War of the Worlds Review: A War on Your Senses

War of the Worlds is a fresh take in the worst way possible for the classic novel, with no redeemable moments or characters.

In War of the Worlds (2025), Will Radford (Ice Cube, of 21 Jump Street) works in surveillance at the Department for Homeland Security. He often spies on his pregnant daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), giving her advice on what not to eat, and his son, Dave (Henry Hunter Hall, of Harriett), forcing him to stay off video games. His team is tracking down a notorious hacker when an alien invasion comes from the sky through meteorites. Locked inside his office and only having his computer, Will tries to understand and combat the invasion whilst also keeping his children safe, by any means necessary. 

This film is shot entirely through a computer screen, and everything on screen is what Will Radford can see on his computer. This approach was pioneered, and used to good effect, in Searching (2018) and Missing (2023). Both of these films were about finding someone by using the internet or the missing person’s computer screen to gather the necessary information. The style of filmmaking made perfect sense for these movies because it was written in the story, but with War of the Worlds, it feels very janky and obvious that this was done for both budget and COVID reasons, because you rarely see two people on screen at the same time.

Exposition is told through news coverage, and when the news can’t say it, Ice Cube murmurs exactly what the character is thinking at any given moment. Characters will be running down the street, holding their phones up perfectly, whilst video calling Will so he can perfectly see these aliens and their destruction. There is no story reason for this film to take place entirely on a screen, and that is the core problem with this adaptation.

The movie makes a major change to the story: in the book, the aliens are killed by Earth pathogens, whilst this time, Ice Cube unleashes a computer virus onto these beings to break them down and destroy them. This is one of the few ways the filmmakers have tried to modernise (or bastardise) the original text. The film makes good use of Amazon drones, Tesla cars, and smart fridge cameras; any technology that would place the movie in the 2020s has been forcibly inserted into it with no real reason.

The script itself is utterly atrocious, but combining this with Ice Cube’s performance makes this the nail in the coffin in viewing this as a serious adaptation. The film is not meant to be funny, but there are some so-bad-it’s-funny moments. Any time Ice Cube witnesses a tragedy on screen, his reaction is very underwhelming. The biggest reaction we get from him is when the aliens are eating all of the data in the world and one of the few places they attack is his dead wife’s Facebook page. In terms of story beats, it’s one of the most laughable of the year.

One of the few aspects of the film that is faithful to the source material is the look of the aliens, but the fact that the visual effects are worse than when we last saw them in 2005 is a serious problem. The editing in this sometimes has the feel of a TikTok conspiracy video, with the zooms onto Ice Cube’s face and the strange music they overlay to create some semblance of dramatic tension when, at one point, Ice Cube has to create an Excel spreadsheet of the alien’s strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, War of the Worlds is a fresh take on the iconic tale, but every creative decision is wrong in a multitude of ways. We could have only wished that the data-eating aliens had eaten this film while it was still in the vault.

War of the Worlds is now available to stream globally on Prime Video.