While Ice Cube is the top-billed star of the latest adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, he is not the film’s hero. Nor are any of the other human characters. The true savior in this alien invasion story is Amazon, the global conglomerate whose products and services become the only means to repel an extraterrestrial menace.
For instance: The only way to get an all-important MacGuffin to Cube’s Department of Homeland Security hacker is for another character (who just so happens to be an Amazon deliveryman) to utilize Amazon’s drone delivery service to ship him the crucial gadget. While said character is racing to stop the total obliteration of the planet, he pauses long enough to explain that Amazon’s drone service is called Prime Air and that it is “the future of delivery!” Duly noted!
(Not only does the climax involve placing an official order for an item through Amazon’s website, the human resistance actually saves the day by bribing someone with a $1,000 Amazon gift card. So just remember: The next time you need something for that special someone in your life, think of an Amazon gift card. You might just save the world while you do it.)
I’ve seen some egregious product placement in my day, but the last time I can recall a film that felt less like an actual movie and more like a feature-length commercial was 2013’s The Internship, starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as out-of-work, middle-aged salesmen who managed to land a pair of exclusive internships at Google headquarters. In 2013, I wrote that The Internship “is not so much product placement in a movie as movie placement in a product.” War of the Worlds is the first film I can recall since then that matched that description — right down to the fact that the only place to watch this shockingly, hilariously bad movie right now is on Amazon’s Prime Video service. (It’s the future of streaming!)
READ MORE: The Best Sci-Fi Horror Movies That Aren’t in the Alien Franchise
That does at least mean you can actually experience this disastrous screenlife disaster movie on a handheld screen, as was surely intended. Cube’s character, Will Radford, is largely seen as an extreme closeup from his webcam. Holed up in his office at DHS (a green screen background he never interacts with in any way), Will mostly ignores his actual job responsibilities while he casually uses invasive surveillance technology to spy on his two children.
Will’s so distracted, in fact, he almost misses the first stages of a full-scale invasion from those classic War of the Worlds tripods. Working with the head of DHS (Clark Gregg) and an intrepid NASA scientist (Eva Longoria), Will must figure out how to stop the aliens while helping his rebellious son (Henry Hunter Hall) and pregnant daughter (Iman Benson) stay out of danger.
That’s actually not the worst idea for a sci-fi movie. Some filmmakers have made clever use of the so-called “screenlife’ format, where an entire movie takes place on a computer screen and its various apps, to tell stories about the isolating terrors of modern technology. War of the Worlds’ execution of that concept, however, really may be the worst I’ve seen from a major studio in any genre (Universal, in this case) in a decade or more. I would not have been surprised to see Tommy Wiseau’s name in the end credits.
Even with every digital editing and cinematography trick in the book, this War of the Worlds’ tripods and their global attack look egregiously phony. Some moments are impossibly amateurish; at one point Will saves his injured daughter by guiding her to a Tesla he remotely pilots to a medical facility. Using his unstoppable hacker skills, Will drives the car from his desk back at DHS headquarters. He even watches where the car is going through the Tesla’s front windshield — where the other cars on the road move slowly with the normal flow of traffic even though they are supposed to be running from their lives from a rampaging Martian craft shooting death beams at everything its path.
The only thing worse than the visuals are the performances, especially from Cube, whose array of reactions to whatever is happening on the screen in front of his is so random and disconnected from the flow of the story it seems he was given a series of generic prompts to react to instead of an actual script. In one moment he might be devastated by the near-death of someone he cares about, and literally 15 seconds later he’s pumping his fist and screaming “Take your intergalactic asses back home!” as if he’s playing a video game and not fighting for the survival of the entire human race.
Still, none of Cube’s dialogue is as bad as the stuff the writers give to the President of the United States, who actually goes on a Zoom call and declares that the alien attack represents “a war of the worlds.” Then they repeat that phrase on a CNN chryon.
Supposedly, War of the Worlds was shot during some of the worst of the Covid pandemic, which explains its conception as a series of disconnected faces on screens working together remotely to disrupt a massive threat. That’s not the issue; the issue is the film looks bad, sounds worse, and appears to exist solely to promote Amazon as the solution to all of life’s problems — everything from a father’s estrangement from his children up to and including an incursion from the stars by ultra-advanced war machines. The tripods may look futuristic with their laser weapons and robo-tentacles. But they could never stop the future of delivery.
The Worst Movies of 2025 So Far
There have been a lot of good movies so far this year — and more than a handful of clunkers.
