Review: The Tomorrow War

Hollywood scriptwriting is all about adding and taking away. Screenplays are built in layers; big ideas and twists are added in and taken out, but traces still remain. There's probably an analogy in there with time travel, but to be honest The Tomorrow War doesn't deserve that much thought: it's big, it's dumb, and it's clear that at some stage pretty much everything interesting or original about the concept was tossed in the bin.

It's December 2022 and science dude / former special forces assassin Dan Forester (an insanely jacked Chris Pratt, who might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION FIGURE) is pissed off that his elite skills aren't being taken advantage of and he's wasting his life teaching bored high school kids. Good news! In the middle of the World Cup a bunch of time traveling soldiers arrive on the pitch to tell everyone on Earth that the future sucks and they need our help.

Soon the whole world is sending their military forces - first the elite, now the dregs - off to the future where they promptly get chewed up by the alien White Spikes and spat out in a way that is not at all a metaphor for how America treats its servicemen and women. For a movie that has climate change as an explicit plot point, this sure is optimistic about how much effort today's world is willing to put in to help the future - but once you stop to think that gee, maybe if one country sneakily didn't send their forces off into the future meat grinder then they could conquer today's world that won't matter so much.

Eventually Dan gets called up, and the "eventually" is a bit strange because you'd think a special forces dude-slash science guy would be someone the world of tomorrow might need, but here's the secret behind The Tomorrow War: literally everything that takes place is in service of various clunky, played-out story beats you'll recognise from a dozen earlier films.

For example, why are the troops only sent forward to fight for seven days? Why is the war thirty years away? Why don't, say, the future dudes come back to today secretly, use their future knowledge to take over the global economy, then use it to mass produce Boston Dynamics kill-bots and send them forward instead? Because if they did, we wouldn't get this particular, extremely uninspired story that once again reminds us that when it comes to Hollywood, it all boils down to family.

There are traces of attempts to paper over the cracks. Old dudes are being recruited because they'll be dead in the future (but if the future is so grim and almost everyone there is already dead, what does it really matter?); there's a brief mention that the alien invaders take one day off a week ("the sabbath"), which presumably explains why all the time travel happens then, though why past people only have a one-week tour of duty remains a mystery until the plot reasoning becomes clear. 

The idea that things are grim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, especially when the concept as presented poses so many questions: why not send the future civilians back to the present day as refugees? Why not bring future knowledge back to today so when the aliens arrive we'll have better guns and training?

Nobody wants to watch a film bogged down in pointless techobabble, but the whole "the future needs bodies" angle comes across as so sketchy it's a real disappointment to get to the future only to discover that it is exactly as advertised. Especially as it makes zero sense that in a future war where humanity is totally screwed (we're repeatedly told they barely have weeks left) they're grabbing fat losers (sorry) from today, giving them a gun and zero training, then literally dumping them into a war zone that they then napalm ten minutes later.

Worse, this turns out to be yet another Hollywood blockbuster where the whole world gets trashed by an unstoppable force that just happens to have a weak point - though at least here the weak point / reset button makes slightly more sense than usual.

 

[MILD SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH ONLY: Also, if the future already has a toxin that can kill the male White Spikes, why not start spraying that shit around considering the male ones are the ones doing all the fighting?]

 

Aside from all that, this has a few well-crafted action sequences, the monsters are decent, and the always great J.K. Simmons plays Dan's extremely useful survivalist tech-ninja estranged dad. The final act is actually a step up from the rest of the film because it turns into a knock-off of Aliens and The Thing, which are both much better films it's always fun to be reminded of. Dumb films that are secretly smart are awesome; this is a smart film that's secretly dumb, and that's not much fun at all. 

- Anthony Morris