (please correct me if I’m wrong), Ice Cube navigates CNN and Fox News updates - told in bracing and startling mixes of real-time and time-breaking-fast forward - while using novelty toys to celebrate when something good happens.

“Hell yeah!”

“I got you!”

“Take that, you intergalactic…” something something.

You don’t cast Ice Cube to be subtle or stoic; you cast him because of his cadence and his grumpy energy. Indeed, he delivers. Of course he does. He’s the only one in the entire film to understand the assignment given, and he’s on fire. Unfortunately, not being applicable to just how terrible everything else is makes for a further detriment.

Fortunately, this detriment is also an attribute, giving the film something to be joyfully entertained by. War of the Worlds is only bad by its climax, when Amazon’s shipping and delivery services become the key to salvation, and all of the characters join hacker forces to control wi-fi and satellite-connected devices of all sorts. Until that point, it’s all so wonderfully meme-able, worth making fun of in a group watch setting.

This is the stupidest movie of the year, and for that, War of the Worlds might also give the most entertaining kick of any other flick in 2025. Despite its low quality and lower quality scores, the movie succeeds. At crushing my depression. At keeping my interest. At crashing so thoroughly.

I hope that I’ve enticed as many moviegoers as possible to give this a look. The world is in shambles, and we could all use a ~~good~~ “bad” evening, filled with popcorn and chuckles.

But please, don’t choke on your fun. 1/5

War of the Worlds is currently available on Amazon Prime.