The classic sci-fi story War Of The Worlds is now a cyber thriller starring Ice Cube. Also: aliens that eat data? It’s on Prime Video next week.
No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that someone would turn War Of The Worlds into a cyber-thriller. But here we are, in 2025, with another adaptation of HG Wells’ 1898 novel, this time starring Ice Cube as a data analyst working for the US government. Peering into his computer, Mr Cube’s expert realises that Earth’s data is being harvested… by extra-terrestrial invaders? That seems to be the premise, anyway.
The new War Of The Worlds is the feature debut from Rich Lee, previously a director of music videos, commercials and TV. The alien invasion cyber thriller was first announced in 2020, and reading back over the news back then, it sounds as though it was shot during the pandemic era, too. A piece on Deadline reports that Ice Cube and co-star Eva Longoria were going to record their performances in their own homes – all the better to keep budgets low and maintain the social distancing rules in place at the time.
This is why much of the trailer below consists of Cube sitting in a chair, looking concernedly at a computer screen. The creative key here is producer Timur Bekmambetov, who also produced the low-budget horror Unfriended (2014) and its thriller siblings Searching (2018), Run (2020) and Missing (2023). Their events unfold in real time and almost entirely within the confines of a computer or smartphone screen – hence the format’s name, ‘screenlife’. There’s a new one coming this year called LifeHack.
War Of The Worlds was originally being produced by Universal Pictures as part of a multi-film deal with Bekmambetov; the project has clearly been relocated, since it’s now going straight to Amazon Prime on the 30th July.
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It’s the latest in a long line of films based on Wells’ genre-defining invasion story. Producer George Pal adapted it for Paramount in 1953, with Oscar-winning Martian warship effects. Steven Spielberg directed his own version, also for Paramount, in 2005. Thanks to the novel’s out-of-copyright status, there have also been several straight-to-video and TV adaptations, including a three-part BBC version that kept its Edwardian, home counties setting.
According to Bekmambetov, though, his incarnation more closely resembles Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast from 1938, which famously caused a panic when casual listeners thought it was a news report about a real invasion.
“It’ll be exciting for audiences to watch the movie and ask themselves: if aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones,” Bekmambetov told Deadline. “In that way, it’s kind of a modern spin on Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds. Back then, he used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real. Today, that medium is the screen of our devices.”
For those wondering: yes, big, stompy Martian war machines still figure in this latest adaptation, but they’re all glimpsed from assorted mobile phone cameras and the like.
“It’s worse than you think!” the trailer warns. Let’s hope not, eh readers?
War Of The Worlds emerges on Prime Video on the 30th July 2025.
