Just over 20 years ago, Steven Spielberg released War of the Worlds, a remake of the HG Wells classic updated for then modern day, capturing an era of post-9/11 anxiety filtered through the prism of late-90s disaster movies. That movie’s reputation has only grown over the years – it’s basically the thinking and anxious person’s Independence Day – but the Wells text has been revisited repeatedly since its publication at the tail end of the 19th century. 2025 seems as good a time as any for another update. And if ever any viewers yearned to see a new War of the Worlds beset with the constant pinging of a Microsoft Teams chat, Prime Video has a real treat in store.
Yes, hovering towards the top of Prime Video’s movie charts is a new War of the Worlds, which arrived with little fanfare on the service at the end of July. In it, Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security official who monitors an array of feeds for terrorist threats. Despite a belated heads-up from his Nasa pal Dr Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), he (somewhat bafflingly) fails to pay much mind to a series of mysterious gathering storms, until it’s too late: meteor strikes occur worldwide, and from the meteors emerge alien tripods that quickly lay waste to buildings and people everywhere. Will has been distracted by the hunt for a hacker called “Disruptor”, as well as by spying on his grown-ish kids Faith (Iman Benson), who is expecting her first child, and Dave (Henry Hunter Hall), a gamer Will thinks is wasting his life.
In a novelty that turns into a hindrance almost immediately, most of this unfolds on Will’s computer screen at his mostly empty office, where he’s working what’s described as a “graveyard” shift despite it being, you know, daytime. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it unfolds near Will’s computer screen. Unlike past “screenlife” movies like Unfriended, War of the Worlds is not exactly rigorous about adhering to its self-imposed limitations. Though Will’s face is often display on screen as part of various video calls (which is how Unfriended and others have worked actors’ faces into a screen-only framework), the movie also flat-out cuts away to traditional shots of Will that are framed vaguely like a Zoom call but clearly take place outside of Will’s computer. This makes sense. After all, when you’ve got an actor as expressive as Ice Cube, you want unmotivated closeups that can capture every single cocked-eyebrow scowl. How will the audience know how to feel if they can’t see Ice Cube scowling at his computer screen?
That’s probably not fair to Cube, who has been quite good in plenty of other movies. The man has presence. What he does not have is the kind of subtlety or emotional range that benefits from de facto solo occupation of the screen. Really, every actor in War of the Worlds feels like they’re performing in a Zoom-style vacuum – and seemingly not as a commentary on the coldly disconnected world of digital communication. In fact, quite the opposite: in this movie, everyone video-calls everyone all the time, to better show off some of the worst visual effects ever seen in a movie bearing the Universal Pictures logo out front. No amount of handheld phone-camera or grainy news footage can disguise how terrible the alien ships look. They wouldn’t pass muster on a whimsical Snickers ad.
So how did this happen? How did this D-grade reimagining of a public-domain property wind up going from major studio to major streaming service to the top of the charts?
It should have been a fortuitous confluence of events. Film-maker Timur Bekmambetov remains high on the screenlife format, a variation on found footage, where stories are told entirely through activity on device screens. He’s produced several successful film series based on that tech: the aforementioned horror film Unfriended and its sequel, and a pair of less bloody companion thrillers, Searching and Missing. All of these movies make innovative use of their central gimmick, and War of the Worlds came out as a pandemic-inspired variation. It was announced in the fall of 2020 as a spectacle-driven sci-fi movie that could nonetheless unfold in a series of contained environments, with actors all filming their parts separately.
So the reason War of the Worlds feels not just like eavesdropping on a Zoom call but like a movie pieced together through Zoom is that it more or less was. More technology was involved, but that’s barely clear from the final product, which has the rushed jankiness of something that should have come out a month or two after filming and been marketed as a quickie experiment. Instead, the movie seems to have sat on a shelf for literally years before it was sold off to a streaming service. Weirdly, it’s not the only 2020-shot Universal-produced sci-fi movie to get that treatment: Long Distance, a space survival movie starring Anthony Ramos, recently debuted on Hulu despite filming wrapping before the end of 2020. Even a lengthy post-production would mean that it spent three years on the shelf, and couldn’t even rate a release in the aftermath of the 2023 strikes. (Long Distance looks and acts more like a real movie compared with War of the Worlds. This is also true of many network TV shows and some big-budget ads.)
The simplest answer to why the hell these movies have remained in limbo, then, seems to be Covid-era buyer’s remorse. Studios were panicking about how to keep their pipelines moving during an unprecedented disruption, and didn’t wind up having room on the release schedule for these smaller projects. The real question is how audiences have made it through an unconvincing cheapie like War of the Worlds – a sci-fi epic that seems to take place in real time yet features a vast and coordinated worldwide mobilization of multiple armed forces – without shutting it off in disgust (it boasts a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
Maybe they haven’t. Streaming viewership is notoriously sketchy to measure, and most services rely on total minutes watched, which means watching five minutes of an awful movie and then flipping to something else can add to its total. War of the Worlds seems to have been made for its Covid-era convenience, and cynically capitalizes on surveillance paranoia and government secrets without actually saying anything coherent about, well, anything. But Amazon – which figures into the plot so embarrassingly that it seems like a plea for a Prime Video pick-up – stumbled upon the perfect streaming product: a cheap piece of junk with a recognizable title and stars, just enough for millions of people to hit play. Maybe some of them even watched through the end; the movie certainly doesn’t compete with second-screen phone-scrolling, in the sense that your scroll is likely to eventually hit upon something vastly better than the movie’s own toggling between chat windows. Amazon has plenty of experience helping consumers find junk, so War of the Worlds wound up in a fitting home – at least until Temu starts its own streaming service.