The Tomorrow War: Chris Pratt fights a future where IQs have sustained heavy casualties
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
Within the near future, or so the Amazon Prime movie The Tomorrow War posits, people will have invented time travel. They will not otherwise turn out to be very smart.
With echoes of Starship Troopers (minus the pointed satire), The Tomorrow War, starring Chris Pratt, is the second noisy “temporal war” movie of the pandemic era, after Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. To differentiate between the two, this is the one Nolan would have written if he’d suffered a head injury.
Aliens beware!: Chris Pratt is here from the past to set the future right.
Whereas Tenet took great pains to existentially explain itself (albeit to no avail for some of us), the writers of The Tomorrow War seemingly didn’t care about things like paradoxes or just plain logic. Just charge up the weapons, and fire away at the carnivorous bug-like aliens.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
The Tomorrow War begins with a visitation, at a crucial moment of what appears to be the 2022 World Cup, by a troop of soldiers from a few decades into the future. Seems an invasion of aliens is/will be threatening to wipe out all of humanity, and they’ve used their new time travel technology to come back in time and, um, draft new soldiers from the past to continue the pointless effort of firing automatic weapons at the nearly bulletproof enemy.
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That’s the set-up. The first gobsmacking thing, considering everything we’ve learned in the past year about the inherent selfishness in many of our fellow humans, is that everybody on the planet is onside with the dubious “fight the aliens in the future!” plan. There’s no, “Clearly this is a plot by the liberal elites! The aliens are a hoax, sheeple!”
And among the draftees is Dan Forester (Pratt), an Iraq war vet having a hell of a time trying to get a job. He is drafted, to the alarm of his wife (Betty Gilpin) and daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and promises he’ll make it back alive – which in some timeline or another, he most assuredly will, being the star of the movie.
Against a cheesy backdrop of burning model skyscrapers, Dan finds himself plopped into the firefight of his life, taking orders from officers not yet born in his time. People meet people they shouldn’t meet, paradox wise, and find out things about their “future” that they shouldn’t know.
In a way, I’m surprised that director Chris McKay didn’t follow the wry and satirical path of destruction Starship Troopers’ Paul Verhoeven left behind. McKay’s LEGO movie background, particularly The LEGO Batman Movie, shows he knows something about satirically shaping the ridiculously serious.
Okay, my time-travel two cents: If billions of people were being killed, and I had time travel at my disposal, I would suggest we go back to when the aliens first arrived and were at their most vulnerable and welcome them with every hydrogen bomb on the planet.
Something, not exactly that, does bring the last act of The Tomorrow War to our time for its final act. There’s some family business to take care of between Dan and his estranged dad (J.K. Simmons), and a new plan to fight the aliens that doesn’t involve the same stupid battle tactics over and over.
The important thing is that it still involves tinnitus-level weapons fire. Rest assured, First Contact may not be friendly, but it will be loud.
The Tomorrow War. Directed by Chris McKay, written by Zach Dean. Starring Chris Pratt, Betty Gilpin and J.K. Simmons. Available Friday, July 2 on Amazon Prime.