The Ending Of ‘War of the Worlds’ Is An Advert For Amazon Prime Air

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

War of the Worlds (2025) is impressively terrible in a lot of different ways, but its ending is particularly egregious. What is otherwise an ill-advised screenlife adaptation of the H. G. Wells story transforms in its final act into an overt advert for Amazon Prime Air, with a supporting character saving the day by flying a drone into the basement of the Department of Homeland Security to drop off a USB drive. Not a single word of that is a lie.

We simply must discuss this. As a critic, I have a professional responsibility to call this out, but in a slightly more informal capacity, I must advise everyone to watch this movie just to laugh at it, because it’s hysterically funny in loads of ways, not all of them related to its feature-length Amazon glazing.

Mmm, Data

As with every adaptation of this story, the plot revolves around an alien invasion. In the original text, they’re Martians who are eventually killed by Earthly pathogens, which means they basically catch a cold and drop dead, which I’ve always found quite funny in itself, at least for its relative banality. But these aliens are different – they’re a hybrid race, part organic and part cyber, which we’re definitely supposed to understand since Eva Longoria’s NASA scientist character repeats it twice to two different characters in the exact same way. And they feed on data.

The reason the aliens feed on data is to tie their invasion into a wider surveillance state plot about the U.S. government, primarily the DHS under the leadership of Clark Gregg’s Director Briggs, having clandestinely developed a super-invasive program known as Goliath to rigorously monitor America’s citizenry in direct violation of their privacy and human rights. Initially, Ice Cube’s Will Radford thinks Goliath is “fake news” and is determined to shut down Disruptor, the domestic terrorist who is trying to blow the whistle on it.

As the tripods all converge on U.S. data centres and begin draining them of their information, the stage is set for a profoundly silly finale.

Disruptor Revealed & Goliath Confirmed

In a hilarious turn, it’s later revealed that Disruptor is really Will’s son, Dave, and he tried to tell him so at the very beginning of the movie. However, because Will thinks Dave’s a deadbeat who sits around playing video games all day, he repeatedly cut him off and took other calls. This movie could have been over before the invasion started if Ice Cube had any emotional intelligence.

Anyway, Dave sends Will a bunch of documents that confirm that not only is Goliath real, but Briggs is behind it and it’s buried 40 feet under the DHS building. What’s more is that the U.S. government had encountered the aliens before, knew they fed on data stores, and were confident that activation of Goliath would entice them into a full-blown invasion.

Briggs was inexplicably willing to risk this… why? He brags about Goliath having been air gapped and being totally inaccessible to the invaders, but what good is a surveillance system if all the people it’s supposed to be spying on have been killed by aliens? Nothing about his intentions for Goliath make a great deal of sense. Truthfully, nothing in this movie makes any sense at all.

Amazon to the Rescue

Okay, this is the meat and potatoes of War of the Worlds’ ending, because this is the point where I was guffawing to myself at the sheer brazenness of this movie’s nonsense. I already thought it was weird when Will’s daughter, Faith, was badly injured and had to be rescued by her boyfriend, an Amazon delivery driver named Mark, using his immense package delivery skills to bind her wound. But that is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Will and Dave initially try to take the aliens down using a computer virus with help from a small squad of anonymous hackers, but it doesn’t work. Later, Sandra confirms that the aliens are hybrids and contain DNA, which is just as well since Faith has very recently developed a cannibal code that reprograms DNA to attack sick cells. Dave can translate that into computer code, re-engineer it slightly, and then trick the aliens into cannibalising themselves. But it’ll mean the code being uploaded onto Goliath’s servers.

Since the U.S. government is planning to bomb the DHS building and bury Goliath under the rubble, preventing the aliens from accessing it, Will has to upload the code manually, by way of a USB flash drive. But he doesn’t have a flash drive, so he has to order one from Amazon so that Mark can deliver it to him via drone using Prime Air. I promise you, again, I’m not making this up. This is literally what happens.

All’s Well That Ends Well

In a brilliantly funny climactic sequence that sees Mark flying the USB drive into the basement while Dave uses hacked drones to clear a path and Faith sends unsolicited text messages to a homeless man and bribes him with a $1000 Amazon gift voucher to flip the drone over when it crashes – I swear, this is real – Will is able to save the day. But he seemingly loses his own life in the process.

Before he “died”, Will scheduled an email to his kids apologising for being such a rubbish dad and attaching a bunch of family photos that were all taken illegally through hacked surveillance infrastructure, which I think is supposed to be emotional. But Will isn’t dead! War of the Worlds doesn’t bother to explain how he survived, but it wants its happy ending, so he’s just fine. He even threatens Secretary of Defence Crystal (played by Michael O’Neill, albeit for like two brief scenes) that he’s watching the government now, and manages to attend Faith and Mark’s baby shower.

Elsewhere, Briggs is arrested, Faith becomes internationally recognised for her work killing the aliens, Dave and Will blow the whistle on Goliath, and Sandra becomes the new head of NASA. Everyone, I presume, auto-renews their Amazon Prime subscription. And they all lived happily ever after.