aka War of the Worlds: Revival
Russia/USA. 2025.
Crew
Director – Rich Lee, Screenplay – Kenneth A. Golde & Marc Hyman, Story – Kenneth A. Golde, Based on the Novel The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells, Producers – Patrick Aiello & Timur Bekmambetov, Photography – Christopher Probst, Music – Jon Natchez, Visual Effects Supervisors – Jean Delauny, Rich Lee & Sean Struble, Visual Effects – Drive Studio, Special Effects Supervisor – Roger Matsuo, Production Design – Clarence Major. Production Company – Bazelevs/Patrick Aiello.
Cast
Ice Cube (William Radford), Iman Benson (Faith Radford), Henry Hunter Hall (Dave Radford), Eva Longoria (NASA Sandra Solas), Devon Bostick (Mark Goodman), Clark Gregg (NSA Director Donald Briggs), Michael O’Neill (Secretary of Defense Walter Crystal), Sheila Jeffries (FBI Agent Sheila Jeffries), Jim Meskman (President)
Plot
NSA operative William Radford is working from home, where he is constantly using the surveillance technology at his disposal to spy on his children Faith and Dave. He is contacted by NASA scientist Sandra Solas who relays video footage of satellites being knocked out by meteorites. The meteorites then strike all over the world. Out of these emerge giant tripod-shaped machines that begin obliterating their way across cities, wiping out all military force brought against them. Radford uses the technology at his disposal to help the pregnant Faith get through the chaos to a hospital. At the same time, he discovers that the alien machines have come to devour data and are targeting government data centres, wiping out all internet information as they consume it.
H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) was the classic literary work that popularised the Alien Invasion genre. Wells created a vivid and memorable image of the placid heart of England rent open by the arrival of tripodal Martian war machines that decimate society. It was Wells holding up a mirror to the fragility of the British Empire, which seemed unassailable around the world at the time. The Wells books has attracted a number of film adaptations from George Pal’s The War of the Worlds (1953) to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) to various other sequels, modernisations and tv spinoffs, even a best-selling musical album and a Marvel comic book. (See bottom of page for other screen adaptations).
This new version is produced by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov who made a big splash in the West with Night Watch (2004) and has gone onto make a number of other works, including the English-language likes of Wanted (2008), Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2012) and Ben Hur (2016). Bekmambetov has been prolific as a producer on a number of other works. One of these was Unfriended (2014), a supernatural retribution work that took place across social media. This took a novel approach where the film screen became a computer screen that was constantly being interrupted by messenger, social media and video pop-up windows. This is something that has since become referred to as the screenlife approach. Bekmambetov also produced another venture into screenlife format with Resurrected (2023), returns to it here with War of the Worlds and is set to direct another such film himself with Mercy (2026).
As War of the Worlds 2025 starts, it is a work that H.G. Wells would have an enormous amount of difficulty recognising. For one, large amounts of the film are heavily wound up in technologies that nobody had even conceived of when Wells as writing – the internet, digital mass surveillance, social media, video and instant messaging, satellites and drones. Cars had only just appeared in 1898 but here we are at a point of remotely driven and driverless cars and Amazon delivery drivers.
It may be more pertinent to actually note what War of the Worlds 2025 and the H.G. Wells book have in common as opposed to the differences. Both feature aliens that arrive in meteorites, which open to reveal tripod war machines that are armed with a deadly heat ray that obliterates Earth military. As with the book, there are assorted scenes with people struggling to get through the chaos and devastation. And the aliens are defeated at the end after being infected with a virus. Unlike Wells, we never see the aliens inside in this version. Nor are the invaders from Mars, which is in keeping with a number of modern filmed versions of the story that adhere to greater scientific realities regarding the unlikelihood of life on Mars. Wells’s hero was a reporter trying to survive as he is separated from his wife in the midst of the devastation, whereas Ice Cube here plays a computer jockey who starts rooted to his keyboard up until the final scenes.
When it comes to this version, you more or less have to forget anything to do with H.G. Wells or any of the previous film and tv versions. All the flipping back and forward between video windows, news footage, command line tabs and various apps is neither here nor there. I have seen Unfriended and various other films that have employed the screenlife format and this is standard. It gets fast paced as you are constantly whipping between one piece of drama going on somewhere, a call from some government agent, next Ice Cube hacking somebody’s phone, car or Facebook and then back to Eva Longoria’s NASA scientist and contact from the mystery hacker Disruptor.
War of the Worlds gives the impression it is a B movie. What it does have going for it are some good visual effects. The appearances of the alien war machines – and in full tripod form as Wells had them – is quite impressive. Even more cool is when the bulb shaped head of the machine first opens up like the petals of a flower to blast down attacking helicopters.
The film was greeted with a lot of instant ridicule online. What feels most concerning for me as the film begins is that we have someone (Ice Cube) who has almost unimaginable ability to access data system at his fingertips, including the ability to hack Zoom calls by no less than the Secretary of Defense, to hack into and remotely control a random Tesla on the street, casually hack into Facebook accounts and other people’s computers, all of which he uses to spy on his son and daughter, including hacking into his daughter’s fridge to calculate her calorie intake, having an app that monitors her heartbeat on his system, and where he even deletes the videogames on his son’s machine because he doesn’t consider being a videogame tester a real job. It is greatly concerning to me that governments let alone individuals can have this degree of control and access to people’s personal internet data and by extension their personal life – all it takes is one bad actor for this to become something nightmarish and authoritarian, if we haven’t invisibly already tipped over that point already.
The end of the film does have scenes where such mass surveillance is regarded as a bad thing – not apparently because it is conducted at all but because it is a magnet for aliens. The end does have Ice Cube doing a mea culpa and turning against his masters and exposing his boss and coming to the realisation that snooping on his children was a bad thing. It is the stance that you wanted the film to take at the outset, even if you wish it had gone even further with it.
In a wider sense, each version of the War of the Worlds seems to be a mirror of the times it was made. The H.G. Wells book was a mirror held up to the might of the British Empire; the 1953 film version was an echo of America in the Atomic Age clinging to faith in God and the church and divine deliverance; Spielberg’s War of the Worlds was a parable for a post-9/11 America. This version seems a War of the Worlds for the 2020s, pointing out the fragility of a society that has placed so much focus on mass data surveillance of its populace and just how much of everything we now do is controlled by and dependent on interconnected computer systems.
Here we also get into some of the film’s Bad Science. One of these is that aliens would regard gathered data as something akin to a richly laden banquet table and be drawn to consume it. This seems nonsensical – data is inert, it makes about as much sense as saying aliens have come to devour words or numbers. Not to mention what form data takes will radically differ depending on what type of computer and operating system is being used. Why, for instance, don’t the aliens attack libraries and bookshops, which are vast accumulations of data, just in a different form? Or that matter even if we are talking about internet data only, it seems odd to see the aliens targeting government data centres but not attacking the vast ones maintained by private companies like Google, Facebook, ChatGPT and the like. The most ridiculous part of the film though is when it is determined that the aliens’ microchips are a mix of electronics and organics. This is a workable idea but then we see a virus being created by biologist Iman Benson and being able to be uploaded into the data centre by Ice Cube from a USB drive!.
War of the Worlds was a feature-length directorial debut for Rich Lee who had previously worked in music video for artists such as The Black-Eyed Peas, Eminem, Fergie and Lana Del Rey, among others.
Other versions of the H.G. Wells book include:- George Pal’s production of The War of the Worlds (1953); and the tv series War of the Worlds (1988-90), which posed as a sequel to the Pal film; Steven Spielberg’s contemporary reimagining War of the Worlds (2005) starring Tom Cruise; The Asylum’s low-budget contemporary-set mockbuster War of the Worlds (2005) starring C. Thomas Howell, which spawned a sequel War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008); the low-budget The War of the Worlds (2005) from Timothy Hines, which was set during the Victorian era; The War of the Worlds (2019), a three-part BBC tv mini-series set during the Victorian period; War of the Worlds (2019-22), a tv series that relocates action to the contemporary European Union; The Asylum’s modernised Alien Conquest (2021); and the contemporary Young Adult film War of the Worlds: The Attack (2023). Also of interest is War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012), an animated film set in an alternate history 1914 with Steampunk mecha taking on a second Martian invasion; and The Great Martian War: 1913-1917 (2017), which rewrites the story as an alternate history retelling of World War I incorporating digitally created war machines into actual WWI footage.
Trailer here