A Not-So-Recent Review of War of the Worlds (2025)
Your data is deadly.
It is rare—almost mythological—in cinema history that when a film arrives so far ahead of its time that audiences simply are unable to grasp its beauty and meaning. Orson Welles had his radio broadcast. Stanley Kubrick, his 2001. And joining them Rich Lee has War of the Worlds (2025), an uncompromising masterpiece that has been, with characteristic short-sightedness, dismissed by 96% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes. My peers, I fear, watched the wrong film.
The premise is quite simple. Will Radford, played by the rapper Ice Cube, is a Homeland Security analyst of formidable intellectual prowess: he sits at his desk and scrutinizes every pixel on his computer. He scrutinizes everything from the facial expressions of tourists in Washington D.C. to the perimeter of Congress. One day, aliens invade Earth. As the world gathers to respond, the robotic aliens start targeting humanity’s most precious resource—data. Many might call this film a 90-minute screensaver, something that’s just there you put on the background when you mop the floor, but I disagree. In Lee’s hands, it’s a meditation on the modern condition that requires more careful treatment: that we, too, sit at our desks to watch screens as the world outside falls into chaos and disorder. That Will is played by Ice Cube, whose expression captures the full spectrum of human exhaustion, is a stroke of genius casting.
War of the Worlds belongs to the genre of found footage—which is a genre that, at its best, has produced in recent times some of the most viscerally effective and cathartic masterpieces of the past three decades. The 1999 horror The Blair Witch Project’s suffocating atmosphere and the 2008 Cloverfield impressively disorienting scale of America's Godzilla highlights the genre’s ability to close the cinematic distance between the viewer and mise-en-scene: perhaps there is no score to tell you what emotions are appropriate for a given scene, no polished cinematography to deliver the peril in the stories. In its superior, more evolved “screenlife” form in the case for War of the Worlds, the kernel of tension and emotions is transposed onto the digital screen, the most intimately surveilled space of modern life: a reminder of the message that everything we watch privately is public. All this is to say, War of the Worlds is successfully daring in exploring an underexplored mode of filmmaking at the hand of Lee. What he did with that understanding is entirely another matter of course.
The supporting cast is, if anything, even more inspired. Devon Bostick—known to a generation of millennials as the ne'er-do-well older brother from Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2011) Rodrick Heffley and, in more recent years, as Seth Neddermeyer in Oppenheimer (2023)—is cast here as Mark Goodman, an Amazon delivery driver in a movie made by Amazon Prime. In a lesser film, a delivery driver would be a throwaway role. However, in this film, he is the key to saving the world by guiding a Prime Air drone to deliver a flash drive to Ice Cube’s desk in the film’s climatic cuts. That this climax may be argued by others of a more cynical mind and disposition to be essentially a 90-second Amazon advertisement is not a compromise of the film’s artistic integrity or merit; rather, it is a bold interrogation of late-stage capitalism that if corporations have already achieved world domination, why not let one of them stop an alien invasion?
This brings us to the film’s most daring formal choice: The aliens themselves do not destroy cities contrary to the Hollywood sci-fi trope. They do not incinerate neighborhoods or send Tom Cruise sprinting through New Jersey in an older adaptation. They eat data. They consume the vital digital infrastructure of modern human civilization, growing evermore powerful with every terabyte of “6-7” they consume. This is, albeit, an interesting creative decision. To more serious viewers, it is a rejection of our civilization’s fatal hubris: that we have made ourselves not through weakness of body but through addiction to algorithms and dopamine hits. H.G. Wells, writing in 1898, simply could not have imagined it. Rich Lee, despite facing isolation during COVID on an aggressively modest budget, somehow did.
For the film that was shot in fifteen days, with almost zero coordination between the director or co-stars, Ice cube is worth highlighting not as a criticism but as context. The COVID pandemic forced a constraint on this production that, paradoxically, became its greatest feature. The result is a performance of raw authenticity. Every menacing scowl, every shout of “Take your intergalactic asses back home!” delivered into the ether, in front of a camera, and for a future audience in five years time, is what suffering for one’s art looks like.
War of the Worlds currently sits at #76 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the 100 Worst Movies of All Time. After carefully considering the merit of this list, I can conclude that the list is a ranking of the 100 most understood films of all time. The other 75 films owe Rich Lee an apology.
Watch this film on Amazon Prime Video today. You’re lucky you don’t get charged extra for this—but you should be.
