WAR OF THE WORLDS (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

War of the Worlds, Prime Video

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 30, 2025

There's definitely something to the approach War of the Worlds takes. Director Rich Lee presents the basics of H.G. Wells' novel, in which invaders from Mars attack Earth, and sets them entirely within the confines of a single computer screen. One thinks of the most famous/infamous version of this tale, when Orson Welles orchestrated a radio drama of it, presented as a live news broadcast, in 1938. Some of those who were late to the program believed the drama was the real deal, and panic ensued.

A modern equivalent of that would, of course, be almost impossible to mount, since news is no longer exclusive to one medium. Lee, along with screenwriters Kenny Golde and Marc Hyman, attempt to replicate what an alien invasion might look like to someone witnessing it from the multimedia hub of a desktop computer. Our man William Radford (Ice Cube), isolated in a room and staring at his computer screen, watches as news reports, CCTV cameras, cellphones videos, social media, video calls, and the like capture the alien attack in near-real time.

It's a neat conceit, to be sure, but the filmmakers' imagination quickly runs thin here. After all, there had better be a good reason that William stays put, or else, the entire gimmick of the storytelling would come to an end. Also, a guy watching a screen for about 80 minutes isn't always exciting, especially since that makes our protagonist an entirely passive figure in the drama. To make William too active in this story, however, might wreck the illusion of helplessly witnessing the invasion unfold, too.

None of these concerns ultimately matter, because the filmmakers don't appear to have considered them. The story here is so overwhelmed and overburdened by convenient technology that William basically becomes an all-seeing eye and an all-powerful force to observe and to fight back against the aliens. He works as an analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, and with a super-duper-top-secret surveillance program at his fingertips, William can do pretty much anything that the plot requires of him.

That the movie becomes more about the ethics and overreach of this system is a strange choice, given that it's so instrumental to William's efforts to save his family from and attempt to stop the alien invasion. He uses the surveillance network, for example, to spy on his adult children Faith (Iman Benson), currently pregnant and dating Mark (Devon Bostick), and David (Henry Hunter Hall), a wannabe video-game streamer who lives at home.

One would imagine such using official government technology to keep tabs on family members might be frowned upon by William's bosses, since it's technically supposed to be implemented to violate privacy in the name of national security. The bigger question, though, is why William retains full access to this system even after he's fired for daring to question if the system, which is so incredibly helpful to him personally and professionally and in the midst of this global crisis, should even exist in the first place.

Eventually, the aliens show up, emerging from meteorites in those iconic three-legged vehicles. As for the visual effects, it's probably a good thing that much of the alien tech is seen in smaller windows inside the desktop frame. Even that can't hide how herky-jerky their movements are or how their laser blasts come across as bold lines copied, pasted, and deleted in some rudimentary graphics program.

At a certain point, the screenplay almost forgets about the aliens entirely, since there's also a vast government conspiracy for William to unravel. It doesn't take much work, of course, because William is an official part of that conspiracy. For some reason, he only seems mad about the abusive surveillance system after learning that it unintentionally brought aliens to Earth.

Most of this plot, then, amounts to meetings and phone calls presenting exposition, as William's family and NASA scientist Sandra (Eva Longoria) try to avoid or escape the aliens with William's omniscient aid. At times, we just have to trust that there's a threat near them, since a movie that tries to portray a worldwide alien invasion on a single computer screen surely doesn't have the kind of budget to stage big, visual effects-heavy action setpieces. Most of it, apparently, was spent on a climactic drone flight, brought to us by the online shopping company that coincidentally is distributing the movie on its streaming service.

War of the Worlds offers a clever concept for telling this story. Everything else about it fails to live up to that promise.

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