In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, Ice Cube’s critically derided War of the Worlds reboot gets reappraised as a radicalising anti-capitalist masterpiece.
Let me just declare real quick that this is the worst movie of the year. We have no reason to believe that a worse movie could possibly be released in the next two months or so. What it is not, however, is useless, outdated or boring. It may in fact be, for better and for much, much worse, the film of the year.
Some of 2025’s best movies have suggested that it’s the year in which Hollywood, however clumsily or belatedly, finally attempts to restage the revolutionary rage experienced offscreen by viewers living under systemic oppression. Over the past few years, I’ve sensed that our cinema has been arrested in an anxious state of nostalgia, comfort food, safe bets on IP. In short, programming for shell-shocked pandemic cocoons, when we weren’t ready to articulate our reaction to all Them Horrors just yet. But titles like One Battle After Another, Eddington, Sinners, and even an 80s remake like The Running Man, are daring to dramatise this moment—resistance, a revolt against the corrupted mainstream, grassroots solidarity—in amongst their genre trappings and bombastic action sequences.
Isn’t there a weird little corner somewhere in this inspiring chaos for War of the Worlds 2025, starring Ice Cube as a Department of Homeland Security surveillance creep who bears witness to an alien robopocalypse? Will any of the transcendant, fight-the-power ethos of those celebrated films leave a mark on my mind that can outlast the image of Cube watching the world end from his cubicle—brows furrowed, mouth hanging slightly open, a locked and loaded “oh hell no” his only defence against the obliteration of everything he’s ever known and loved?
Every misguided detail of the project is so undeniably now. It’s a screenlife film, its plot unfolding entirely in desktop application screens and text messages filled with a lot of exclamation points. It is the umpteenth remake of an established, classic property, reimagining HG Wells’ turn-of-the-century alien invasion novel…through the lens of Hollywood’s tried-and-true workaholic-dad-reconnects-with-his-family premise. It was filmed in 2020, with cast members recording their roles in isolation, and only dumped onto a streaming service years later after an agonisingly drawn-out post-production process that certainly broke the minds of many an underpaid SFX artist. And hey, speaking of downtrodden workers—it’s Amazon propaganda, too!
A funny thing happened when I watched the climax of War of the Worlds 2025 for the first time. I was about 70 minutes into the 89-minute-long film, which is technically very short but represents years off my life in terms of psychic damage. Ice Cube, Eva Longoria (as “Sandra NASA”, a scientist called Sandra who works at NASA), and Cube’s two children are on video call as robots from outer space slurp up humanity’s precious data. Thankfully, Cube’s dorky son-in-law is an Amazon delivery man, and thus can heroically pilot a delivery drone carrying an important USB to Cube’s location. All hope is lost when the drone crashes, but then its godlike all-seeing camera spots a man experiencing homelessness in a nearby tent. Jackpot!
The family Cube hack into the man’s phone and attempt to bribe him with “free internet for a year” from “the government”. He refuses, very rightly paranoid about accepting such a bizarre and stingy offering from a flying robot. But he leaps into action, flips the downed drone upright and saves the day when our heroes wisely offer a $1000 Amazon gift card instead.
At this point, my partner paused the film. He navigated to Prime Video’s settings, and his account details. He cancelled our subscription to the streaming platform, typing what we’d just seen into a customer service field that asked why we were leaving Prime Video.
I can’t believe that this scene would be intended as Verhoeven-esque satire: some good-natured ribbing at the expense of Amazon and its customers, at our tendency to solve problems through algorithmic convenience rather than acknowledgement of innate human dignity, empathy, all that good old-fashioned crap. It’s the film moment of the year for me. Implausibly, the film’s producer Patrick Aiello has claimed that none of the film was vetted or developed by Amazon, meaning all this seeming product placement is but a simple shout-out to essential workers. “In the early months… when you weren’t going to the grocery store and you couldn’t get toilet paper, who was bringing us – individually, to all of our homes – all of these products to keep us going, keep us neutral, keep us surviving?” Aiello explained, of the movie’s COVID lockdown production: “Amazon drivers.”
If this is true, War of the Worlds 2025 is an even more fascinating and evil product than first anticipated. It means the filmmakers were not paid to depict a world in which humanity’s data is prized above its very existence, where a privatised company takes on the role of world police. It means they just looked around and believed that this was an accurate, or at least enjoyable, interpretation of how society operates. When Aiello describes the heroism of characters like Cube and his family keeping “us going”, “neutral”, “surviving” through bringing us products, the status quo he is hoping to protect is a hopelessly cruel capitalist fantasy. It’s an executive’s utopia, mirrored in the final shot of Ari Aster’s Eddington as the dystopia it really is: a glowing server farm, where data towers bleep out a more perfect, virtual facsimile of our messy, un-“neutral” species.
See? I’m clearly mad about War of the Worlds 2025, but in a very activating, energising, productive way. And that’s why I can’t hate the film. It’s been super funny and unifying to note the movie’s universally negative reception, to the point where writing this article feels like beating a dead horse. Critics and audiences have witnessed Amazon’s apocalyptic vision and said: nah, that’s not us. We do not like this. Whether we are right or wrong in this indignation, it’s nice to feel like we may be in this war together for once.
