Ice Cube’s New Movie War Of The Worlds Scores A Rare 0% On Rotten Tomatoes

H. G. Wells's classic sci-fi novel The War Of The Worlds has been adapted plenty of times, from Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast to Steven Spielberg's 2005 film led by Tom Cruise. We certainly didn't need another adaptation, but we got one this year in the form of a new movie starring Ice Cube. I haven't seen it, but so far, we have a critical consensus: It's bad. It's so bad that it's one of only 45 movies to have a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on at least 20 critics’ reviews.

According to Wikipedia, War Of The Worlds stars Ice Cube as DHS surveillance expert Will Radford, who's helping the FBI crack down on a hacker. Then, the planet starts getting barraged by meteors containing fighting machines, and Will and his NASA-employee friend Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) deduce that aliens are invading Earth. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes are tearing it to shreds: "War Of The Worlds is a tortuous, endless 90 minutes of glitchy video clips, military stock footage, glad-to-be-doing-something actors running through the street waving a camera in front of their faces and pretending to be scared," reads one review. Another says: "Poorly written and awkwardly paced, War Of The Worlds is in contention for one of the worst movies of the decade so far."

But let's cut them some slack, people! Ice Cube's son came to his dad's defense on Twitter clarifying that they filmed War Of The Worlds during COVID's peak. A lot of the movie is composed of desktop and iPhone screen recordings, meaning its stars were able to film their scenes remotely. In the trailer, for example, Ice Cube is only seen sitting down at his desk like he's in a Zoom meeting that could've been an email. Longoria is only seen via FaceTime, Airpods in and all. That screenlife approach could've actually made an interesting product if A) it was still 2020 when the film was released, and B) if it was distributed independently. Instead, it's a five-year-old Universal Pictures vehicle streaming exclusively on Prime Video, where mass surveillance and Amazon save the day. One of the taglines in the trailer reads "it's worse than you think," and, yeah, that sounds about right.

At least Ice Cube didn't have to break his anti-vax stance over it. The movie's out now, and you can watch the trailer below.

Shot during the pandemic. Released 5 years later.

— O’Shea Jackson Jr (@OsheaJacksonJr) August 5, 2025

@lulguru__ #icecube #waroftheworlds #meme #fyp original sound - Lulguru__