War of the Worlds (2025) Review
If “so bad it’s good” were a deliberate genre, this latest War of the Worlds would be its unwitting poster child. Unfortunately, this is not a knowing parody or a clever reimagining—it’s a straight-faced attempt at an alien invasion thriller that collapses so hard into unintentional comedy that it becomes more amusing than frightening. The trailer alone, packed with stilted line delivery, jittery webcam visuals, and awkward reaction shots, is almost all you need to decide whether to watch it. Spoiler: it’s not worth the runtime. Respectfully!
War of the Worlds (2025), Prime Video
From Alien Terror to Zoom Call Fatigue
In theory, War of the Worlds is a sci-fi epic about humanity’s desperate fight against alien invaders. In practice, this 2025 version is a digital-age, found-footage-style misfire that plays out entirely through the screenlife format—video calls, chat windows, news broadcasts, and app notifications. While “desktop cinema” has worked wonders in films like Searching or even the horror thriller Unfriended, here it feels like a suffocating creative choice. Instead of amplifying tension, it robs the story of urgency and scope. And more importantly, fun visuals.
The movie follows DHS agent Will Radford, monitoring his family and the alien attack from behind a wall of surveillance feeds. The aliens, instead of towering tripods or menacing ships, are mostly represented through grainy news graphics and distant, blurred chaos in the background. The stakes are meant to be global, but the execution reduces the end of the world to a series of frozen Zoom frames and jumpy cell phone clips. The format could have been intimate—instead, it just feels claustrophobic and cheap.
Plot Holes You Could Drive a Mothership Through
The script hinges on the idea that these aliens feed on human data, an admittedly intriguing update for the digital age. But the film never explores the concept in a satisfying way. Instead, we get repetitive shots of characters panicking into webcams, overwrought speeches about trust and family, and scenes that stretch mundane tech interactions into supposed action beats. For example, one of the film’s “big twists” involves humanity’s hope resting on a delivery drone transporting a thumb drive. The image of the fate of the world hanging on a floating package would be funny if it weren’t so obviously unintentional.
The pacing is equally disastrous. Every time the story flirts with building momentum, it grinds to a halt for more screen-bound chatter. The alien threat is never convincingly shown, the sense of scale is non-existent, and the audience is left watching characters stare at the same flickering screens we are. At one point, we have to wonder—what’s the point here?
Performances Lost in the Format
The cast, led by Ice Cube, is trapped in a format that demands they act in isolation. This results in performances that feel disconnected, awkward, and frequently overblown. Ice Cube spends much of the runtime barking orders into the void or looking mildly irritated at whatever glitchy feed he’s staring at. The supporting cast fares no better—they are reduced to floating digital rectangles, delivering lines into laptop cameras without the natural rhythm that comes from actual scene partners.
This isolation might have been an intentional creative choice, meant to mirror the alienation of the characters, but instead it comes across as lazy blocking. It’s hard to care about anyone’s survival when they feel less like real people and more like stock video chat avatars.
From Sci-Fi Epic to Accidental Comedy
The original War of the Worlds stories and adaptations have always leaned into terror, awe, and the human will to survive. The 1953 film used groundbreaking effects to bring the Martian machines to life. The 2005 Spielberg version blended visceral action with the intimate story of a fractured family under siege. This new version trades those strengths for glitchy screens, awkwardly staged video calls, and endless shots of typing.
Instead of tension, the film inspires chuckles—not because the lines are funny, but because the execution is so mismatched to the intended tone. Entire dramatic beats land with the weight of a sitcom gag. There’s something almost surreal about watching characters shout about an imminent alien attack while framed in a Microsoft Teams window. The visual effects, when they appear, don’t help. Aliens are barely glimpsed, and when they are, they look lackluster—low-resolution silhouettes that make old-school sci-fi puppetry seem sophisticated by comparison.
Lack of Vision, Lack of Stakes
The biggest failure here isn’t even the poor effects or awkward performances. It’s the lack of anything fresh to say. In a time when science fiction is exploring bold, socially relevant ideas, this War of the Worlds seems content to rehash the same beats without adding new layers. The digital-age found-footage gimmick might have offered a unique lens—but instead it becomes the whole movie, draining it of spectacle and emotional range.
The story doesn’t deepen our understanding of human resilience, doesn’t innovate on the alien invasion formula, and doesn’t even lean fully into the absurdity of its own setup. It just lingers in a strange, flat middle ground, unsure of whether it’s a thriller, a drama, or unintentional comedy.
Score: 2/10
War of the Worlds is an uninspired retread of a classic story that offers nothing new—and manages to make the end of the world look incredibly boring.
