War of the Worlds (2025) – Screenlife Sci-Fi Thriller on Prime Video | Plot, Cast, Trailer & Review

War of the Worlds (2025) – Screenlife Sci-Fi Thriller on Prime Video | Plot, Cast, Trailer & Review

War of the Worlds (2025) adapts H. G. Wells’ classic alien-invasion novel into a screenlife format: the entire film plays out through video-conference windows, social-media feeds and surveillance dashboards. Directed by Rich Lee and written by Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman, the story follows DHS cybersecurity analyst Will Radford (Ice Cube), who is forced to choose between exposing a government conspiracy and safeguarding his family when alien machines attack data centres worldwide.

The 89-minute feature premiered directly on Amazon Prime Video on 30 July 2025 and co-stars Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Henry Hunter Hall, Iman Benson, Devon Bostick and Michael O’Neill. Media reaction to this “Zoom-era War of the Worlds” is sharply divided: some critics deride it as a 90-minute Amazon commercial, while others praise its low-budget, experimental disaster storytelling.

War of the Worlds Film Facts

Item	Details
Title	War of the Worlds
Genre	Science Fiction / Thriller / Screenlife
Runtime	89 minutes
Director	Rich Lee
Screenwriters	Kenneth A. Golde, Marc Hyman
Producers	Patrick Aiello, Timur Bekmambetov
Distributor	Amazon MGM Studios (Prime Video)
Premiere	30 July 2025 – global streaming release
Rating	PG-13 (sci-fi action, strong language, bloody images)

War of the Worlds Trailer Highlights

• “Your data is deadly” tagline – The trailer reveals that the aliens intend to consume Earth’s data, underscoring the film’s critique of surveillance culture.

• Pure screenlife viewpoint – Footage jumps between Zoom, WhatsApp, drone cams and live-news feeds; TechRadar dubbed it a “Gen-Z disaster movie.”

• Ice Cube in the war room – Viral moments show Will hacking his daughter’s smart fridge via a DHS backdoor and remote-controlling a Tesla.

• Prime delivery-drone rescue – During the invasion, a futuristic “one-click” order sends a flash-drive that could save the world, which some outlets mocked as blatant product placement.

• First official trailer – Released 24 July, it racked up over eight million views on YouTube within one week.

WAR OF THE WORLDS Trailer (2025)

War of the Worlds (2025) – Spoiler-Filled Plot Summary

Homeland Security Analyst and Protective Father

Will Radford (Ice Cube) is a top-tier cyber-security analyst working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. From his high-tech Washington, D.C. surveillance bunker, Will spends his days monitoring security camera feeds and computer networks for threats – and even uses this omnipresent surveillance access to keep tabs on his own family. A widower and overprotective father, Will watches over his pregnant daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), and teen son, Dave (Henry Hunter Hall), by peeking into everything from Faith’s text messages to the contents of her smart fridge.

His son jokingly complains that Will is essentially “spying on what’s in people’s Amazon carts,” highlighting Will’s intrusive habits. Early on, we also see Will tracking an Anonymous-style hacker known as “The Disruptor,” who is broadcasting warnings about government surveillance programs. Will’s routine of juggling national security and helicopter parenting is soon shattered by an unprecedented crisis.

Meteor Showers and the Alien Invasion

Without warning, bizarre environmental events and communication outages begin occurring. Will’s friend, NASA scientist Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria), calls in a panic about strange weather and satellites going offline. Moments later, a sudden meteor shower bombards the Earth – and those “meteors” disgorge towering three-legged war machines (tripods) that launch a full-scale alien invasion.

Through his array of screens and live feeds, Will witnesses chaos as the tripods attack cities around the globe. The entire film unfolds via computer and phone displays (in the screenlife style), so the carnage is shown through shaky smartphone videos, news streams, and video calls that Will monitors in real time. One colossal tripod lands in Washington near Faith’s vicinity, obliterating everything in its path – at one point, Will watches in horror as it even knocks a police helicopter out of the sky, nearly killing his daughter.

Desperate to save her, Will exploits his digital arsenal: he remotely hacks Faith’s Tesla to autopilot her to the safety of a hospital. Simultaneously, he coordinates with the federal response; we see Will on Zoom calls with his boss, DHS Director Donald Briggs (Clark Gregg), and Dr. Salas as government agencies scramble to understand and combat the extraterrestrial attack. “This is humanity’s last chance,” the U.S. President declares via video-conference, vowing to fight back in this literal “war of the worlds”.

Data-Hungry Invaders and Government Secrets

As the invasion intensifies, Will and others notice an odd pattern – the aliens aren’t merely causing physical destruction; they are siphoning and destroying data. Crucial digital infrastructure starts failing: financial systems go down, GPS navigation is knocked out, and even Will’s personal Facebook memorial page for his late wife is suddenly erased. In a startling twist, it becomes clear the aliens have targeted Earth’s information networks, “feasting” on our data rather than just conquering territory.

Will’s surveillance feeds reveal that the invaders are hacking into servers and cutting off data streams across the globe. This digital aspect of the assault forces Will to question what might have drawn the aliens to our data in the first place. He soon uncovers a disturbing secret: the government has a clandestine mega-surveillance program – code-named “Goliath” – that aggregates massive amounts of private data. This top-secret network, which had been kept hidden from even analysts like Will, appears to be the true target of the alien invasion.

In fact, an old memo suggests that launching such a sweeping spy system was akin to “ringing a dinner bell” for any data-hungry extraterrestrials. As the pieces fall into place, Will realizes his own government’s project may have inadvertently lured the aliens to Earth, a truth his superiors hoped to conceal.

Spoilers escalate when Will makes a very personal discovery amid the chaos: the mysterious hacker “The Disruptor” he had been tracking is actually his son, Dave. By filtering the distorted voice of the hacker’s video feed, Will recognizes Dave’s voice, leading to a shocked confrontation via webcam. It turns out Dave – a self-taught genius hacker – was trying to expose the Goliath surveillance program’s dangers all along. Father and son now reconcile and combine their knowledge.

With Faith (a biomedical researcher by training) also looped in, the Radford family forms an impromptu think tank to find the aliens’ weakness. They confirm that the invaders are not Martian-style colonists but information predators, seeking to harvest humanity’s data as a resource. Armed with this understanding, Will and his kids devise a high-stakes plan to shut down the tripods by severing their digital lifeline.

 Promotional banner for War of the Worlds (2025), featuring Ice Cube as Will Radford. The film’s tagline “Your Data is Deadly” underscores the digital-age twist of this alien invasion. In this screenlife presentation, the story unfolds via computer and phone interfaces – note the collage of surveillance imagery, the alien tripod machines, and Will’s family members in the background, highlighting how humanity’s interconnected data networks lie at the heart of the conflict.

Fighting Back: A Digital Virus and an Unlikely Delivery

Will, Dave, and Faith work together (entirely through screens) to engineer a counter-attack in cyberspace. Their idea is to create a powerful computer virus – a “cannibal” virus designed to corrupt and devour the aliens’ data feed from within. Essentially, if the invaders are gorging on Earth’s information, the heroes plan to poison the meal. Dave spearheads coding the virus, while Faith applies her scientific know-how to ensure the virus acts like a self-replicating organism (a digital analogy to a biological contagion). However, deploying this virus is tricky since the internet and communications are severely disrupted by the aliens. They determine that the safest way to transmit the virus is via physical means: a portable thumb drive delivered directly into the network uplink that the aliens are tapping into.

Here, Faith’s resourceful fiancé, Mark (Devon Bostick), becomes crucial. Mark happens to work as an Amazon Prime delivery driver – and even amid apocalypse, he has access to Amazon’s fleet of autonomous drones. On a video call, Mark guides Will on how to “place an official order on Amazon” to dispatch a Prime Air drone loaded with the virus-laden USB drive to Will’s location. In a surreal bit of tech heroism, Will quickly adds a dummy item to his Amazon cart and hits checkout, activating a drone for immediate delivery in the middle of the war zone.

The drone zips through ruined D.C. streets carrying humanity’s last hope on a thumb drive. As it nears Will’s command center, a tripod’s shockwave knocks the drone out of the sky. The device crash-lands on a devastated city block, out of reach. With time running out, Faith pinpoints a single bystander in the area – an unhoused man sheltering in a tent – by triangulating his cell phone signal. Will and Faith contact this reluctant good Samaritan and persuade him to retrieve and reboot the flipped drone. His price for risking danger? Not cash or safety, but a $1,000 Amazon gift card sent electronically on the spot! (He pointedly refuses a government reward of free internet service, fearing “Big Brother” surveillance – a darkly comic nod to the film’s theme.)

The stranger complies once the digital gift card hits his phone, managing to place the drone upright and get it flying again. At last, the drone arrives at Will’s facility with the precious USB. Will grabs the thumb drive and physically plugs it into the central server that the aliens are siphoning data from – essentially uploading the custom virus directly into the invaders’ link. At that moment, the alien tripods worldwide are actively “downloading” Earth’s troves of information via this network; the instant Will’s USB injects the virus, it spreads like wildfire through the aliens’ systems. The hostile machines begin to malfunction as the extraterrestrial data stream turns to digital poison.

Final Showdown and Aftermath

The plan works. Within moments, the towering tripods falter as the cannibal virus corrupts the aliens’ data supply. One by one, the war machines collapse or retreat when their link to Earth’s information is severed. Essentially, humanity fights off the invasion not with nukes or microbes, but with a simple USB stick and a clever piece of code – a decidedly modern twist on H.G. Wells’ classic ending. In the control bunker, Will watches the global feeds as the carnage finally subsides.

Cities are left in ruins and countless digital records have been wiped out, but the alien onslaught is over. In the aftermath, Will is reunited via video call with Faith (who remains safe at the hospital) and Dave, both of whom survived the ordeal. Director Briggs and the government stand down from full crisis mode as the extraterrestrial threat disappears. There’s a bittersweet victory: humanity has prevailed, yet billions of dollars in data (and likely many lives) have been lost. Notably, all of the personal data the aliens “slurped” – from bank information to cherished social media memories – has been permanently deleted, a side effect of the invaders’ attack that the heroes cannot reverse.

For Will Radford, the experience is transformative. Having seen the dire consequences of unfettered surveillance and data obsession (from both aliens and his own agency), Will gains a new perspective on privacy and priorities. In the film’s closing scene, he famously declares, “There’s more important things to do than worry about what’s in people’s Amazon carts.” This line pointedly echoes his son’s earlier jibe and shows that Will now understands the value of personal privacy and trust. The family’s teamwork – blending Will’s security skills, Dave’s hacking, and Faith’s scientific acumen – not only saved the world but also bridged the trust gap between the overbearing father and his grown children.

The final moments show the Radford family on a healing path (and possibly teasing the birth of Faith’s child, who will inherit an Earth saved from alien invasion). Despite the global devastation, the film wraps up on a hopeful note. The invasions ends as abruptly as it began, and the government begins restoring communications and infrastructure. In a neatly packaged resolution, War of the Worlds (2025) concludes with humanity safe and perhaps a bit wiser about the perils of mass surveillance. Will’s closing quip about Amazon carts underscores the story’s core message: in an age of digital overreach, our humanity and freedom are more vital than any trove of data.

War of the Worlds Main Characters & Cast (with Instagram)

Character	Actor	Instagram	One-Line Role Synopsis
Will Radford	Ice Cube	@icecube	A Homeland-Security cyber-analyst whose all-seeing surveillance skills become humanity’s first line of defence.
Dr. Sandra Salas	Eva Longoria	@evalongoria	NASA planetary scientist who helps decode the aliens’ data-harvesting motive.
Donald Briggs	Clark Gregg	@clarkgregg	DHS director—and secret architect of Project Goliath—whose decisions may have lured the invaders.
Sheila Jeffries	Andrea Savage	@andreasavage	Seasoned FBI field agent coordinating ground evacuations while trading quips with Will.
Dave “Disruptor” Radford	Henry Hunter Hall	@henryhunterhall	Will’s hacktivist son who weaponises code—and family secrets—to fight the tripods.
Faith Radford	Iman Benson	@imanbenson	Pregnant biomedical researcher whose scientific insight shapes the digital “cannibal” virus.
Mark Goodman	Devon Bostick	@devbostick	Faith’s fiancé and Amazon drone pilot who literally delivers humanity’s USB-stick salvation.
Walter Crystal	Michael O’Neill	@thismichaeloneill	U.S. Secretary of Defense trying to balance nukes and network cables against an unseen foe.