It takes very little editing to turn Amazon's "cheerful" new holiday ad into a horrifying techno-dystopia

By William Hughes  |  November 24, 2018 | 9:12pm
Aux Features Film

At this point, our various speculations about our collective future have inevitably dropped a few rungs on the optimism scale, dipping from “Which utopia shall our children frolic in, carefree and pure?” to “Which corporate logo do you think we’ll have tattooed onto the inside of our eyelids before we’re sent to toil eternally in the Bitcoin mines?” If we were betting drones, Amazon would probably be a pretty good pick for that ocular honor, especially since their latest holiday ad—with just a slight tinkering to its soundtrack—suggests that the company is already planning a world in which their distinctive arrow-marked boxes are watching, and can never be escaped.

Said eye-opening edit comes courtesy of the genius of writer and director Omar Najam, who re-set the ad to the tense, paranoia-heavy theme song to 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a film which is also, not-coincidentally, about a digital panopticon aiming for global domination. Although we’d argue that nothing on Hydra’s planning board is as terrifying as this shot of a nurse smiling ominously at the all-consuming hellbox she’s left next to a sick and sleeping child.

 
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