Let’s hear it for War of the Worlds, the 2025 film that took one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written and then re-imagined it as something really stupid.

It takes a certain amount of balls to take a book that was written in the 19th century and to adapt it as a low-budget screenlife film.  Plus, the idea of making the protagonist an employee of the DHS who abuses his power to monitor his children, and his daughter’s boyfriend?  That’s actually kind of clever.  Good for you, movie!  Way to point out just how invasive our current surveillance state is.  It always kind of amazes me that, here in America, we’ve given up so much of the freedom that people died for but, whenever you point that out to people, you just kind of get an apathetic shrug.

You know what isn’t a good idea?  Casting Ice Cube as the DHS employee in question.

Ice Cube plays Will Radford, the straight-laced and uptight DHS employee and 90% of the film is basically just shots of him staring at the screen of his laptop.  During the day, he argues with his kids and tries to ascertain the identity of a mysterious hacker.  He also checks in with Clark Gregg (who plays the head of the DHS) and with a NASA scientist who is played by Eva Longoria.  Let’s give some credit where credit is due and admit that Clark Gregg seems to understand exactly what type of film that he’s in and, as such, he gives about as good a performance as anyone could in the role.  Eva Longoria, on the other hand, comes across as if she’s just killing time until the next Democratic convention comes around.

But let’s get back to Ice Cube.  Ice Cube is not a bad actor.  When cast in the right role, he can bring an unbeatable authenticity to the screen.  That said, Ice Cube does not have a particularly wide range.  When he was cast as the Captain Dickson in 21 Jump Street, the intentional miscasting made for one of the best jokes in the film.  In War of the Worlds, when Will starts yelling at his daughter’s boyfriend, it’s hard not to be reminded of Captain Dickson reacting to Jonah Hill dating his daughter in 22 Jump Street.  The only problem — well, not the only problem — is that War of the Worlds is not meant to be a comedy.

So, what is War of the Worlds meant to be?  It’s not easy to say.  It’s certainly not meant to be any sort of tribute to H.G. Wells and his classic novel.  If anything, the film seems to take a perverse joy in not caring about the source material.  It can be argued that the film is meant to be a commercial for Amazon, seeing as how an Amazon drone plays a key role in the film’s conclusion.  Considering that the film was released on Prime, that certainly seems to be a fair interpretation.  In the end, even though the villains are ultimately revealed to be some of Will’s colleagues, the film still feels like a perhaps unintentional endorsement of the Surveillance State.  Where would be without Ice Cube watching over us?

Where indeed?