Amazon Prime's latest sci-fi disaster has officially landed with the grace of a meteor strike. War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube as a surveillance expert battling alien invaders through computer screens, received a perfect 0% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.
This "fresh take" on H.G. Wells' 1898 masterpiece follows Will Radford (Ice Cube), a Department of Homeland Security analyst who must save humanity while staring at monitors for 90 minutes. The film, directed by Rich Lee and co-starring Eva Longoria, unfolds entirely through the "screenlife" format, watching someone work on their computer during an alien invasion.
The casting choice raises eyebrows along with the low-budget concept. Transforming Wells' Victorian-era British protagonist into a modern-day Ice Cube feels less like creative adaptation and more like identity checkbox casting that pervades far too many films in modern times. The decision to reimagine this classic tale through a black lead is a suspect choice at best.
Critics have been merciless in their assessment. Variety's Peter Debruge delivered a scathing review, noting that "Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon."
The Telegraph's Ed Power was equally unimpressed, describing the film as "silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he's working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment."
Paul Mount from Starburst called it "a tortuous, endless 90 minutes of glitchy video clips, military stock footage, glad-to-be-doing-something actors running through the street waving a camera in front of their faces and pretending to be scared," awarding it a brutal 1/5 stars.
Audiences proved equally unforgiving. One viewer complained about the film's complete suspension of logic, noting how "nice to know that the Internet and cell phones are going to continue to work after the aliens take out our satellites." Another simply declared it "the biggest steaming pile of garbage I've ever watched."
The most damning audience review came from a viewer who stated they "would've rather have been on hold with insurance for 90 minutes, only for them to deny my claim." When your movie loses to insurance hold music, you've achieved something special.
Even Ice Cube's son, O'Shea Jackson Jr., seemed to distance himself from the project, revealing on social media that the film was "Shot during the pandemic. Released 5 years later,” suggesting even the family knew this was destined for the vault.
This catastrophic adaptation may represent one of the most dismal sci-fi failures in modern cinema history. With its perfect storm of misguided casting, lazy execution, and shameless product placement, War of the Worlds 2025 threatens to make Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Citizen Kane by comparison.
At least Plan 9 had the decency to be unintentionally entertaining.
What do you think of this latest Hollywood disaster?
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This is what happens when USAID funding dries up and they don't have extra cash to buy reviews - as we know USAID funded "reviews" in gaming mags and funded journalists in "gamergate" 1 and 2.
With that cut off now, we're going to be seeing a lot more honest reviews because they weren't bought. Some big land-whales, like Disney or others, will still pull the worst tricks as they have a serious pressure to make their bottom line look like it is at least starting to rise from the wreck of the Titanic.
Tom Clancy might have been able to this off. Modern Hollywood, nope.