When the promoters of the new War of the Worlds movie decided on the tagline “It’s worse than you think,” little could they imagine that it would unintentionally promote a film with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, 0% after 20 reviews at the time of writing.
One critic described it as “silly, shoddy,” and criticized Ice Cube for spending too much time “staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment.“
Variety panned the film for resembling a glorified Amazon commercial. “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 said.
War of the Worlds 2025
Billed as a “modern spin” on the HG Wells novel, War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube and Eva Longoria. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security surveillance expert who spends most of the film in front of a computer screen, battling a hacker and an alien invasion while trying to protect his family.
The film is an Amazon Prime production and attracted online ridicule. For instance, this advertisement for Amazon Prime delivery.
Then there is the bad acting
When a fan on X posted the clip with the caption, “I truly can’t believe this adaptation of War Of The Worlds is actually a real film with a real budget and Ice Cube is actually in it,” Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., responded: “Shot during the pandemic. Released 5 years later.”
This is not the first film adaptation of the novel. The first adaptation was released in 1953, while Steven Spielberg’s adaptation was released in 2005. Then there is the famous radio broadcast in 1938 which caused widespread panic among American listeners, many of whom mistook the dramatization for real news reporting of a Martian invasion.
As for War of the Worlds 2025, despite the backlash, the movie may gather more eyeballs than it intended. But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?
