Film Review – War of the Worlds (2025)

There have been reports suggesting that “War of the Worlds” was shot in 2020, and the film certainly plays like a production trying to deliver screen intensity while maintaining COVID-19 guidelines. It’s a screenlife take on the 1898 H.G. Wells novel, which has been explored in all forms of media (and will continue to be exploited as a public domain option for B-movie producers), putting music video director Rich Lee in charge of a global alien invasion story that’s explored only through computer and phone screens. Scale normally associated with the brand name isn’t present here, and suspense is missing as well. “War of the Worlds” feels very amateurish and undercooked, out to sell panic and paranoia with limited resources and a script (by Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman) that’s painfully routine, aiming to merge a paint-by-numbers family drama with worldwide destruction. There’s a lot of keyboard action and screen switching, and perhaps there’s a Big Idea on the state of surveillance in America, but it’s all turned into generic mush as Lee has little to work with beyond remote production clumsiness. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com