Everyone is wrong about Ice Cube's War of the Worlds
In my 5★ rewatch of War of the Worlds (2025), Ice Cube channels the edge he had in Boyz n the Hood—ad-libbing like Doughboy with a Homeland Security clearance in a "real-life" alien invasion that fuses Host (2020)’s Covid chaos with ’50s B-movie paranoia with MST3K-ready charm.
I will never rate a movie I haven't seen ever again. I thought I was being smart when I gave this a one-star rating based solely on the trailer and the ratings of other friends. It turns out I was just being a smart-ass.
This is my Under Paris flip-flop in reverse. That went from “4.5 stars: This is better than Deep Blue Sea!” to a sheepish “3.0 stars: um, yeah, that sucked-ass” on a rewatch two weeks later. War of the Worlds (2025) went from “not even worth a proper watch” to an underappreciated five-star cult classic in the making with this Orson Wells-inspired dumpster fire that kicked ass.
It’s the Host (2020) of invasion movies, shot entirely through computer screens as if we were still in the height of the COVID pandemic (fun fact: it WAS filmed during the height of COVID). The movie wants you to think its about global annihilation, but it's really about Ice Cube’s horrible parenting and eerily relatable desktop habits. I'm sure the big-name actors got paid bank, because they put little money into the effects. It’s ugly. It’s fake. It gave me a headache. But I found all of that glorious. James Gunn, whose alma mater is Troma Entertainment, would be proud. It's a low-budget (except for the cast) attempt at something epic. Think Independence Day if it happened during COVID.
Orson Welles scared 1938 America with a radio play; this is the 2025 version of that if Homeland Security ran the broadcast while Ice Cube multitasked between alien threats, family FaceTimes, and NSA hacker tracking. I swear he ad-libbed every line, and it works because it’s exactly how I imagine him talking in real life—raw, awkward, and unfiltered. I may like this performance better than his B-movie greatness in Ghosts of Mars.
And I completely relate to Ice Cube at his day job. I work at home, and my workstation command center has nearly the same setup: a big monitor (two 28-inch monitors side by side), my iPhone mirrored to my desktop, professional headphones and mic, and more simultaneous open windows than a Victorian greenhouse. Add in Zoom, Life360 family tracking, AI tools, automations, and YouTube, with my algorithm running in the upper left corner of my screen. The only thing I'm missing is the Disruptor Program.
The fakery is the point—it’s pure clickbait for Mystery Science Theater 3000, catnip for Joe Bob Briggs and Darcy the Mail Girl, and pure Piranha pheromones to Roger Corman. All covered with 1950s “Red Scare meets UFO” paranoia goodness, in a modernized wrapper of too-obvious AI-generated video.
I will bet anyone $10 that this will be a cult classic in five to 10 years.
