War of the Worlds, the 2025 “screenlife” movie following Ice Cube as a Homeland Security employee who defends the world from an alien invasion, isn’t so bad it’s good. It’s so bad it’s fascinating. It contains painfully blunt Amazon Prime product placement, a sudden and bizarre appeal to the alt-right, and a scene where the protagonist hacks into his daughter’s fridge to criticize her eating habits, among other oddities. And according to the movie’s star, the production was just as baffling as the contents.
While appearing on internet personality Kai Cenat’s livestream (per Deadline), Ice Cube spoke about the production of War of the Worlds. “We shot it in 15 days, and it was during the pandemic,” he said. “So, the director wasn’t in there, none of the actors was in there. This was the only way we could really shoot the movie.”
That stripped-down approach is one of the benefits of the “screenlife” genre, a moviemaking trend that spans the shlocky horror of Unfriended to the slightly more renowned Searching. Unlike those movies, however, War of the Worlds required a little more scaffolding, and therefore more production time. “All the footage is from real surveillance cameras all around the world,” Ice Cube said. “So they had to build all that shit.”
That may be the movie’s biggest flaw, although there are certainly a lot to choose from. If the goal was to create a screenlife movie, then the story should have been restricted to the screen. A story about an alien invasion is, by definition, happening in the real world. If the plot had been dialed back, then the movie could have been released earlier, and audiences would’ve shown a little more grace for a movie filmed under pandemic restrictions. Instead, it tried to split the difference between being an epic war movie and a single-screen thriller, and it failed at both.
War of the Worlds will go down as one of the worst movies of 2025, of the screenlife genre, and of the entire science fiction genre. It is, in its own way, quite the feat, just not one worth bragging about. At least now we know a little more about why.
War of the Worlds is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
