Have you ever wished that star-studded Hollywood films were more like two-hour Microsoft Teams meetings with the world’s most unprepared Amazon representatives? If so, you’ll probably still be disappointed by the execution of Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds.
Back in September 2020, a handful of filmmakers working under the Universal Pictures umbrella had an idea for how they could continue making movies despite the industry-wide production shutdown due to the pandemic. Coincidentally, this team’s proposal was the same one that every improv group and community theater troupe already had two months prior: “We do it over Zoom.”
Using the public domain launching-off point of H.G. Wells’ iconic 1898 science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, these visionaries adapted the foundational sci-fi story for the modern age by utilizing screenlife technology (i.e., sticking Ice Cube in front of a webcam for every scene) to show us all what it would be like to experience an alien invasion in an era when most of us would end up watching the near-apocalypse on our phones and laptops.
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Oh, and, also, the aliens’ Achilles heel is fast and reliable delivery from Amazon Prime.
Last week, War of the Worlds (2025) debuted with a dismal zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes as professional film critics roasted the straight-to-Amazon-Prime-Video film for being a sloppy, soulless, uninspired Amazon commercial that runs for 89 excruciating minutes too long. But as poorly as the film industry received the most recent and most misguided film adaptation of War of the Worlds, these critics’ wrath is nothing compared to what the average internet commenter has to say about the absolute turd.
Here are our favorite Letterboxd reviews of the webcam War of the Worlds, starting with…
Content shared from www.cracked.com.