Movie review: The Tomorrow War

(image courtesy IMP Awards)

There are times when you crave, when you need, a big heapin’ helpin’ of big dumb blockbuster fun.

Switch off the brain, park your critical faculties in neutral and surrender yourself to a glorious onslaught of sight, sound and action that’s bonkers bananas and yet somehow weirdly satisfying.

Technically that is indeed what you get with The Tomorrow War, an epic, spectacle-rich sci-fi film that bases its two-hour plus narrative on the idea that humanity is being wiped out a scant thirty years into the future by a bloodthirsty, hungry alien race and need help from the past where people, technology and resources are abundant.

The premise is an audacious one, pivoting on the idea that time travel has been invented and held together on a wing and a prayer and copious amounts of rubber bands and bubblegum, in order to get this necessary help from 2022, without which Homo Sapiens are going to join their antecedents as an extinct people.

Such a premise almost inevitably promises expansive action scenes, people sacrificing themselves for the greater good and an impelling sense of urgency and desperation which all but demands heroic acts and reassessments of what really matters in life.

Consider those boxes ticked by The Tomorrow War which knows on which side its 80s/90s inspired blockbuster bread is buttered.

Where the film stumbles in when it tries to inject some raw, affecting humanity into proceedings.

This humanity comes naturally enough from star and one of the executive producers Chris Pratt who plays the role of Dan Forester, an ex-military guy and scientist who is convinced his life amounts to nothing because he’s teaching high school.

Leaving aside what a dubious ego boost this is for his students, and teachers in general, what Dan wants is to make his mark, to be proved worthy to be a husband to Emmy (Betty Gilpin) and budding scientist daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and to coat himself in the sort of glory of which bardic ballads are sung and multi-stanza poems are composed.

At the start of The Tomorrow War it looks increasingly unlikely Dan will get his ego-boosting wish until, and hurrah for people popping unceremoniously from the future, armed soldiers, who presumably are au fait with the 21st century’s terrorist problems and unsettling swings to extremist violence, and yet choose to ignore how their weaponised entrance might look, leap through a vividly coloured portal into the middle of a soccer game.

As “LOOK AT US!” entrances go, it’s hard to beat and it certainly makes for a dramatic set piece but it is the first sign that The Tomorrow War doesn’t quite understand the salient idea that even in big, dumb blockbusters less can often be more.

Granted many of the film’s predecessors in the genre haven’t exactly been noteworthy for their subtlety, and so director Chris McKay (who exchanges previous satirical silliness in his films for earnest cheesiness) and screenplay writer Zach Dean, likely thought they were on safe ground in putting the pedal to the over the top metal and seeing where their commitment to going above and beyond the sane and rationale could take them.

When it comes to the bombastic action scenes, which form a significant chunk of the film’s running time, their approach actually pays off most of the time with close-in battles with the viciously hungry aliens (who look, it must be said, like just about every other mindless chomping alien of the last 20 to 30 years), and the climactic final act really paying off in terms of impressive spectacle.

While this epicness would’ve found more of a home on a sprawling cinema screen, it by and large does what it sets out to do and establish the battle for humanity’s tenuous future as a Very Important One With Lots at Stake.

What it fails to do, however, is inject any meaningful humanity into the storyline.

It’s not for want of trying; the scenes between Dan and his daughter Muri do pack an emotionally resonant punch and give The Tomorrow War a moving substance that you may not have been expecting.

But for all the scenes that hit close to home, and make you smile or cry in recognition, there are an awful lot so awash in cheesy sentiment that you could use them to stage a fondue and have plenty leftover for a cheesecake and a dessert cart at a tonier restaurant.

There are some moments so excruciatingly cringeworthy that you wonder how Pratt, and he is often the one saddled with them, his character missing the spark and verve you’ve come to expect from the protagonists he often portrays, managed to deliver them with breaking into a riotous grin.

They are counterbalanced to a delightful extent by supporting characters such as wisecracking, likeable Charlie (Sam Richardson) with a rather handy narrative-propelling PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and joins Pratt when they are conscripted to fight 30 years hence, and even taciturn cancer-stricken Dorian (Chris Hodge) but all too often The Tomorrow War seems happy to trade on trumped up treacly sentiment rather than actual, authentically-affecting emotion.

It also likes to play fast and loose with logic and narrative cognisance.

Take why the people from the future don’t just go back and kill the aliens at their source or how aliens so primitively bloodthirsty could put a sophisticated planet-hopping ship together in the first place, and while yes, to be fair, The Tomorrow War does answer many of these questions after a fashion, and does present a reasonably cohesive explanation for how time travel works, it often feels like Dean is slapping things together at a rate of knots and hoping it all makes sense, somehow, in the end.

Those criticisms aside, and they need to be taken into account because they detract from The Tomorrow War being a truly diverting watch, the film is still good enough to watch and enjoy if only because it’s hyper-realistic fantastical premise and the wholly committed dedication of its producers to making it an awesomely epic blockbuster compensate sufficiently for its many failings to be pushed aside in favour of some good old-fashioned, get a dog if you want to survive, big dumb blockbuster fun.

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