Imagine you’re a sci-fi aficionado, craving cosmic dread, Martian tentacles, and a redeeming narrative thread to hang onto. Now instead, picture being force-fed 89 minutes of Ice Cube staring at spreadsheets, product placement so shameless it could collapse a camera lens, and an alien invasion narrated exclusively by Microsoft Teams pop-ups.
That’s War of the Worlds (2025): a film so inept, it’s as though someone decided to adapt H.G. Wells’ horror classic using slide decks, Amazon Prime promotions, and a healthy dose of self-regard. Spoiler alert: the invaders don’t need heat-rays. They’re already unleashing a more terrifying weapon—budget-conscious branding.
Tomatometer Terror: 0% Horror
Let’s not pussyfoot: the film bowed to critics with a legendary 0% Rotten Tomatoes score—a cinematic joust so badly executed it could qualify for the dictionary next to “unredeemable.” Yes, War of the Worlds (2025) is a rare stunt—in that no critic, not a single soul, could find reason to recommend it.
It’s now being whispered about in hushed tones as one of the worst films in living memory, like Battleship or something that happens when mid-budget movies contract a deadly virus of incoherence. And yet, despite this, it’s also streaming among Prime’s top-viewed titles—a perfect reminder that no publicity is too awful if it gets people clicking.
Screenlife Nightmares: Alien Invasion Via Zoom
This isn’t a conventional flick; it’s what they now call a “screenlife” film—aliens invade through your Wi-Fi, and our hero fights them by clicking tabs and monitoring folders. The idea is modern, meta, and millennial—a planetary meltdown viewed through a “privacy-but-also-surveillance-thesis.” Maybe that could’ve been clever. Instead, it’s tedious.
Critics have described scenes so mind-numbingly dull that you’d rather watch your phone battery drain than endure another close-up of Ice Cube reacting to a Teams alert. CGI looks budget-constrained. Plot hangs on thin air. And the alien threat? They exist solely to harvest… data. That’s right: your existential dread, commodified.
Product Placement or Plot Placement?
If you’ve ever wondered what a 90-minute commercial masquerading as a thriller looks like, this is your moment. The film brags about drones, Amazon deliveries, Teams calls—even as Earth collapses. Big Tech is practically the superhero here, which in sci-fi is like letting the ad section write the script: serviceable, but soul-dead.
Critics didn’t just call it bad—they called it “shameless propaganda” disguised as entertainment, a “corporation-coddling remake” that feels like a PR firm’s fever dream. Worse still, the movie seems to applaud surveillance while blaming… surveillance. It’s dystopia—packaged nicely—and then sold back to you with a Prime logo.
The Cast of Thousands? More Like the Cast of Ghosts
You’ll recognize names—Ice Cube, Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg. But in execution, they’re as effective as wax figures reading cue cards. Performances are flat, the product placement too enthusiastic, and no one looks like they believe in the stakes of the scene they’re in.
Some say there’s unintentional camp value—the trainwreck appeal of a film so bonkers it circles back into guilty-pleasure territory. But it’s a half-hearted redemption. Camp is fine when it’s knowing. This is camp that’s just… bad.
Audience Reviews: From Rage to Ridicule
Here’s where the stinger’s full of receipts: audience responses run the gamut—from legally banning sleep to calling it “garbage” to praising it as “fun for a trainwreck.” One viewer said it’s worse than watching a semester project with no plot. Others compared it to a Zoom meeting gone wrong. Another lamented they “stopped after 20 minutes.” Dry, savage, and deeply deserved.
Some tried to spin it as cozy TV fare. One wrote: “It reminded me of being at work while watching a movie.” A kind of dystopian sitcom, where homelife bleeds into catastrophic siege, and only the IFC stays on the call.
What This Disaster Says About Cinema Today
The tragic elegance here: a beloved sci-fi property warped into a live-streamed tech commercial. It embodies the vicious orbit of content streaming — big idea, zero execution, polished surface, hollow core.
It suggests we’re chasing relevance by asking, “How would aliens invade during a pandemic?” instead of “Why should I care?” Storytelling died on screen under the weight of screens themselves. We’re collapsing art into UI, narrative into branded user flow.
In Conclusion: A Horrible Movie That Keeps on Giving
So here we are. A film with the audacity to modernize a classic through PowerPoint-esque visuals, a nihilistic ad for Amazon and Big Tech, and an existential commentary drowned in product placement. One critic called it “a disastrous movie retelling of H.G. Wells’ classic.” Others accused it of being “shameless tech propaganda.” Even Ice Cube’s son had to mount a defense—“it’s cheesily entertaining,” he said—but that just confirms how deeply this sucker punched expectations.
In art, ambition without clarity is just noise. War of the Worlds (2025) has volume—but no actual dial tone. If telecommunications broke, this is the signal failure: a sci-fi disaster that alienates viewers by being too human—selling instead of storytelling, streaming instead of stirring.