Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | August 5, 2025
If you’ve popped over to Prime Video’s homepage recently, you’ve probably been confronted by a splash screen of Ice Cube, wearing glasses, staring into a computer monitor. The first thing you need to know about this War of the Worlds remake is this: That is the movie. The film is presented through Screenlife technology. The entire thing unfolds from the point of view of Ice Cube, playing a DHS surveillance officer named William Radford, staring into his screen. What follows is an endless stream of browser windows, FaceTime calls, and cursor movements as he tries to save the world from an alien invasion from his D.C. office chair.
Every single person we see is filmed in close-up, framed behind a phone or laptop. Even the goddamn alien attacks are filtered through Radford’s live CCTV and drone footage. Before the invasion, Radford’s job is to spy on everyone, including his own son, David (Henry Hunter Hall), and daughter (Iman Benson), both of whom he communicates with exclusively via FaceTime and Zoom. NSA Director Donald Briggs (Clark Gregg), Secretary of Defense Walter Crystal (Michael O’Neill), NASA scientist Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), and FBI Field Agent Sheila Jeffries (Andrea Savage) pop in occasionally to report from the field, where we watch poorly rendered CGI aliens destroy even more poorly rendered CGI infrastructure while Ice Cube shouts things like, “How do you like me now?” into his webcam.
If it sounds like a pandemic movie, that’s because it is a pandemic movie. It was shot during lockdown and apparently sat on a shelf for years, most likely because it’s so aggressively unwatchable no one dared to release it, even when we were desperate for content. Had it come out in 2021, we might’ve forgiven its wretchedness as a product of the moment. But now? It should’ve stayed buried. Instead, Prime Video decided to distribute it and seemingly tacked on a bunch of Amazon Prime references for good measure, resulting in some of the worst product placement since Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial.
Directed by music video vet Rich Lee, the plot centers on aliens attacking Earth to consume our data centers, because these extraterrestrials are technobiological hybrids who feed on data. Before the attack, Radford had been tracking an anonymous hacker known only as the Disruptor — who, of course, turns out to be his own son — while his daughter was busy developing a vaccine that targets sick cells. I’m just going to spoil it: William teams up with his hacker son, somehow converts the vaccine into digital code, and launches it through drones to infect the aliens with an old-school computer virus. “How you like me now?”
There’s a reason no one wants to revisit pandemic-era films. Filmmakers did what they could under impossible circumstances, and we indulged them because we had no choice. But no one’s asking for those movies now, and War of the Worlds is a shining example of why. It’s bad — really, irredeemably bad, even for a pandemic movie. Do not watch, no matter how many times Prime Video confronts you with that splash screen.
