War of the Worlds (2025) Review: Novel Adaptation To Be Renamed As "War of the Advertisements"
Title: War of the Worlds (2025)
Director: Rich Lee
Based on: War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Release Date: July 30, 2025
No wonder Amazon has truly gone to ruin their reputation with an original movie. Netflix is rising with KPop Demon Hunters for the most part. Even Hulu got a few followers thanks to Predator: Killer of Killers. What about some others that are competing against Netflix? We sure do have one that tarnished the service's name instead of attracting customers. Today's movie is the 2025 War of the Worlds, the infamous Amazon Prime original movie starring Ice Cube, and I am not joking. When it got released on July 30, it got a brutally negative reception from critics and audiences for its product placement and acting. Thanks to so much criticism on the internet, it gained a 3% critic score and a 20% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, labelling it as one of the lowest-rated movies of the year. Because the movie only exists to advertise the service's name, War of the Worlds is a tragically terrible adaptation with no reasoning behind destroying the government.
Summary
"A computer security analyst working for the U.S. government finds his daily life disrupted by an alien attack. Accustomed to dealing with virtual threats, his struggle extends to secrets the government may be hiding." - Google
Reasons
The most notable things that started the War of the Worlds are the product placement, the terrible acting performances, and the disrespect to the novel. Just because your films are lesser known than Netflix’s original films are, that doesn’t mean you have to shove your service down others’ throats like Liberty Mutual. It is not just an Amazon Prime gadget saving our heroes, but Amazon Prime Air being all over the place makes this movie a feature-length advertisement. Even though Universal fully made this during its production, it still doesn’t help that this is advertising Amazon with no story depth. Along with the product placement, the acting is so laughable. We all knew Ice Cube was going to be himself throughout the whole movie. None of the other actors interact with any decent chemistry between each other to make a heartwarming arc. Also, even though it is titled War of the Worlds, the disrespect to the novel is as laughable. Think The Electric State, but replacing the story with a screenlife version of the generic alien invasion plot. No Martians, no tripods, and no London fear. It’s all replaced with Amazon.
Other factors that caused the War of the Worlds to come up are the funny logic, awful CGI, and stripped themes. This is supposed to be a movie concerned with tech, so how can this movie fail with understanding the concepts of it? We do not see much reasoning behind the alien invasion, nor do we get the drone climax saving everyone on Earth. In addition, the CGI is quite lazy. Heck, even the aliens don't look like aliens, but they look more like robots with spider legs and mosquito claws. Why would you base your movie off of War of the Worlds when the majority of the scenes are just surveillance footage? Finally, the themes are as disjointed as the CGI is. This movie strips off the themes from the original novel in exchange for something that tells us to sub Amazon. Instead of substance, it relies on surveillance, and it is baffling how the novel is less important to this movie.
Conclusion
Compared to how Netflix and Hulu are doing, Amazon Prime ruined their reputation with War of the Worlds because of shameless product placement featuring Ice Cube. Be thankful that this was not screened in theaters. The lesson of the day is that you should not rely on promotion to make customers subscribe to your streaming service. For those who have Amazon Prime, definitely skip out on this. Sure, it has nothing problematic when compared with Fixed, but it still goes at the bottom of the barrel for mixing Amazon, War of the Worlds, and screenlife into a huge pile of prime garbage.
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