Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.
War of the Worlds (2025): Apocalypse via Amazon, Delivered Direct to Your Doorstep
Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.
Let’s start where the movie does: in the glowing, fluorescent hell of government cubicles, watching Ice Cube—yes, that Ice Cube, whose smirk has finally fossilized into the only special effect on offer—click around like a substitute teacher trying to get Zoom to work. “Goliath, it’s dinner time,” he zings at his security supercomputer, and I found myself wondering if even the AI wanted to self-destruct. This is a screenlife thriller, which means you stare at desktop interfaces, pop-ups, bad WhatsApp calls, and what looks suspiciously like stock footage of Google Maps for a brisk 105 minutes. I haven’t seen a thriller wring so little out of the end of the world since the last time I accidentally left C-SPAN running overnight.
I suppose it’s pointless to complain about the acting—when you’ve buried every performer beneath layers of video call filters, pinging WiFi, and the immortal, haunted grayness of Microsoft Teams, you could cast Bette Davis herself and it wouldn't matter. Eva Longoria gets to be “the friend at NASA” whose pixelated face we see mostly as an oval in a chat window, while Clark Gregg is wasted as a bureaucrat so generically villainous he may as well have “placeholder” stamped on his forehead. The real star, however, is Amazon Prime—whose drone delivery saves the world in a third act so predictably sponsored I half-expected Jeff Bezos to cameo as the President, beaming in with futuristic hair plugs and a free month of Kindle Unlimited.
It’s astonishing, really: the script can’t keep its own apocalyptic mechanics straight for a single scene. We’re told the world’s data is devoured, our planes and boats are useless, but Ice Cube never seems to lose his GPS, WiFi, five-bar voice calls, or his uncanny access to live news notifications. Somewhere in the middle of all this, a band of “hackers” (if you believe a YouTube access password like “Erika2020” belongs anywhere but the nightmares of infosec auditors) attempts to fight the aliens by uploading a virus that might as well have been programmed in Scratch. Their operational security makes a Geocities web ring look like the NSA, and—miracle of miracles—the film manages to kill them all off before anyone is forced to rifle through the plot’s remaining logic gaps. The screenlife conceit only draws attention to how little is happening; we’re treated to Ice Cube’s face, sweating over a looping series of JavaScript popups, instead of, say, a Martian tripod vaporizing a city. It’s as if the filmmakers wanted to save on visual effects by just not bothering with any.
But I might have grinned at the incompetence, or found a bit of trashy pleasure in a sci-fi fiasco, if not for the movie’s unblushing celebration of government surveillance, corporate omniscience, and—Lord help us—Microsoft Teams, as the true heroes of mankind’s survival. Is there anything more revolting than a War of the Worlds where, instead of the humble microbes of Wells’s imagination, Amazon drone logistics are our salvation? Not content to simply coast on brand synergy, the screenplay stumbles into unintentional horror: this is a world where every private moment is watched, every call is monitored, and the solution to alien annihilation is... more intrusive network architecture. The original novel was a parable of human vulnerability; this is a recruitment ad for cybersecurity consultants and Amazon’s marketing department.
Why remake a classic at all if the result is going to be this? Cloverfield at least tossed us into the scrum—a found footage panic, all blood, sweat, and digital noise. This War of the Worlds, by contrast, is content to have Ice Cube clutching his mouse and muttering to himself while digital cities burn just off-screen. The promise of apocalypse via Zoom meeting isn’t just uninspired—it actively sabotages the staccato terror the premise deserves. What we’re left with is a movie so corny that you could pop it, bag it, and sell it at the next Amazon Prime Day.
Of course, the product placement alone deserves special eternal recognition: every character is kitted out with AirPods, the Amazon deliveryman gets more action than most of the military, and plot devices are literally airmail'd to the bunker by Prime drones. There’s an almost Dadaistic thrill to watching the world end with a helpful safety tip about “the future of delivery”—but I doubt that’s what H.G. Wells had in mind.
In the end, the achievement here is cosmic: it’s the rare film that manages to be so shoddy, so tone-deaf, so laughably stitched together, that even exasperated hate-watching becomes an endurance test. I’ve seen Sci-Fi Channel originals, straight-to-torrent knockoffs, and Doomsday Preppers farces with more life than this. But War of the Worlds 2025 is an empty spreadsheet of a movie: soulless, pointless, and yes, possibly evil—for making Microsoft Teams look like a salvation fantasy.
Avoid this movie like it’s a phishing email from your ex. If the apocalypse arrives this flat, let’s hope Amazon’s return policy covers planetary destruction.
