War of the Worlds, But Make It Capitalist
General Reviews
I think this might be the first time a movie spat in my face and told me to like it.
The new War of the Worlds adaptation has certainly made a splash. The Amazon released, Ice Cube starring adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel is being heralded as the worst movie of the year. Maybe the decade. Almost overnight, the internet was full of one star reviews and memes of a dead-eyed Cube saying, "Damn," as he watches the end of the world through his laptop screen.
A combination of morbid curiosity and a genuine love of so-bad-it's-good cinema was what made me push play. I thought this movie was going to take its rightful place on the pantheon of poop, right next to Battlefield Earth and The Happening. But by the end of the longest 89 minutes of my life, I hadn't had any fun. I didn't even crack a smile. I just got mad.
To call this movie an adaptation is like calling a chicken a dinosaur. Maybe they came from the same DNA once, but that's where the similarities end.
Ice Cube plays William Radford, a Department of Homeland Security agent who spends his days surveilling civilians (and his unknowing adult children) to gather intel for the government. It's a screenlife movie, so the entire thing takes place on his desktop monitor. When the aliens attack, we don't see it from the ground, or even through his POV. We see it through a Zoom call and Fox News clips. It's a new take for sure, but separating your main character from all the action and never once having him experience any actual danger isn't really the way to convey the terror of an alien invasion.
The themes of the original novel are concerned with the moral implications of British Imperialism, the dominant power structure when it was written in 1898. Wells said that it was designed to put the English readership in the shoes of the people that they had colonized and make them question the power structures that they existed within.
War of the Worlds (2025) on the other hand, is one of the most blatant pro-capitalist movies I have ever seen. Instead of critiquing the dominant powers of the day, it straight up enables them. I can feel billionaire fingerprints all over this waste of brainspace. It's a feature-length commercial that doesn't even bother trying to hide what it's doing. And let's be clear, I wouldn't really give a shit about product placement or the fact that an Amazon drone and a Tesla are major plotpoints, if the movie wasn't using the veneer of Wells' classic story to try and distract me.
A modern adaptation could say so much about the current era of late-stage capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction. But this version? It's a product and nothing more. As everyone rushes to watch this movie so that they can join in the online dogpile, what messages are they actually getting?
Radford uses his megacomputer and drop down menus to deduce that what the aliens are actually after is our data. The more of it they eat, the more powerful they become. So Ice Cube and his hacker son MacGyver some cannibal code in about 30 seconds, and then plug it into the global data store conveniently located in the basement of the building Cube is trapped in. The aliens eat it, bada-bing, bada-boom, blue screen of death for all the Tripods. Movie over.
This version of The War of the Worlds is not about the fragility of life, and it's definitely not about the hubris of dominant powers. It's barely even about aliens. Instead, it ends up making the argument that surveillance is necessary for security and that data is our greatest commodity. Instead of the aliens being defeated by Earth's atmosphere, they get taken down by a computer virus on an Amazon thumb drive. And just to rub salt in the wound, I had to repeatedly hear the Microsoft Teams meeting chime and a knock-off "That Was Easy" button.
The movie tries to have it both ways by shoehorning in a story about standing up to a secret government surveillance program, but that rings pretty hollow when your main character has spent the whole film participating by hacking into military drones and civilians' personal devices and medical information.
For the good, of course. :/
It ends with Ice Cube telling the Secretary of State that he is still going to surveil. But he's surveilling the government now. Bitch.
It's giving good guy with a gun.
The movie's greatest crime is lampshading an endorsement of the dominant power structure within a story that was originally designed to critique it. Twisting Wells' original intent inside out in order to serve the opposite narrative feels more like an alien invasion than the movie itself. I mean, come on. The villains are hyper-intelligent, greatly evolved Martians come to take over Earth after the death of their planet. Kinda sounds like SpaceX's mission statement, but we gotta get that Tesla product placement, so don't think too hard about all that.
"The decline in media literacy" is a hot topic at the moment. The rise of AI is raising concerns about the outsourcing of critical thinking and original thought from humans to machines. While I don't want to be an alarmist, War of the Worlds certainly felt like a proof of concept. After I'd watched a bit of the movie, it did feel like an apocalypse, but not in the way the filmmakers intended. In the current climate, this movie doesn't just feel stupid and insulting; it feels dangerous. Because not everyone knows what this story is actually supposed to be about.
Not to bring up another classic novel, but in Fahrenheit 451, in which literacy is essentially dead and civilians believe everything that they see on TV, the first step towards society's downfall was when it allowed those in power to simplify stories so that they would be 'easier' for people to understand. Through that practice, the government is able to alter the stories to fit whatever narratives benefit them.
So, when does simplifying become bastardizing? This movie is the answer.
If I can impart one thing to you with this article, let it be this: it is not worth it to watch this movie, no matter how funny it looks from the memes. It isn't funny, it's just painfully boring. It actively chooses to misunderstand the source material and push narratives that ultimately serve corporate interests and the system that they benefit from. It genuinely made me consider deleting my Amazon account. Don't do what I did and watch it "just to see."
I wanted to have a silly goofy fun-bad time. I didn't want to go on a rant about the importance of themes and responsible storytelling. I wish I could just sit back and take cheap jabs, but the audacity to release a movie like this in 2025 really pissed me off. And I'd be lying if I said it didn't scare me a little.
You can't fool me, movie. I'm the one watching you now. Bitch.
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