The Tomorrow War, Today’s Dumbest Summer Movie
The “Expert Film Critic series” is neither a series nor conducted by experts. It does focus on films that you’ve probably already seen, and simply want to know if “experts” also hated it.
*Spoilers ahead.
The Tomorrow War, Today’s Dumbest Summer Movie
A straight to Amazon streaming alien invasion/time travel film that uses 8th grade science and Chris Pratt to collectively make the world a much, much dumber place.
Right away, the title will have you scratching your head, as the ‘Tomorrow War‘ actually takes place 30 years in the future. But you should quickly forget the idiocy of the title, because in order to survive the Tomorrow War you’ll need to empty your brain of logic and step gingerly through a minefield of nonsensical plot holes and recycled one-liners from several 1990’s action movies, that go on for 2 hours and 18 minutes.
Here are just some of The Tomorrow War’s incredibly original lines:
“We need to get the extraction team out of there, now!”
“You’re our last hope.”
“I’m not a hero!”
“We’re gonna save the world, together.”
It’s dialogue like this that makes me think English is not screenwriter Zach Dean’s first language. I think he may have learned English by watching the movie Armageddon several hundred times on VHS, or maybe it was Starship Troopers? In any case, despite an arsenal of disaster movie cliches the plot still makes no sense, and continues to ram that point home, one explosion after another.
The film begins during the World Cup final of 2023 (I’m not making this up) soldiers from the future appear through a portal and ask humanity to join them to fight a war that is happening 30 years from now, and if people don’t go to the future to help, humanity will go extinct!
Right away, a sober person with a child’s understanding of ‘time travel’ movies would say, “ok, you’ve warned us about the aliens, give us some intelligence on them, and we have 30 years to prepare and research how to beat them.” But instead they decide to ship people from the past with no military training or knowledge of the aliens to help fight the war in the future. The Tomorrow War!
SOLID.
Once Pratt arrives 30 years in the future, machine gun in hand, squinting at the horizon, you discover the real reason they added a time travel element to the movie, it’s so Pratt can meet his 6 year old daughter in the future, a now 36 yr-old MIT scientist and Army Colonel played by Yvonne Strahovski (spoiler alert: she’s got abandonment issues). Strahovski is also the future leader of the resistance! Think Terminator 2, if it were written by Micheal Bay’s much slower older brother ‘Yani’.
The interaction of father and daughter is almost thoughtful at times, almost. But the basic structure of the movie is so poorly thought out, it makes you wonder how they got a star like Chris Pratt to sign on.
But then you notice the Director is Chris McKay, Pratt’s old friend from the Lego movie franchise, McKay’s only directorial credits are animated Lego movies, which Pratt voiced. Aha! Amazon chose a director who may have never done a live action movie, BUT he could deliver his buddy Pratt as the star.
They must have spent most of the budget on Pratt and the alien CGI, because they could only afford a screenwriter who I’m guessing is from Eastern Europe, and still struggling with basic sentence structure. Luckily, the aliens don’t talk.
The aliens (called The White Spikes), are big, dumb loud and after 2 hours Pratt figures out that he didn’t have to go the future to defeat them after all. I had to rewatch the ending because I fell asleep.
Amazon’s The Tomorrow War was given 4.1 stars our of 5…by Amazon. It is rated PG-13 and is streaming now.
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