Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds Is Too Crazy for This Planet

“I know people would rather have someone watch them than blow them up,” William Radford (Ice Cube) explains to his son in the new Amazon Prime adaptation of War of the Worlds. Adapted — kind of — from H.G. Wells’s novel, Rich Lee’s screen-life movie is a sci-fi action-adventure Amazon commercial that may be the first-ever movie scripted in IJBOLish. Clips and stills have been making the rounds on X since the film dropped on Prime on July 30; out of context, they feel like some kind of COVID-19 fever dream. Actually, you know what, these moments feel just as strange and bizarre in context. We tried to make sense of them anyway.

This is the same plot as the Steven Spielberg–Tom Cruise movie, right? Where aliens land on Earth?

Yeah, but we need to back up before we even get into the aliens so we can discuss how Ice Cube plays a “domestic-terror analyst.”

A what?

War of the Worlds is set entirely on William Radford’s computer screen, and before giant menacing aliens land on Earth, we catch a glimpse of his daily life. He has a daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), who is a biologist and a genius and very pregnant with her boyfriend Mark’s (a very funny Devon Bostick) baby. Radford also has a son named Dave (Henry Hunter Hall), who is addicted to video games. Most of what Radford’s workday entails is hacking into his children’s various devices to check on how they’re doing.

Like their computers?

More like: He logs in to his daughter’s fridge to tell her she’s drinking too much soy milk.

Are we supposed to think it’s good the government is doing this?

We’re supposed to understand that Radford is struggling to be a father in the aftermath of his wife Erica’s death, and the only way he knows how to connect with his children is to hack their devices. Most of what War of the Worlds seems to argue is that the best thing the government can do with its surveillance technology is use it to love adult children better — or something like that. “Good morning, my sweet baby drone” is something said in earnest in this movie.

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Where do the aliens come in?

Sandra (Eva Longoria) keeps blowing up Ice Cube’s internal work DMs to hop on a call. She works for NASA and continually sends him footage of crazy storms happening across the world. That’s not his area of expertise — he and the rest of the Department of Homeland Security have a hacker (aptly) named Disrupter to catch. The storms, however, aren’t just freak weather incidents: They’re meteors carrying giant combination cyborg–living aliens that eat data.

What do the aliens want?

Data.

What data?

Like, all of it. At one point, Ice Cube gets a notification from Facebook that his Memories are being deleted — including the ones of his dead wife!

Oh no! But how can he keep the aliens away from his computer screen?

Well, first, all the armies on Earth band together to try to shoot missiles at the aliens, and #ThisIsEarth starts trending on Twitter. That works only up to a point and then it becomes clear they’ll have to corrupt the world’s data en masse in order to get the aliens to stop what they’re doing. Oh, and the government knew about the aliens before they arrived and risked implementing a new surveillance program anyway. “You risked all our lives just to spy on people’s Amazon carts,” Radford shouts at his boss, Briggs (Clark Gregg).

You’re saying this goes all the way to the top?

Sadly, yes.

Oh yeah, wait — what’s with all the Amazon stuff?

It’s not just that this is a movie streaming on Amazon Prime — War of the Worlds is a movie that doesn’t let you forget about Amazon for even five seconds. Faith’s boyfriend, Mark, is a Prime delivery driver and spends a lot of the movie panicking and driving around in his gray truck. In the climactic scene in which Faith and Mark have to get a thumb drive to Radford, they use Prime Air — a new drone program Mark promises is the future of delivery.

Is this supposed to be funny or serious?

Yes.

No, really — which is it?

War of the Worlds is both too silly and too much a commercial for Amazon to be anything other than wholly itself. I laughed just as much watching this as I did The Naked Gun.

Are notification sounds from every possible app going off during the whole movie such that someone watching on their laptop may think it’s their computer making the notification sound?

Yeah … maybe it’s best to watch this one on your TV so you don’t think Microsoft Teams is bugging you for an hour.

Got it. Does a fictional version of Chuck Schumer have anything to say about this?

You know it.