by Conan Simmons – July 6, 2021 – 6:19 pm
Whenever a major film star at the top of their game suddenly appears in a straight to video release it’s because some low rent distributor puts out a movie made years prior, when the star was just starting out, hoping to make a quick buck. This isn’t the case with ‘The Tomorrow War’.
Prior to the release of ‘The Tomorrow War’ straight to streaming on Amazon Prime, I was perplexed as to why a movie with a box office draw like Chris Pratt, with Oscar winning character actor J.K. Simmons in a supporting role, battling monstrous aliens in a CGI fest to save the world would skip theaters entirely at a time when theaters are in need of content.
Then I watched ‘The Tomorrow War’.
The movie opens with Chris Pratt, playing a character named Dan Forester, being dropped out of the air onto the top of a skyscraper where he fortunately falls into a swimming pool unlike the multitude of faceless bodies dropping to more unfortunate fates around him.
Before any of that is explained the film cuts to Dan, a suburban dad hosting a Christmas/Soccer game watch party. Just as a player on the television is about to score a goal a big bright light appears on the field and heavily armed people emerge onto the field. The leader of this armed group instantly gives a desperate plea to the world, as though most of the world is watching the sporting event. Somehow her voice carries very well in the stadium and over the airways with the tv cameras trained on her even though she is not speaking into a microphone or anything. She explains that they come from 30 years into the future and are losing a war against alien invaders.
Presto! A global draft ensues enlisting literally almost anybody. Nobody for an instant thinks to question the validity of these so-called future soldiers that insist damn near everyone join up and jump into the future no questions asked.
The Iraq War veteran turned high school teacher, Dan gets his draft notice over his phone while he is teaching a class of despondent youths who seem to be the only ones with even a hint of reaction to future soldiers telling the world humanity is on the verge of extinction in 30 years time.
When Dan shows up for his physical he learns that he has been drafted because he will die in seven years anyway. This leads fellow recruit, the highly nervous Charlie, played by Sam Richardson, to make the observation that most of the recruits are over the age of 40.
With absolutely no training, not so much even to know how to properly hold a gun, all of the present day common people turned soldiers are zapped into the future where many instantly fall to their death. This is when Dan falls into the swimming pool.
Nobody is concerned in the slightest that they just allowed future soldiers to drop so many people to their deaths on the way to fight deadly aliens that haven’t been described in any way, shape or form.
This may be attributed to the denseness of the characters. Dan, for instance, is clearly meant to be some kind of super smart scientist that’s just down on his luck. However, he is so dense that when he meets his grown daughter in the future, played by Yvonne Strahovski, who looks a lot like his wife and her mother, played by Betty Gilpin, he doesn’t recognize her even after she tells him her name.
The complete absence of logic in this movie is mind-boggling. As fast as the entire world is to believe heavily armed future people without question it is baffling that when Dan, Charlie and a few other heroes of the film, including J.K. Simmons as an understated conspiracy theorist and Dan’s estranged father (a performance he just phones-in), need to go to the frozen wasteland of Russia to defeat the alien invaders they are promptly rejected and questioned as to why they need just one plane.
‘The Tomorrow World’ is loud, fast and dumb. It really tries hard to keep you from noticing the lack of plot, character, and the many imitations of far superior sci-fi action-adventures like ‘Edge of Tomorrow’, ‘Predator’, ‘Pacific Rim’ and ‘The Thing’. The script, by Zach Dean, is less a script and more a rehash of scenes from other, better movies.
Director Chris McKay may do fine with animated fare like ‘The LEGO Batman Movie’ but from what ‘The Tomorrow War’ shows live-action is not his strong suit.
And someone please tell music composer Lorne Balfe not to bash the keys of his synthesizer. It’s not music. What the filmmakers here think is ominous, bombastic orchestrations is nothing more than pretentious, pompous, mashing of keys. A cat on a keyboard has more melody.
Cinematographer Larry Fong, known more for his work with director Zack Snyder on his films from ‘300’ to ‘Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice’, is probably the only one whose contribution helps the movie as he is used to making heavily computer generated scenes look good. He doesn’t accomplish that in ‘The Tomorrow War’ but at least his work doesn’t hinder the film.
‘The Tomorrow War’ would have bombed pretty hard had it been released to theaters as was originally planned last year. Amazon managed to pick it up and wisely regulate it straight to streaming, as this is exactly like a straight to video movie that was intended to be something more. ‘The Tomorrow War’ is a failure all around and would be a bad sign for star Chris Pratt if it wasn’t for the pandemic of the last year keeping the lid tight on movie releases until now. Chris Pratt will bounce back from this failure but he needs to stay away from this type of quickly thrown together schlock until it’s the only kind of work he can get.