Rich Lee’s 2025 War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube, is a badly received screenlife thriller—and for some viewers, that’s part of the entertainment. Critics have faulted its screenplay, effects, performances and uneven use of computer screens and digital interfaces. Its most notorious comic beat ties an alien invasion to Amazon and a delivery drone. The result is less a deliberate comedy than a disaster movie whose earnest choices can land as absurd.
Which War of the Worlds movie is this?
This is the 2025 film directed by Rich Lee, with Ice Cube playing Will Radford. Eva Longoria and Clark Gregg are also among the cast. It adapts H. G. Wells’s public-domain alien-invasion story as a contemporary screenlife thriller: much of the action is presented through computer screens, video calls and other digital interfaces. The Guardian and Variety both describe the screen-centered approach. The film is associated with Universal Pictures and Prime Video, though streaming availability can vary by location.
What do critics say goes wrong?
The screenlife format is inconsistent
A screen-based story can make limited viewpoints feel tense, but the Guardian argues that this film repeatedly departs from its own screen-only conceit. When the devices and interfaces stop feeling like a coherent point of view, the format can seem more like a constraint than a source of suspense. The Guardian’s review also places the film in the context of earlier screen-based movies, but that comparison is a frame for discussion, not proof that one approach is objectively better.
The effects and performances don’t help
The Guardian criticizes the alien ships’ appearance and says the performances feel isolated from one another. Its review puts the effects complaint bluntly: “No amount of handheld phone-camera or grainy news footage can disguise how terrible the alien ships look.” Rotten Tomatoes’ page collects reviews that also criticize the screenplay’s challenge of animating Ice Cube’s largely desk-bound role and call the movie a “desktop disaster.” Those are critics’ judgments, not a universal response.
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The script leans on an awkward plot device
Variety critic Peter Debruge singles out the Amazon-centered plot turn in which an official order activates a delivery drone, calling the film a weak adaptation. His review makes the moment’s implausibility the joke: “How many people will watch this nonsense long enough to get to the part where the Prime delivery guy saves the day, telling Will, ‘I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone’?”
Why do some viewers find it hilarious?
The film is not presented as an intentional comedy. Its humor, for viewers who find it funny, comes from the gap between the grave tone of an alien-invasion thriller and the conspicuous commercial details threaded through it. The delivery-drone solution turns Amazon into part of the apparent answer to an existential crisis; earnest disaster-movie dialogue and the desk-bound screenlife setup can add to the incongruity.
Rank #2
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TheWrap reports that viewers mocked the Amazon placement and shared reactions describing the movie as funny. That response is audience-dependent: a scene that one person finds enjoyably ridiculous may simply frustrate someone else. The marketing card “IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK,” reported by TheWrap as trailer copy, is a memorable bit of promotion—not neutral evidence about the film’s quality.
How bad is it, exactly?
Rotten Tomatoes’ page showed 4% of critics and 20% of audiences at the time checked for this article. Those figures are a dated snapshot: scores and the number of reviews or ratings can change, and an aggregator score is not a universal verdict. The useful takeaway is that the film was receiving very poor reviews and a low audience score at that check, while individual viewers may respond differently—especially to its accidental comedy.
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Is it worth watching?
If you want a polished, suspenseful adaptation of Wells’s invasion story, the reported weaknesses in execution make this a risky pick. If you enjoy watching earnest genre films veer into unintended absurdity, the screenlife premise and Amazon-drone moment may be precisely what makes it entertaining. The source novel is The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells; no particular edition is singled out here.
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