Directed by: Chris McKay
Starring: Chris Pratt, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Yvonne Strahovski, Ryan Kiera Armstrong
The aliens are at it again. They invade the Earth of the future in The Tomorrow War and wipe out all but 500,000 of the world's population. Hopes of winning the war (in the year 2051) are so slim that, with aid of wormholes, the top military brass travels back to 2022 to recruit soldiers to fight the war which doesn't take place for another 29 years. Recruited soldiers enlist for seven-day tours of duty in the future and if they survive are transported back to the present day. Making it through the first moments is hard enough, if you consider that many of those beamed to the future are dropped freefalling from the sky and go splat on the ground. The lucky ones seem to land in swimming pools. More soldiers are likely killed this way than from the thingies which attack them.
The Tomorrow War isn't supposed to be realistic, but it sure is ludicrous. Questions pop up which distract us from the action going on...thank goodness. The Tomorrow War is a two-plus hour long, mindless video game in which the giant-toothed aliens (who could be cousins of the monsters in A Quiet Place) come at you and you shoot at them with assault weapons and handguns. You mean there aren't better weapons in the future to combat these creatures? Soldiers shoot hundreds of rounds into one monster to kill it. They would have to carry around thousands of rounds in order to keep their guns loaded. Imagine how heavy that is.
The star of this mess is Chris Pratt, he of Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World. He is an Iraq War veteran with a loving wife and a nine-year old daughter drafted to fight the war and finds himself leading a squad of misfits against the aliens. His commanding officer is a colonel (Strahovski), who acts coldly towards him. The reasons are easy to decipher and a potentially emotional moment is stunted because the movie would rather concentrate on the violence. The reason for her anger towards Pratt doesn't follow much logic, if you consider what she experienced hadn't happened to him yet.
The Tomorrow War has a 145-minute running time; far more bloated than the material justifies. Much of this time is spent with characters holding weapons and quietly walking down steps, corridors, halls, and passageways. This all grows quickly tedious, as does the action which runs amok. Pratt's Dan Forester has his own baggage involving an absent father (Simmons) and his own uncertainty about his own future which was interrupted by a future war. We know as surely as night follows day that this will all be resolved by the end. Predictability can be okay in movies. Deadly predictability is not.
If the head honchos fighting the future war were ambitious and a tad more resourceful, they would find a way to send the 500,000 people back to the present and avoid having to put us through The Tomorrow War.
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