The Tomorrow War movie review: This Chris Pratt movie doesn’t work much as an escapist film either. Every time there is a set piece that you are mildly enjoying, a nonsensical sacrifice by a character or a misplaced dialogues spoils your immersion.
The Tomorrow War cast: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, JK Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge
The Tomorrow War director: Chris McKay
The Tomorrow War rating: 1 star
It’s the year 2022. Dan Forester (played by Chris Pratt), an Iraq War veteran and biology teacher, is watching the FIFA World Cup with his family as they witness a wormhole materialising right in the middle of the field on TV. Several people step out and claim they are from 2051, where the humanity is on the verge of extinction due to an alien invasion, and request reinforcements.
The world governments send their soldiers to the future in response, and learn that the survival rate is 20 per cent, which leads to compulsory conscription as clearly people would rather not barge right into the middle of an invasion by malignant aliens. Forester is drafted and leaves a tearful wife and daughter behind.
If this premise sounds familiar, you are not not mistaken. The Tomorrow War has taken, for want of a better word, ‘inspiration’ from frankly much better movies. The obvious source of ‘inspiration’ is Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow. But there are also echoes of Independence Day in the international response to the alien threat and Alien in the design of extraterrestrials, and so on.
It’s like an algorithm wrote this movie.
But it’s not The Tomorrow War’s undoing. That blame lies with a ridiculous plot, and uneven characterisation that spoil whatever fun the story offers. Bizarre stuff keeps happening, and you are meant to take everything at face value. If it was a self-aware, dumb action movie like, say, the recent Mortal Kombat movie, the silliness would be more palatable. Here, the script wants you to take every daft thing seriously.
The Tomorrow War doesn’t work much as an escapist film either. Every time there is a set piece that you are mildly enjoying, something happens that spoils your immersion, be it a nonsensical sacrifice by a character, or a line of dialogue that appears out of place in that particular situation.
A lot of the action, granted, would have looked impressive on the big screen with sounds effects. On a TV, it was just okay.
The design of aliens is one thing that is genuinely impressive about The Tomorrow War. They do look like nearly-unstoppable killing machines with more tentacles that can be handled by humans. But even that sense of dread is minimised by inconsistency — at the beginning, nobody can figure out how to kill the grunts, and by the end, they are dispatched with relative ease. This movie clearly thinks it’s much smarter than it actually is.
The Tomorrow War would have been a decent actioner, but the script is too substandard to make it even a dumb summer entertainer.
