Movie Review: War of the Worlds

Given how much time many of us spend glued to our screens, the concept of a film that takes place entirely within them isn’t a bad one. Though it isn’t an original one either. In theory then, taking H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion story The War of the Worlds and adapting it to the format at least could work. Alas, screenwriters Kenny Golde and Marc Hyman prove the wrong choices to do so, and music video director Rich Lee, making his feature film debut, doesn’t fare much better in this bafflingly lifeless retelling that may have you rooting for the aliens by the time it ends.

Most of the movie takes place in an anodyne office, viewed from within a computer, where we watch William Radford (Ice Cube, playing a bored version of himself) go about his job as apparently the lone officer tasked with monitoring the government’s network of spy cameras to root out potential security threats. Those DOGE cuts must have really decimated the Department of Homeland Security. When we begin he is attempting to use the tools available to him to steer field agents towards a location where the potentially dangerous and highly wanted hacker known only as “Disruptor” is hiding out, a task that he frequently interrupts to take very-not-urgent video calls with his daughter Faith (Iman Benson), her boyfriend Mark (Devon Bostick), and his son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall).

The mission doesn’t go to plan and immediately afterwards an unprecedented number of meteors begin crashing into the Earth. William is quickly summoned into a Zoom call with his boss Donald Briggs (Clark Gregg) and NASA scientist Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), among others, as she climbs into one of the craters to investigate. Of course, alien craft begin emerging from space rocks around the world and extraterrestrials launch an attack on human civilization.

William is the worst government employee in cinema history since Dwayne Johnson’s equally important-job-eschewing character in San Andreas. I can understand how hard it would be to not be able to help your family because you are stuck at work, but when said work is a key component in assuring the safety of millions of others, I would hope those handling it would at least consider making the difficult choice to do what is being asked of them. But no, Radford is so singularly focused on his family, and especially his daughter, that at one point he even ignores a call from a supposed friend who he saw was in danger of imminent death mere moments before. That the woefully miscast Ice Cube’s line delivery is so bizarrely monotone (only occasionally punctuated with shouting) as to suggest he doesn’t actually care about any of his supposed loved ones only makes his behavior more puzzling.

Director Rich Lee and his cinematographer Christopher Probst do at least seem to know how to set up a decent shot, though Lee’s past special effects work on blockbusters like Minority Report and three Pirates of the Caribbean films does not appear to have helped the middling CGI on display here to rise above SyFy Channel original movie levels of believability. That much of the destruction shown is comprised of real footage taken from actual disasters with the cheesy alien craft superimposed on top only makes it worse, and even more than a little offensive.

There is a kernel of a good idea here and once or twice we almost catch a glimpse of the better movie this could have been, which only makes it more of a shame that War of the Worlds wound up as bad as it did. It seems to want to say something about the dangers of mass surveillance, but never really forms a cohesive opinion on it and ironically enough at times instead comes off like an advertisement for Amazon.com. With action that is often reduced to staring at icons on a map, performances that are literally phoned in, and a plot only a mother(ship) could love, this early Razzie Award frontrunner will be remembered as one of the worst movies of the year, if it is lucky enough to be remembered at all. ★