awful film. avoid. spend time with the family. if you do not have a family spend time watching paint dry. because anything is better than giving this film another viewer.

This is literally an Amazon commercial. Like, in the last 20 minutes Amazon saves the world and then the characters pretend they care about your privacy. LITERALLY.

It's just an insult to H.G. Wells.

The new adaptation of “War of the Worlds” somehow manages to turn a sci-fi classic into a lifeless, tensionless mess, and one of the laziest uses of the screenlife format we’ve seen in a while. Even though it starts with a premise that could’ve at least created some urgency – aliens invading Earth in the middle of the digital age –, the movie seems totally uninterested in building any kind of atmosphere or scale. The decision to lock the entire story inside a computer screen, focusing on a single character sitting in a room (and not exactly a charismatic one), isn’t just visually limiting, it also says a lot about a production that avoids any risk in favor of a cheap, bare-minimum kind of execution. It’s almost laughable that, during a full-on alien invasion, the film chooses to center everything on Will Radford (Ice Cube), a Department of Homeland Security analyst who spends his time spying on his kids and spouting cringey one-liners while clicking through windows on his desktop. The apocalyptic scale gets watered down to grainy videos, amateur livestreams, and news clips that feel more like stock footage than a stylistic choice, mostly because it’s clearly more about saving money than building a world. Instead of seeing society collapse or watching complex moral dilemmas unfold, we just follow Will trying to micromanage his grown kids’ lives – acharacter arc that feels completely out of place and painfully boring considering, you know, the end of the world is happening. The movie tries to align itself with some kind of critique on surveillance, controlling parents, or our tech addiction, but it all falls flat because the script doesn’t have the depth to back up those ideas. Everything feels shallow and borderline unintentionally funny, like it wants to satirize digital paranoia but chickens out before it can actually commit. Ice Cube, meanwhile, just doesn’t work neither as a government guy nor as a concerned father. His whole performance relies on the same facial expressions and over-the-top delivery, which turns every supposed moment of tension into straight-up parody. The supporting characters don’t help either, they’re just empty plot devices with zero charm or conflict. Even Will’s daughter going into labor mid-apocalypse feels more like a lazy screenplay gimmick than anything with real stakes. Visually, it’s just plain dull. When done right, the screenlife style can actually be immersive and suspenseful, limiting what we see to make us feel trapped with the character. But here, it’s just an excuse for bland production design and hyperactive editing that tries to cover up the lack of substance with quick cuts and overlapping windows. The visual effects, when they finally show up, are generic and outdated. The so-called big reveal with the alien tripod shows up way too late and has zero impact: by that point, we’ve already been numbed by endless desktop screens and spoon-fed exposition that feels more like a tech tutorial than a story. And we can’t ignore the sheer absurdity of how commercial branding is forced into the narrative, especially the ridiculous scene where Will’s son-in-law, an Amazon delivery guy, ends up saving the day by launching a drone through an official order on the website. It’s honestly one of the most cringe-worthy and shamelessly promotional scenes ever crammed into an alien invasion movie, and that’s saying something. Making a real-world brand a key part of saving the planet isn’t just narratively desperate; it’s such a gross corporate flex that it kills whatever tiny bit of seriousness the movie had left. “War of the Worlds” fails as sci-fi, as social commentary, and most of all, as entertainment. Its biggest disaster isn’t even the alien invasion, it’s how little ambition it has with such a timeless concept. What we get instead is a hollow digital shell that barely qualifies as cinema, let alone a decent use of screenlife. In a world where sci-fi has shown it can deliver thought-provoking and emotional futures, this “War of the Worlds” ironically gives us no world, no war, and absolutely no impact.

Terrible adaptation. Terrible presentation format. Way too much product placement. Most scenes have a giant logo for Fox News, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Prime, or Tesla plastered somewhere. It felt like one long ad with War of the Worlds barely hanging on in the background. Like others have said, the constant default ringtones from WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams completely killed the immersion. And there’s no clear reason why Ice Cube's character picks and chooses who to answer. If someone declined my call multiple times during a crisis, I’d stop trying. He seems to be the only person handling the situation, yet spends half the movie chatting with his family while ignoring everything else. It makes no sense and honestly makes him look irresponsible. What started as an interesting idea, connecting characters through a computer screen, quickly became annoying. They leaned on it for most of the movie, then awkwardly threw in random camera cuts when they realized it couldn’t carry the whole thing. Either stick with the screen format or don’t use it at all. The half-and-half approach didn’t work. The twists weren’t exciting or believable. One character literally says "do a barrel roll." It’s that kind of movie. And almost every plot turn made Ice Cube’s character look completely useless compared to all the side characters. He is great in action roles, but here he’s stuck playing the "angry arm chair jockey" while everyone else gets pushed to the side character role while contributing more than the main character. The CGI looked cheap. It honestly felt like a 90s made-for-TV movie whenever the alien machines showed up in clear view. They used the screen format and “bad signal” effects to hide it in some clips, but it was obvious. All that product placement money clearly didn’t go to visual effects. The movie also tried to make some half-baked point about tech companies collecting data. But by the end, it turns into a straight-up Amazon Prime ad. I’m not kidding. The last 10 minutes feel like Bezos needed to pay for his wedding and decided this was a way to recoup the costs. I gave it a 3 out of 10, and that's mostly because Ice Cube is still Ice Cube. His lines felt like ones I’ve heard in other movies, but he at least came off like a believable frustrated dad and employee. I’ll give the movie credit for trying something different with the screen-only format. It just didn’t work. Let’s not try that again anytime soon.