Amazon Will Still Take and Fulfill Orders During An Apocalypse, According to Amazon’s ‘War of the Worlds’

Warning: contains spoilers for Prime Video’s 2025 adaptation of War of the Worlds.

Last week, Prime Video dropped its new straight-to-streaming take on War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells’ original novel was published in 1898, which means it’s in the public domain, and contemporary artists can do whatever they want with the source material. Apparently, that includes turning it into dogshit. 

If you’ve somehow missed the novel and its many adaptations — including a recent series that ran for three seasons and starred Gabriel Byrne, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Elizabeth McGovern, but which hid from us all on the usually forgotten premium movie network Epix — War of the Worlds is about a terrestrial invasion by aliens from Mars, who feed on human blood. The novel is a first-person narrative, and thus lent itself to Orson Welles’ interpretation. In his 1938 radio play, a broadcaster reports on the invasion beat by beat, so immersively and with so much verisimilitude that some listeners believed they were listening to the news.

For the 2025 take, co-screenwriters Kenny Golde and Marc Hyman and director Rich Lee bring us a vision that reeks of September 2020 (which is when Ice Cube signed on to star): The viewer watches the invasion through the computer screen of William Radford (Ice Cube), a domestic terror analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. In the early going, we watch him take video calls from “Sandra NASA” (Eva Longoria), who’s concerned about unusual weather phenomena around the world that wasn’t predicted by any satellites; flick through CCTV cameras to monitor his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson) and hector her about her diet; and cancel a gaming account while his son David (Henry Hunter Hall) is in the middle of a game. 

Nothing could be clearer than that each performer recorded their part alone; even the baby shower group photos that close the movie look like the movie’s stars were Photoshopped together by someone who only had four minutes to do it.

William is guiding an FBI agent (Andrea Savage) to what turns out to be the spoofed location of an anti-surveillance whistleblower, Disruptor, when “meteors” start striking the earth in impossibly high numbers. But, surprise, they’re not meteors; they’re the spacecraft aliens are using to invade the earth.

Amid the global chaos, William has to continue keeping tabs on everyone in his life, though Faith is the one who needs his help most. She gets a piece of metal stuck through her thigh and needs William to use his seemingly unlimited tech tools to find, open and start a Tesla (we even see him adjust the AC); then he uses the self-driving mode to direct it to the nearest hospital. When the battery on the car AND Faith’s phone are both about to die, he’s able to reach her boyfriend Mark (Devon Bostick) by accessing the multiple cameras in the AMAZON truck he drives. Mark makes it to the hospital, saves Faith’s leg with a tourniquet made from his AMAZON tape gun and helps her safely deliver her baby.

But William has no time to celebrate having become a grandfather! Sandra has figured out that, whereas Wells’ original aliens fed on human blood, these ones feed on data! They’re attacking now because everything Disruptor teased about a secret government data collection program called Goliath was true! The aliens are here to find the data center and have the biggest feast of their lives! Unless the “cannibal code” biochemist Faith has been developing to reprogram DNA to attack cancer cells could be edited into a computer virus to infect the aliens, which are made of the same materials as microchips but also have DNA! (?) 

How would that work at all, never mind in a matter of minutes? Don’t worry about it! 

By this point in the story, all of the data in the world’s non-Goliath data centers has been consumed by the aliens, paralyzing computer systems of all kinds. The consumption of financial data has rendered the entire world population bankrupt at once; naval ships have fallen over in shallow water without the technology that runs them. “Doesn’t this mean the movie would also end since all the characters’ computers and smartphones are just bricks now?” Well, you’d think. There is a gesture toward this as William watches all the precious photos in his Facebook albums, and the last voice message from his dead wife, poof away in front of him before Facebook.com itself just returns a 404 error. 

Fortunately, our heroes are all still somehow in the same bubble of functional internet (including Sandra, in Los Angeles). William can still use his powerful government software and get on highly sensitive Zoom calls. And even as commercial jets are straight falling out of the sky, the most important consumer-facing website is still completely functional. See, Faith can send William the virus online, but he’s going to need to get it into the Goliath system (conveniently located in the building he’s already in) manually, and he doesn’t have a thumb drive — they’re not allowed in the building at his secure location! But Mark has a thumb drive, and a solution: “Faith can load it here, and I can get it to you!”

“How?” snaps William.

“Prime Air,” says Mark, unzipping a bag and pulling out a drone he thought to bring into the hospital on his way to saving his pregnant girlfriend’s life.

“Prime Air?” William repeats — kind of carefully enunciating each syllable, in my opinion. 

“It’s the future of delivery,” Mark explains. “They’ve been training us for months. I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone.” 

We then watch the screen as William Googles “amazon.com” (let’s call Google the SECOND most important consumer-facing website), navigates to the site, searches for a flash drive, and clicks through to his cart with his work building already loaded as his default delivery address (seems like that wouldn’t be allowed at a secure location either?).

“We only got one shot at this,” William reminds Mark. “Are you sure you can get it here?”

“Don’t worry!” Mark says, putting on his headset. “I can soar like an eagle with this thing!”

William says he believes in Mark, and we watch him complete his AMAZON purchase. 

Things get a little dicey from there: The aliens detach from their legs and start flying, requiring David to get into a dogfight to protect Mark’s path through the air. But AMAZON’S training has been thorough and Mark is an expert — mostly. The PRIME AIR drone does crash, at one point, landing on its back near an unhoused person hiding in terror. David finds this man’s phone number, and Faith texts him a request to put himself in peril by coming out from his sheltered spot to turn it over; evidently he’s also on the same unaffected internet as our heroes. 

Duty to a drone doesn’t motivate this man, nor does Faith’s offer that the government will pay for his internet for a year: “Why, so they can track me?!” he writes back. (Taking the time, while in potentially mortal danger, to add the interrobang is a nice touch; clear expression is important.) Then Mark tells Faith to give the guy “an AMAZON gift card for a thousand bucks.” Faith just plops a link into the chat — we don’t have to watch her go through the steps of purchasing it, though it might have been nice, since it’s not something you can do instantaneously — and the guy runs over and flips the drone.

A thousand dollars’ worth of purchasing power on AMAZON would probably induce most of us to do almost anything; this gentleman is no different. In fact, his helping is touching proof of his belief that the world will survive long enough for him to redeem this gift. Or maybe he’s going to dart right back to his hiding spot and just sort shopping results for what Prime Air can send him immediately. It may or may not be Mark sending it to him, though; you know he’s going to get written up, or worse, for sending William his own thumb drive instead of the one he ordered and thus messing up AMAZON’s inventory, presumably tracked from a data center that’s either buried far deeper than Goliath’s, or one too robust even for these data-eating aliens’ appetites. 

Look, it doesn’t REALLY matter how any of this works. What matters is that, according to the epilogue, free thinker William gets social media kudos from both Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan.

H.G. Wells would be so proud.