A cursed Covid-made version of the HG Wells classic, starring Ice Cube, was quietly buried after a five-year delay and perhaps it should have stayed buried
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ust over 20 years ago, Steven Spielberg released War of the Worlds, a remake of the HG Wells classic updated for then-modern day, capturing an era of post-9/11 anxiety filtered through the prism of late-90s disaster movies. That movie’s reputation has only grown over the years – it’s basically the thinking and anxious person’s Independence Day – but the Wells text has been revisited repeatedly since its publication at the tail end of the 19th century. 2025 seems as good a time as any for another update. And if ever any viewers yearned to see a new War of the Worlds beset with the constant pinging of a Microsoft Teams chat, Prime Video has a real treat in store.
Yes, hovering towards the top of Prime Video’s movie charts is a new War of the Worlds, which arrived with little fanfare on the service at the end of July. In it, Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security official who monitors an array of feeds for terrorist threats. Despite a belated heads-up from his Nasa pal Dr Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), he (somewhat bafflingly) fails to pay much mind to a series of mysterious gathering storms, until it’s too late: meteor strikes occur worldwide, and from the meteors emerge alien tripods that quickly lay waste to buildings and people everywhere. Will has been distracted by the hunt for a hacker called “Disruptor”, as well as by spying on his grown-ish kids Faith (Iman Benson), who is expecting her first child, and Dave (Henry Hunter Hall), a gamer Will thinks is wasting his life.
