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Most motion pictures handle to really feel actual. They’re normally introduced properly prematurely of their premiere, adopted by casting updates, manufacturing particulars, after which finally a trailer and launch date. It’s very uncommon {that a} film just like the 2025 Conflict of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, will sneak out prefer it’s a secret everybody concerned wished to maintain. Once you watch it, although, you get why possibly, simply possibly, Common Studios selected to quietly drop it with minimal fanfare, within the hopes that folks wouldn’t discover it exists.
To their credit score, that was truly true for an excellent week or so, because the film premiered on July thirtieth, 2025. I occurred to study it prematurely by Rick Ellis’ Too Much TV newsletter, which encompasses a by information roundup part, and even then, it didn’t appear actual: Within the days earlier than its premiere on Prime Video, I saved revisiting the Deadline article confirming its release date, as a result of that submit was the first proof of its existence.
I then featured it in final week’s Stream On, Consequence’s streaming suggestions e-newsletter, within the spirit of “if sufficient folks watch this film, then possibly I’ll cease questioning if I hallucinated it.” As a result of fairly severely, the expertise of watching this film on opening day was baffling, and never made any much less baffling by the film now going viral on TikTok (the one signal of it current on social media).
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A giant cause motion pictures aren’t normally made in secret is that the majority motion pictures require lots of people to be concerned — particularly massive diversifications of traditional science-fiction tales. For example, scroll by the lots of of names listed in the credits for 2005’s War of the Worlds, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise. By comparability, the 2025 movie’s credits are near one-tenth as lengthy.
How, you ask? Effectively, this film makes use of a method lately outlined as “screenlife” to depict an alien invasion of Earth solely by what will be seen on the pc monitor of Will Radford (Ice Dice) — an strategy enabled by its origins as a pandemic-era production. Now, Will’s a authorities worker with entry to a really secret and really invasive safety system, which implies he can see a lot by his varied feeds, to not point out his authorities contacts (performed by notable people like Clark Gregg and Andrea Savage). However there are nonetheless factors the place this film maybe utterly rejects the concept of plausibility because it fumbles by its interpretation of H.G. Wells’ traditional story.
Early within the film, we see Will get updates from his NASA crush Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) on some unusual climate patterns she’s noticing (early warning indicators of the invasion to return) whereas additionally utilizing his surveillance superpowers to maintain tabs on his pregnant daughter Religion (Iman Benson) and son Dave (Henry Hunter Corridor). Then the assaults start — gradual first, then quick — and we see epic scenes of catastrophe broadcast as information reviews or through shaky Facetime footage from folks on the bottom, all whereas Will sits at his pc and tries to determine what’s occurring and how you can cease it.
It’s actually the purpose at which the film’s hero turns into Religion’s child daddy Mark (Devon Bostick) the place the laughter actually begins. Mark, you see, works as an Amazon supply dude, and he helps to save lots of the day by — I swear to God — piloting an Amazon supply drone throughout city. We see this all through drone POV footage, after all. It’s possibly price mentioning once more that this film is out there on Amazon Prime Video. Amazon, a tremendous and good firm! Amazon can do all of it!
Okay, Ice Dice truly saves the day, in an motion climax we see through him actually operating by an information server whereas on FaceTime, as a result of everybody is aware of that once you’re making an attempt to save lots of the world, you must at all times have your cellphone in a single hand to doc your efforts.
A enjoyable reality for you is that Orson Welles’ well-known 1938 radio broadcast of The Conflict of the Worlds (the one which was convincing sufficient to make folks consider aliens had been truly invading) was solely 60 minutes lengthy. 2025’s Conflict of the Worlds, in the meantime, clocks in at 89 minutes, whereas 2005’s adaptation was 117. Within the 2005 film’s case, that runtime truly feels remarkably brief, given how a lot operating from aliens Spielberg and Cruise are capable of pack in. The 2025 film, in the meantime, provides a very ridiculous subplot about an Nameless-type group that’s taking purpose at authorities surveillance, identical to the type Will does.
The core message may be that an over-reliance on expertise… is unhealthy. However that message truthfully feels slightly toothless, given how we simply noticed that expertise saved the planet Earth. Hilariously, Prime Video’s really helpful viewing for this consumer on the finish of the film was the CBS drama Individual of Curiosity, which was additionally all concerning the risks of the surveillance state. The algorithm is typically not refined.
Two issues will be concurrently true: It’s enjoyable to see filmmakers push the boundaries of what’s doable with a comparatively distinctive storytelling strategy, and that storytelling strategy may also be very very silly in execution. (Particularly in the event you overlook to do issues like take away the reflection of the inexperienced display from Ice Dice’s glasses, a factor that occurs in a number of scenes.)
Telling a narrative largely by (fictionalized) second-hand sources is actually a resolution to the issue of “we don’t have Spielberg cash to make this film,” but it surely seems to not be the very best one by an extended shot. That being mentioned, I’m form of hoping extra folks uncover Conflict of the Worlds. Perhaps sometime, if sufficient folks watch, it’ll truly appear actual.
Conflict of the Worlds is streaming now on Prime Video.
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