The new War of the Worlds has achieved an unholy trinity of critical failure: a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 6/100 score on Metacritic, and Letterboxd's second-lowest rating ever recorded. It's not just bad. It's measurably, historically bad. The reviews are so awful they've become a sort of marketing campaign on its own, turning this 90-minute Zoom call into a must-see hate-watch.
This is Amazon’s “screenlife” reimagining of H.G. Wells’s alien-invasion classic, starring Ice Cube as Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security analyst with access to pretty much every camera on Earth, and Eva Longoria as a NASA official who spends most of the running time boring Radford with weather phenomena. The plot, loosely: Aliens attack Earth to consume all of humanity’s data, and Radford has to stop them using nothing but Microsoft Teams and a baffling number of dropdown menus. The entire film plays out through computer screens, video calls, surveillance feeds, and chat windows. Producer Timur Bekmambetov, who made other screenlife thrillers like Searching (2018) and Missing (2023), told Deadline, “If aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones.” It’s a fine premise, but in practice, War of the Worlds feels less like cutting-edge immersion and more like watching your dad troubleshoot the apocalypse.
If you haven’t pressed play yet, don’t. The film was notoriously rushed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Universal capitalizing on safety concerns to justify a low-budget, fully remote production. Just because you can make a dirt cheap WFH movie doesn’t mean you actually should, let alone use it as an opportunity to butcher Wells’s iconic story. It’s somehow worse than the internet says, and not worth an hour and a half of your life. Instead, let me walk you through cinema’s newest abomination, one baffling decision at a time.
Here are the 21 worst things I can’t stop thinking about from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Please, give this a skim before committing real running time to this piece of shit. This isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good movie like Battlefield Earth or The VelociPastor or most of the garbage fish-monster movies. War of the Worlds is a so-bad-it-hurts movie. Finishing it twice was a goddamn trudge, like chewing through gobs of dried paint.
21. Secretary of Defense Walter Crystal golfing through the end of the world.
Crystal proves that when aliens invade, some people just refuse to let it ruin their backswing. He first appears on two Zoom calls with panicked government officials—both times on a golf course, stogie in hand, golf cart right behind him, like this is just another budget meeting. His only other scenes? Getting chauffeured around in the back of a sedan. Crystal treats the end of civilization like a minor scheduling conflict, and honestly? He might be the only character who gets it right.
20. “To get to the data.”
The movie's big revelation comes when Radford and Sandra simultaneously discover the aliens' master plan in perfect Zoom-unison: “To get to the data.” Then they both just stare into the void for four excruciating seconds. No cut, no music, no acknowledgement that they've cracked the code—just two people frozen in their webcam squares like they’re buffering in real time. I rewatched the clip a few times. I thought my computer was buffering at first, and then I had to replay it to put a stopwatch to the side-by-side stares into the digital void. It really goes for a full four seconds. A truly shocking display.
19. “I’ll circle back.”
Radford is first despondent after thinking his son dies in an alien attack that obliterated their family home. Then his son, Dave, reveals he's actually still alive because he successfully hid his IP address from the aliens. Radford flips from distressed to confused to angry to dismissive in less than 60 seconds—though he spends most of that time confused. He wraps the call screaming at Dave for not saving the house instead of his friends and hangs up on him to answer a Sandra NASA Teams call. But before he ends the call, he drops the line, “I’ll circle back.”
The man jumps from thinking his kid is dead to wrapping up the call like he's avoiding an annoying question in an all-hands meeting. It's corporate jargon so tone-deaf it transcends parody. Somewhere, a middle manager is taking notes.
18. Radford’s emergency Zoom advice.
Radford's emergency playbook consists entirely of screaming single-syllable commands at his webcam: "Go!" "Run!" "Get up!" "Hold tight!" He sometimes punctuates each order by dramatically removing and replacing his glasses, as if adjusting his eyewear will somehow help him transmit tactical expertise through Zoom. He offers real directions to his son early in the invasion, but Radford mostly defaults to barking obvious, unhelpful tips at his screen.
17. Faith’s mutant healing powers?!
Radford’s daughter, Faith, gets a helicopter dropped in her lap and walks away with a rebar rod through her thigh. She somehow dumps blood all throughout DHS headquarters like she’s in a Tarantino film, but treats it like a stubbed toe. Her boyfriend, who, naturally, is an Amazon delivery driver, fashions a tourniquet out of packing tape after she casually yanks the rebar out herself off-camera. Either Faith has mutant healing powers or the movie forgot that rebar-sized thigh punctures typically require more than packing tape and a can-do attitude.
16. “Touchdown!” (x4)
Ice Cube drops one "Touchdown!" early in the movie and you barely register it—every action hero needs a catchphrase, right? But later, when his son helps him hack back into his DHS accounts, Radford unleashes a triple-header: "Touchdown!" "Touchdown!" "TOUCHDOWN!" Each punctuated by its own awkward camera cut. It feels like watching someone accidentally submit three different takes of the same scene. I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many “Touchdown!” exclamations out of context. Do football players or fans even yell “Touchdown!”? Broadcasters obviously scream “Touchdown!,” but even those usually come with a little build-up. Does anyone yell “Touchdown!” ever for any reason? Make it make sense.
15. “I don’t have alien invasion insurance.”
It's the kind of dad joke that would bomb at a suburban barbecue, let alone during an alien apocalypse. You can practically hear the silence in the writers' room when someone pitched this gem—assuming there was a writers' room and not just a single person stress-prompting ChatGPT at 3 a.m.
14. Soulless voice-over work.
Every off-camera line sounds like the actor stumbled into a recording booth with zero context and just started cold-reading the script. Radford delivers his domestic-threat analysis like he's narrating a workplace safety video, while his son and other characters phone in their voiceovers with all the emotional investment of a GPS navigation system. They're usually talking over recycled Fox News clips or bargain-bin CGI, which makes the whole thing feel like a low-budget documentary that keeps accidentally cutting to sponsored segments. The bare-minimum effort put into this movie is felt all throughout, but you can really feel blatant disinterest in pretty much all of the VO work (which happens to be a lot of the film when it’s essentially just a movie-length screenshare).
13. The lazy, unnecessary 15-minute time lapse.
The film makes a point of showing Radford’s computer clock jump from 1:56 to 2:11 before he posts a YouTube video exposing the government’s alien cover-up. Has there ever been less effort put into communicating time change in a movie? Also, does that mean every other minute in the movie is a real-life minute? I was taken aback with this one, and I don’t think I’ve ever typed “aback” before.
12. Late-game Ludacris reference.
During a climactic alien tentacle battle—shot with so much dark red light that it feels like a deliberate CGI cover-up—Radford breaks free and bellows Ludacris's famous line: “Move, bitch, get out the way!” The reference lands with all the grace of a meteor hitting Earth.
11. “All right, Disruptor. Let’s disrupt this shit.”
The Disruptor begins as a mysterious hacker threatening to expose Goliath, the government's all-seeing surveillance system. Through some CSI-level audio magic, Radford discovers his anonymous nemesis is actually his own son, Dave. What follows is the most anticlimactic father-son reconciliation in cinema history, culminating in Ice Cube looking directly into his webcam with the gravitas of a Shakespearean soliloquy to deliver: "All right, Disruptor. Let's disrupt this shit." Someone got paid actual money to write that line, and Cube probably (sadly) got paid more to read it.
10. Microsoft Teams call sound.
I'd never heard the Microsoft Teams ringtone before this movie. Now I wish I never had. Every incoming call hits Radford with that same aggressively cheerful "bloop-bloop"—cutting through alien screams and explosions like an impromptu manager's call interrupting the apocalypse. I’m suddenly thankful The Ringer is a Slack operation.
9. “I watch people, not weather.”
I’ll be honest: Radford kind of ate with this one. After Sandra bombards him with footage of apocalyptic weather phenomena—tornadoes, hurricanes, biblical-level destruction—he dismisses each one with profound observations like "Damn" and "All right, that's crazy right there." Then comes his perfectly bureaucratic response: "I watch people, not weather." It's unintentionally brilliant—a government surveillance expert so laser-focused on his job description that he'll ignore obvious signs of global catastrophe. The line works despite itself, which makes it even better.
8. Radford’s pre-invasion parenting.
There's a fine line between being an overprotective parent and harassment. Hacking refrigerator cameras to monitor your pregnant daughter's protein intake is way past it. Radford also hijacks CCTV feeds to catch Faith eating a muffin and remote-controls his son's computer to delete his video game mid-session, but the fridge surveillance really takes the cake.
7. “Let’s just say me and your fridge is pretty tight.”
So bad it earns its own spot on the list. I can’t believe they kept this in. If humans, not aliens, are watching this, their first reaction is probably going to be weirded out by Dad’s Fridge Cam. He’s cracking a joke about spying on his adult daughter’s produce?! Who’s laughing at that? Not the audience, I’m sure.
6. Knockoff “That Was Easy” button.
Radford hits this knockoff “That Was Easy” button three times in the first 12 minutes and then completely forgets it exists. It doesn’t even say “EASY” on the button like it should. It just says “PUSH,” like a bootleg version you’d find in a dollar store toy aisle. I was initially pissed that they used the button at all, let alone a knockoff one. It was easy to jump to irate when they button-mashed it three times early and never again. Why use it at all? It should go down as the worst use of the “That Was Easy” button gag in cinema history.
5. Amazon Prime Air: “The future of delivery.”
The fate of humanity literally depends on Amazon's shipping logistics. When Mark, the Amazon delivery driver, needs to get a world-saving thumb drive to Radford through an alien war zone, he unveils his secret weapon: a Prime Air drone. "The future of delivery," he announces to the groaning audience. Mark pilots it through alien chaos with a massive "Amazon Prime Air" watermark hovering in the top-left corner of the screen. It's a heroic sequence that doubles as shameless corporate advertising that would make Ricky Bobby proud.
4. The $1,000 Amazon gift card.
Nothing pulls you out of the movie faster than watching a random guy risk his life amid an alien invasion for a $1,000 Amazon gift card. When Mark's drone gets smacked down by an alien tentacle mid-delivery, Faith and Dave ask a random guy on the street to help put the drone back into action. Their WhatsApp negotiation starts with offering him free internet for a year, which he immediately rejects: "Why, so they can track me?" You almost respect his paranoia. That is, until they counter with a $1,000 Amazon gift card link and he jumps into gear. Did they already have this gift card loaded up? Did someone pause the apocalypse to log into their Amazon account and purchase it? The movie's commitment to showing us a full thumb-drive shopping sequence makes you wonder why they spared us the gift card checkout process.
3. Radford’s computer chops.
For a guy billed as the government's top cyber threat analyst, Radford's entire skill set consists of right-click menus and typing things into search bars. When tasked with a domestic threat analysis, he screenshots random security cameras and lets his Guardian software do the heavy lifting. His idea of "hacking" is literally just asking his computer nicely, typing commands like "Generate TeamViewer Masterkey" as if Windows has a built-in hacker mode. Without his AI assistant and his hacker son constantly bailing him out, this man couldn't fix a printer jam. It's less WarGames, more watching your uncle try to "fix" his Facebook.
2. “Your Facebook memories are deleting.”
Not your photos. Not your posts. Your memories are deleting … according to a Facebook notification that looks like it was conceived in a Mark Zuckerberg fever dream. Radford clicks through and watches old photos and messages vanish in real time, as if the aliens have declared war on nostalgia itself. It's somehow both the most dystopian thing in the movie and the most realistic Facebook feature imaginable. You know Zuck is somewhere taking notes, realizing he could tank everyone's mental health and boost his engagement KPIs by just adding a "Your Memories Are Deleting" notification.
1. Radford’s 90-minute emote reel.
Ice Cube isn't so much acting as he is reacting—trapped behind his desk like a middle manager who can't figure out how to turn off his camera during the apocalypse. Radford cycles through the same handful of reactions to every crisis: the blank stare, the nervous hand gestures, glasses adjustments, chair spins and kicks, and lifeless quips. Alien motherships destroying cities? Blank, open-mouthed stare and a "Damn." His son trapped in mortal danger? Glasses off, glasses on, nervous hand rub, "Oh no." World annihilation? Chair kick, and the profound "Oh, this is insane." By the end, you're not watching a man save the world from alien invasion; you're praying for the movie to end while Cube speedruns the same handful of expressions between Amazon ads.
It’s not Cube’s fault that this movie is so-bad-it-hurts, though. (Can’t blame anyone for securing a work-from-home bag during COVID.) It’s everything else. The direction, script, editing, all of it. Mute your mics, turn off your cameras, and drag this movie file to the recycle bin before the aliens eat it or whatever.
