Movie Review: War of the Worlds (2025)
I don’t know why I do it to myself. I guess it’s to confirm just how low Hollywood has sunk but I sat through this abomination of a movie.
There have been bad movies. There have been misguided remakes. But War of the Worlds 2025 is something else entirely – a cinematic misfire of such epic proportions that one wonders how it escaped from the cutting room floor at all. Starring a baffled-looking Ice Cube and filmed almost entirely through the dead lens of a desktop webcam, this atrocity manages to be joyless, tensionless, and utterly devoid of purpose.
Let’s get one thing straight: this is not a reimagining. It’s a demolition. H.G. Wells’ original masterpiece is a cornerstone of science fiction. This film discards that in favour of... screen recordings. That’s right – the Martian invasion is told via glitchy surveillance footage, grainy Zoom calls, and Ice Cube squinting at loading bars like he’s just discovered the internet.
The plot, if you can call it that, is thinner than a budget tissue. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a supposed cyber warfare expert, who spies on his children in a really creepy fucked up way and whose big plan to save humanity involves frowning at code and shouting into a headset. There’s talk of satellites, aliens, government conspiracies – all of it delivered with the dramatic weight of an uninterested school assembly.
And the acting? Atrocious. Ice Cube brings the energy of someone who thought he was filming a YouTube ad for antivirus software. The supporting cast, a rotating gallery of blank expressions and green-screened “emergency broadcasts,” look as though they’ve been beamed in from a failed corporate training video. Every emotional beat falls flat. Every line of dialogue sounds like it was written by an AI trained exclusively on military jargon and TikTok slang. Whoever wrote this crap should be shot from a cannon into the sun, it’s that bad.
Then there's the CGI. If you’ve ever seen a 2004 screensaver try to depict an alien tripod, you’ve already had a better visual experience. The Martians – once towering symbols of terror – now resemble awkward origami robots that float aimlessly through digital haze. Explosions flicker like faulty GIFs. The invasion scenes could be outdone by a GCSE media project. The budget for this travesty must’ve been a few bucks because what we do see of the invasion is absolute Amstrad era level of graphics i.e utter shite.
And yet, perhaps most insulting of all is what this film represents: another lazy, tone deaf mangling of a literary classic. War of the Worlds doesn’t need gimmicks. It doesn’t need screenlife novelties or stunt casting. It needs respect. Jeff Wayne managed to adapt it into a musical and still captured more of its soul than this incoherent, cynical disaster ever attempts.
Do yourself a favour of listen to this.
It’s as if the filmmakers read a Wikipedia summary of the novel, decided the aliens were “kind of mid,” and replaced the horror of interplanetary annihilation with poor lighting and awkward monologues. There’s no tension. No pacing. No character development. Just an unrelenting stream of nonsense masquerading as innovation. The plot is garbage with the big twist being that the aliens eat data. What the f**k?!
In short, War of the Worlds 2025 isn’t just a bad film. It’s an embarrassment. A cinematic black hole where money, time, and talent went to die. If this is the future of science fiction, bring on the heat ray.
Rating: 0/10. Utter, utter, wank.
