Mark Reviews Movies: THE TOMORROW WAR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 1, 2021

The Tomorrow War features one of those time-traveling plots that makes less sense the more you think about it. It's also a movie that doesn't want you to think about it, while actively working to make sure none of that pesky thinking about things like narrative logic, conceptual consistency, or basic theme gets in the way. That's something for which to be slightly grateful.

From the story's prologue, which literally drops its protagonist into the middle of a futuristic war zone, there's an obvious and decided storytelling philosophy on display from screenwriter Zach Dean and director Chris McKay. Just keep things moving. Don't stop to explain the mechanics or potential problems of the time-travel conceit, unless it's absolutely necessary to keep the plot going. Ensure there's enough here to make the major characters sympathetic, but don't dwell too long on those personal matters. All of that stuff about narrative and characterization is secondary to action and spectacle.

There's a certain comfort in realizing that we very quickly know exactly what we're going to get from this movie. The downside, of course, is that the filmmakers clearly became a bit too comfortable in actually making it.

It doesn't try. It doesn't dare. It provides a couple of nifty concepts and design elements, as well as some ambitious and well-staged action sequences. It exists, basically, as something mostly predictable and wholly generic.

The story revolves around Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a military veteran who's now a high school science teacher in some small town. He has dreams of doing something important with his life, but the job offers aren't coming. His wife Emmy (Betty Gilpin) is the supportive type—and only that. His daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is smart and ambitious, too, and that's about the extent of what we need to know about any of these characters.

In the middle of a big soccer game, a mysterious portal opens on the field. Some soldiers emerge from it and offer some terrible news. They're from 30 years in the future, as humanity is united in a battle against aliens that have reduced the population to less than 500,000 people around the globe. They need help to fight the creatures, so the governments of the present-day world institute a draft. Dan is called up for service—a seven-day tour into the future dystopia of a dying planet.

To be fair, Dean has come up with some minor details (Time always moves forward on both sides of the timeline, for example) that maintain the plot's momentum, and everything more or less makes superficial sense, as long as one doesn't think how the very act of time travel could change the history of what's to come. It doesn't matter. Dan and a team of other mostly expendable draftees find themselves in Miami 30 years in the future, searching for and trying to return a toxin that could kill the aliens. The officer calling the shots, by the way, just happens to be Dan's adult daughter (played by Yvonne Strahovski).

It's tough to tell how to approach material that plays out in such an unsurprising and standard way. On the plus side, the aliens themselves are nasty customers—pale and armored beasts, with creeping tentacles that fire pointy projectiles and gaping maws featuring rows of sharp teeth. They look and feel like a threat, deserving of the notable build-up before we even catch a glimpse at one of them.

The humans who aren't killed off during the first mission are less interesting, with Charlie (Sam Richardson) providing some understated comic relief and Dorian (Edwin Hodge) trying to defy his cancer diagnosis by dying a heroic death in the fight for humanity's future. Everyone, Dan included, seems more disposed to providing quips between seemingly endless rounds of gunfire than making good decisions, treating this whole situation with any severity, or, in general, acting like thinking and/or feeling people—not just sardonic pawns in an action plot.

Those action sequences are, admittedly, competent—and sometimes more so. They inevitably become repetitive by the time the story reaches its standoff on an alien ship and amidst a blindingly frozen tundra, but the first chase—which leads from an alien-infested skyscraper to the alien-occupied streets—is fairly dynamic.

In trying to keep up that momentum, Dean and McKay, unfortunately, evade everything else. The relationship between Dan and the future Muri is kept at a distance, because of what she knows about what will happen in his future. The same goes for Dan's relationship with his estranged father (played by J.K. Simmons), who is established, disappears, and returns only for the climactic fight. An interlude—between the fight in the future and Dan's attempt to save it in the present—hints at the effects of trauma, and the entire plot could be seen as an allegory for climate change, which essentially becomes part of the text when the aliens' origins are explained.

None of that matters, of course, even though such relationships and concepts are the most intriguing elements of The Tomorrow War. The filmmakers just keep the plot moving and the action coming in a race for safe mediocrity.

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