Featured Image Credit: Universal Pictures
Topics: Amazon Prime, Netflix, Streaming, Social Media, Film and TV, Twitter, Rotten Tomatoes
Ellie Kemp
Topics: Amazon Prime, Netflix, Streaming, Social Media, Film and TV, Twitter, Rotten Tomatoes
Ice Cube's latest movie has been panned by critics - and it's so bad, it's earned a rare and devastating zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
Having dropped on Amazon Prime on July 30, the post-apocalyptic movie is capturing attention for all the wrong reasons.
Titled War of the Worlds, it's a re-imagining of the iconic 1898 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells.
Only, it stars Ice Cube and is told entirely through digital screens. Which would've been ground-breaking, if it were 2010...
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The rapper and actor plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security cyber‑security analyst monitoring a global surveillance system.
When alien meteors strike and machines emerge, Radford, aided by his hacker son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) and NASA scientist friend Dr Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), unravels a terrible truth: the invaders feed on data - prompting a mass‑scale battle for control of information systems.
While its concept is pretty solid, its execution is a whole other story. Even its trailer - which you can watch below - is underwhelming and prompted cynicism.
Most ironic of all is the movie's tagline: "It's worse than you think." As one social media user quipped: "At least the marketing wasn’t lying about it."
Across 18 critics' reviews, the movie has racked up a stunning zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score. As imagined, the reviewers really don't hold back in ripping the 'limp, lifeless' film apart.
Starburst's Paul Mount put it bluntly: "War of the Worlds is a tortuous, endless 90 minutes of glitchy video clips, military stock footage, glad-to-be-doing-something actors running through the street waving a camera in front of their faces and pretending to be scared."
Variety's Peter Debruge observed: "Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon."
And the Daily Telegraph's Ed Power described it as 'silly' and 'shoddy,' writing: "[It] features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment."
Elsewhere, on Twitter, viewers pointed out some of the blatant Amazon product placement which had their jaws on the floor.
It involves - of all people - Diary of a Wimpy Kids' Rodrick Heffley actor, Devon Bostick, as Mark, who is attempting to deliver an all-important flash drive to Will.
When Will asks how Mark will deliver the device, the company's drone delivery service comes to the rescue. Because of course it does.
Mark assures him: "Prime Air. It's the future of delivery - they've been training us for months."
To active the drone delivery, Mark must place an Amazon order for a USB stick. He does so in two simple clicks.
"This scene in War of the Worlds 2025 had my jaw drop," one person said, as a second branded it 'hilariously awful'.
War of the Worlds is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.