Ice Cube plays a Homeland Security agent who uses a national surveillance program mostly to keep tabs on his own family. Then aliens arrive. That is the premise of the new War of the Worlds, which Prime Video released worldwide on July 30, 2025.
Timur Bekmambetov, who pioneered the “screen movie” with Unfriended, Searching and Missing, is behind the project, with Patrick Aiello producing alongside him. Those three earlier thrillers earned more than $200 million between them. The invasion here is told through phones, laptops and tablets, not through wide shots of burning cities.
Aiello explained the idea to Deadline. “When catastrophes happen today, we experience them through our devices,” he said. Bekmambetov put it more bluntly: “If aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones.” He compared it to Orson Welles and his radio broadcast, which used the biggest medium of its day to make listeners believe an invasion was real.
The story
Ice Cube is Will Radford, who ignores a string of warnings on his computer screen until the invaders cannot be ignored. His pregnant daughter Faith is played by Iman Benson. His computer-savvy son Dave is played by Henry Hunter Hall, and Eva Longoria appears as Sandra, a NASA scientist and old friend. Radford tries to use the government machinery at his fingertips to protect them. Along the way he starts to suspect the government is hiding more than intelligence.
The verdict
Decider’s Marshall Shaffer was not won over. His call was “SKIP IT!” and he described the film as a “limp, lifeless take” on Wells, squeezed into the screen-movie format to cash in on a famous title.
His complaints were specific. The aliens are glimpsed only in news reports or far in the background of someone’s video, which he suspects hides cheap CGI. The film spends a long stretch as a parenting drama before turning into a cyber thriller. It also leans hard on Microsoft Office and Amazon. One line has a character say: “Prime Air. It’s the future of delivery. They’ve been training us for months. I need you to place an official order on Amazon…”
Shaffer found the ending cynical, too, since it points the question of surveillance away from corporations and back at the government.
Sources
- Stream It Or Skip It: ‘War of the Worlds’ on Amazon Prime Video, Where Ice Cube Leads The Surveillance State In A Fight Against Aliens
- Ice Cube Leads a Data-Age Alien Invasion in Prime Video’s 'War of the Worlds'
Sources
- Ice Cube ‘War of the Worlds’ Amazon Prime Video Review: Stream It…
- Ice Cube Leads a Data-Age Alien Invasion in Prime Video’s 'War of…
