“It’s worse than you think.” That’s the actual tagline featured in the trailer for War of the Worlds, a new adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic that seemingly came out of nowhere last week. The trailer was released online just a few days before the movie was released exclusively on Prime Video, leaving many to wonder where the hell this thing even came from.
Now that many people have taken the time to actually watch the movie, well, War of the Worlds (2025) has gone viral on social media for one particularly noteworthy reason: with 13 reviews currently submitted at this time, the movie has a 0% Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes.
From director Rich Lee and producers Patrick Aiello and Timur Bekmambetov, War of the Worlds premiered on Prime Video on July 30, and the new twist on the classic tale presents the alien invasion through the lens of the “screenlife” subgenre, where literally everything in the movie takes place on a computer screen. It’s a style Bekmambetov has practically cornered the market on with films including Unfriended, Searching, and Missing, and the idea to give War of the Worlds the screenlife treatment was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And yes, the film stars Ice Cube in the leading role, with the screenlife format allowing Cube and co-stars like Eva Longoria to film their parts at a distance from each other during the early days of the pandemic. Aiello said in a statement, “For the first time ever, a studio-scale sci-fi epic has been produced using a format that places audiences inside the action through the lenses of phones, computers, and tablets. It’s a visceral, first-person experience designed for big screens in a language and format that is now natural within our daily lives.”
Bekmambetov teased in his own statement, “It’ll be exciting for audiences to watch the movie and ask themselves: if aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones. In that way, it’s kind of a modern spin on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Back then, he used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real. Today, that medium is the screen of our devices.”
Those best laid plans, well, it’s safe to say they fell apart somewhere along the way. War of the Worlds has quickly become one of the most panned movies of the year, the sort of movie that misfires so hard that it’s actually becoming a must-watch. The term “so bad, it’s good” comes to mind, reserved for those rare movies that are notable precisely because they’re so bad.
This modern-day adaptation follows “Will Radford (Ice Cube), a top cyber-security analyst for Homeland Security, who spends his days tracking potential threats to national security through a mass surveillance program, until an attack by an unknown entity leads him to question whether the government is hiding something from him… and the rest of the world.”
“It is silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment,” writes Ed Power in his review for The Daily Telegraph.
Adam Does Movies proclaims, “I really don’t like how a lot of modern reviewers say outlandish statements like “This is the worst movie ever made.” Mainly because it devalues films like War of the Worlds, who had to work really hard to actually be one of the worst movies ever made.”
Giant Freakin Robot chimes in, “It’s noteworthy because of all the attempts to adapt this story, this is the worst one.”
Austin Burke from Flick Fan Nation says, “Poorly written and awkwardly paced, War of the Worlds in contention for one of the worst movies of the decade so far.”
And the film’s most notable review comes from Variety critic Peter Deburge, who had this to say: “Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon.” It’s one of many reviews that points out the Amazon product placement within the, well, Amazon Prime movie.
Curious to see this one for yourself? The 1 hour, 29 minute War of the Worlds (2025) is now streaming on Prime Video. Or you can stick with the trailer, which might be enough for most…
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