Now on Prime Video, the cyber thriller reimagining of War Of The Worlds – starring Ice Cube – left us with a bunch of questions about its ending.
NB: The following contains spoilers for War Of The Worlds (2025) and the 1898 novel.
Multiple generations of filmmakers have taken HG Wells’ genre defining alien invasion novel The War Of The Worlds and given it a fresh spin. The 1953 version, directed by Byron Haskin and produced by George Pal, moved the 1898 book’s events to the USA, where humanity was saved by the common cold and the divine grace of God. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version was updated for a world still reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This new 2025 edition, directed by Rich Lee and produced by Timur Bekmambetov, takes the narrative into truly uncharted territory. It imagines the invasion from the perspective of a government security analyst, played by Ice Cube. It’s a cyber thriller with conspiracy elements. And for good measure, it appears to take place in real time, and entirely from the perspective of Mr Cube’s computer screen. It also contains some motivations and plot points that we’re still wrapping our heads around. So with a final warning for spoilers, here’s our attempt – and that really is all it is – to explain War Of The Worlds’ ending.
Let’s start at the beginning. Ice Cube plays Will Radford, an NSA analyst who’s doing the graveyard shift at the office one Sunday – a plot point designed to explain why he appears to be the only employee in the entire building. At first, it’s a regular day at work; he’s helping the FBI track down a cyber criminal named The Disruptor, and occasionally chatting to his NASA scientist buddy Sandra (Eva Longoria) about the weird weather they’ve been having. Oh, and he repeatedly uses work time and equipment to hack into his grown-up kids’ devices to spy on them and lecture them about healthy eating and not playing videogames. What a hero.
Will’s humdrum workday’s interrupted when Sandra realises that the weird weather is, in fact, an alien invasion. Meteors have scythed through Earth’s atmosphere, knocking out satellite communications and generally causing mayhem. Curious about the space rocks, Sandra heads to a crash site and discovers that they aren’t really space rocks: they’re containers for spindly, tripodal war machines, which suddenly begin stomping around and blasting everything that moves. (“WE ARE UNDER ATTACK… MACHINES IN METEORS” a news headline screams.)
Will then spends several minutes working up a perfunctory report to present to the US President (“They will be stronger in groups,” he says) before turning his attention back to his kids and shepherding them to safety. His biological research scientist daughter, Faith, for example, is heavily pregnant and ends up being injured in the attacks. Bringing all his hacking skills to bear, Will remotely takes control of a self-driving Tesla and programs it to drive Faith away from the warzone. (Surprisingly, the Tesla doesn’t catch fire.)
As a global military response is coordinated – seemingly within seconds – it begins to look as though the invaders are a bit, well, rubbish. Fighter jets bring their machines down with ease, much to the delight of Will, who starts hooting and hollering in front of his PC.
“Whoo, hell yeah!” he cheers. “Take your intergalactic asses back home!”
Read more: War Of The Worlds review | Ice Cube fights an alien invasion – with the help of Amazon
But! The aliens haven’t finished quite yet. In the midst of the battle, the tripods begin to converge on the world’s data centres. Crouching down, each war machine unfurls a metallic tentacle, and begins pumping the buildings full of tiny, robotic spiders. These little critters, it seems, have the ability to drink data like mosquitoes sucking blood from a vein, and within seconds, systems everywhere are going wild.
“Full data loss!” a warning on Will’s computer reads. Without their precious data, the military collapses, and anything with wings or rotor blades falls out of the sky. Oil rigs explode. Unaccountably, several army tanks are shown abandoned and rusting, which implies that data loss can also cause surface corrosion.
Even more terrifyingly, all of Facebook’s photos, messages and sound clips begin to vanish. When the social media platform itself goes down, Will spots the 404 error and throws his spectacles down in disgust.
“Our most precious resource on earth is data,” murmurs The Disruptor on a video call. “The invaders won’t stop until they have it all.”
Things are looking dire for humanity. But then comes another revelation that most viewers probably saw coming half an hour earlier: The Disruptor is none other than Will’s videogame-playing son, Mark (Devon Bostick). Despite his father’s constant invasion of his privacy, his status as an Anonymous-style hacker had gone unnoticed all this time. Clever lad.
It’s here that all kinds of other details get thrown into the mix. The aliens, it seems, are addicted to data, though what they do with it isn’t clear. But they’re so obsessed with our information that they’ve secretly invaded before in smaller numbers. Will is given a bunch of previously classified government files which reveal that things like the Roswell incident in 1947 were actually earlier incursions that the military successfully swept under the rug.
Which begs the question: what kind of data were the aliens trying to harvest back then? Computers were still in their infancy. What did the invaders hoover up? Punch cards? Filing cabinets full of folders and hand-typed memos? The film moves swiftly on.
The flash point for the latest invasion turns out to be Goliath: a top-secret surveillance program that is somehow even more invasive than the one Will is already involved in. This one will give the government “the ability to predict everyone’s thoughts and movements” according to Homeland Security director Don Briggs, played by a distracted-looking Clark Gregg.
This scraping of data is so massive that it’s attracted the aliens like moths to a flame, and so here the invaders are, ready to suck up all that delicious information. Will is incandescent with rage. “NASA warned you that if you sparked Goliath, you could have triggered an invasion,” he yells at Briggs. “You risked our whole lives to spy on our Amazon carts?!”
Ah yes, Amazon. We’ll come back to that shortly. In order to stop the aliens, Will teams up with his son and a bunch of other hackers to formulate a plan. It goes wrong, so they come up with a second plan. Analysing one of the badly-animated spiders, Sandra realises that they aren’t purely robotic. “They’re a hybrid organism,” she says. “Biological and cyber. There’s even DNA!”
Will’s son nods over a video call. “DNA is a lot like computer code,” he says.
The group, with the help of Will’s daughter Faith, somehow figure out a way to re-engineer an existing vaccine called Cannibal so that it will interact with the aliens’ systems and kill them to death. There’s a problem, though: how do they get the payload to Will, who’s stuck in the NSA building (it automatically locked down when the crisis started)?
Thankfully, Faith’s fiancee is an Amazon driver, and he has a plan to use one of his company’s Prime Air drones to make the delivery. With the final battle cry of “Alright, dinner time!” Will feeds the vaccine (virus?) to the cyborg spiders, which quickly overwhelms the invaders and ends their thieving antics. And so it is that the world is saved by the divine grace of Ice Cube and our corporate lords at Amazon. Hallelujah!
Weighing in at just 90 minutes including credits, War Of The Worlds is certainly a brisk interpretation of Wells’ text. Amid the stock footage and iffy VFX, it’s possible to see the contours of the 1898 novel; the aliens look and act much like those Wells described, though in the book, they feed on human blood rather than, er, tweets. They’re also vulnerable to human pathogens, and their once mighty war machines soon collapse to the ground when the creatures inside contract some sort of bacterial infection. Much like Independence Day, the new War Of The Worlds updates this concept to a computer virus.
HG Wells intended his novel to be a salutary warning about colonialism – a pretty bold statement to make in the Victorian era, when the British Empire was still at its height. This is what it would look like, Wells suggested, if Britain were invaded in the way it had invaded and plundered other countries. The new War Of The Worlds appears to have a message of its own – perhaps that mass surveillance is bad. Apart from when it’s really useful.
Wells, an atheist, would probably have tutted at the religious overtones in George Pal’s adaptation. But Wells was also a socialist, so having the world being saved thanks to the products and services of a hyper-capitalist behemoth like Amazon probably would have brought him out in hives. That’s progress, we suppose.
War Of The Worlds is streaming now on Prime Video.
