The Tomorrow War Review

Amazon Prime’s newest film The Tomorrow War, was written by Zach Dean and directed by Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie). It stars Chris Pratt and centers around a war taking place in 2051 between aliens and humans. The future is calling on the past to aid in this war and Dan Forester (Pratt), a biology teacher who believes his life has more purpose, is just the man for the job; among hundreds of thousands of other people being drafted into the future. The film runs for just under 2 and a half hours, but is it worth the watch?

Starting off with a positive, the alien (the White Spikes) aspect of this film is truly stunning. Their design is completely unique and incredible, and the CGI used to create these creatures is phenomenal, at least when we see close ups of them. Later on in the film there are scenes where it goes into CGI overdrive with thousands of White Spikes and that doesn’t look the greatest. Despite that, these aliens are terrifying. They are these huge, beastly, white creatures that have multiple legs and these tails that shoot spikes out of them (hence the name). They sort of have a Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon look to them, but if Toothless was albino and terrifying and took steroids. That’s just the males as well. Later on in the film we are introduced to the females, who are said to be rarer, but they are far badder. These things are more aggressive, bigger, and scarier, and I loved every second of it.

As for the comic relief in the film, Charlie (Sam Richardson), a science nerd, was someone I went back and forth on whether or not I liked. At first, I was excited to see Richardson in the film, he’s a comedian that I thoroughly enjoy, but some of his lines tended to take me out of the film and came off as more annoying than funny. However, his scene when he’s running down the stairs and shooting at a white spike, with a gun that seemed to not run out of ammo, and shouting “SHIT” over and over again did get a kick out of me; among other lines he had in the film.

The acting in the film is also hit or miss. Chris Pratt thrives in roles where he plays charismatic characters; and Dan Forester isn’t that. Throw in some cringey lines and interactions between characters and you’ll find yourself laughing at moments that are meant to be serious; such as Chris Pratt’s exclamation of “WHAT?” when James (JK Simmons) says that Dan never asked for his help. However, the acting wasn’t bad, it just could have been better given the experience of the cast.

If there are aliens in a film, there is almost always going to be action, and this film had some really cool sequences. Whether it’s sneaking into a female White Spike den to capture it or slaughtering hoards of them, you surely won’t get bored with that aspect of the film. We also can’t leave out the badass character of the movie, Dorian (Edwin Hodge), who has served 3 tours in the Tomorrow War and wears a claw from the first ever White Spike killed around his neck. However, being this character in the film, we don’t see much badass-ness from him in the film besides a couple of scenes.

So far, so decent, however, the place where this film lost me almost completely was the time travel element. Time travel is something that only works if it’s explained properly; and the movie doesn’t seem to care to tell us how it works. All we really get is this brief interaction where Charlie tells Dan his theory that everyone that they are taking into the future is someone who is already dead in the future; in order to not create a paradox. Although this is a good explanation as to why they were chosen, that is the only explanation we get. The film does nothing else to explain time travel, we just have to accept that it exists. However, when time travel is one of the key elements of your film, it needs to be explained well enough that it creates the least amount of confusion, and this film fails in that aspect.

I think the film had a really cool idea making the colonel of the future war an older version of Muri (Yvonne Strahovski), Dan’s daughter. I also liked the idea that regardless of Dan’s hatred for his relationship with his father (JK Simmons), Dan ends up creating sort of the same relationship with his own daughter. It’s an example of the idea that sometimes no matter how hard we try, it is easy to become your parents because it’s all you know. As for JK Simmons’ character, the “Conspiracy Santa Claus” is a good addition to the film and plays as a sort of comic relief but more of a political commentary on the classic conspiracy theorist “I don’t trust the government and climate change is a myth” sort of person.

A terrible idea that the film had, however, is when it asks us to suspend our disbelief when we see that none of the draftees will be getting any form of basic training before they enter the Tomorrow War. They just send thousands of untrained, middle aged, sometimes overweight, people into a war to fight off Earth’s biggest threat and just hope for the best. I get that it’s Earth’s last hope, but maybe teach them how to hold a gun? Or some stamina training? It’s not even like there was no time for this in the movie. The film is just under 2 and a half hours long, they couldn’t have filled 5 minutes of it with some training? Or just skip over the entire training montage and tell us that they’re getting trained? But nope, we are all forced to buy into the idea that it makes total sense to not train a bunch of people for a war. I get that Japan didn’t train the kamikaze pilots on how to drop bombs, which is why they just crashed into the ships, but they at least taught them how to fly a plane!

Overall, this film took a lot of things that I love (aliens, action, sci-fi) and one concept that I absolutely hate (time travel) and mashed it together to create a plot that is charmingly stupid. If you enjoy action, sci-fi, and thrillers; and you are able to just accept time travel in this film for what it is, then this movie is for you and I think that you will really find yourself entertained. However, if you are the type of person that really analyses a movie and does a little more critical thinking, you may be like me and enjoy the film for its action, aliens, sci-fi, but you’ll definitely have some gripes with it as well. My final verdict for The Tomorrow War is that it is a Summer action blockbuster that is definitely a fun watch and overall entertaining, but it’s lack of explanation of time travel, as well as the unrealistic-ness of sending untrained middle-aged people to fight off aliens, leads me to score it at a 7/10.