“The Tomorrow War” is a Movie™
All films are pastiche, but the best films reference ideas, and not just each other. The Tomorrow War, Chris Pratt’s new Amazon-exclusive sci-fi action vehicle about time travel and bug-eyed space aliens, is not, it probably goes without saying, a movie about ideas, or at least not interesting ones. Instead, it’s a copy of a copy, stealing every second of its ample running time from someplace else. Yet it’s somehow even worse than that, lacking even the joy or arrogance of the thief. The Tomorrow War is boring, yes, but it’s also bored with itself, unwilling (or unable) to attempt anything approaching a new or inventive twist on its paint-by-numbers plot. Watching it is like putting together an IKEA bookshelf, except that putting together an IKEA bookshelf is slightly more tense and exciting.
What works in The Tomorrow War works because it’s dull yet edible — it’s movie comfort food, a Happy Meal or a frozen pizza. Sure, we’ve eaten this a million times, we tell ourselves, but knowing what we’re in for is part of the appeal — it’s safe and predictable, but at least it’ll satiate us. And indeed, the film starts out by teasing its audience with a greasy, if delicious, nothing-burger: we open on Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) an ex-soldier and current high school science teacher living in an infinite, featureless tract of suburban homes with his wife and young daughter. This anodyne bliss is quickly shattered, however, when a small group of soldiers suddenly appear out of thin air during the middle of the World Cup final. These soldiers inform a stunned populace (and presumably many enraged soccer fans) that they are among the few survivors of a disastrous war — taking place thirty years in the future — which has pitted the whole of humanity against rampaging hordes of vicious alien monsters called, somewhat prosaically, “White Spikes.”
With future-Earth on its heels and population levels plummeting, the time-traveling soldiers are in dire need of military assistance, and invite the world’s armies to travel through a rift in the space-time continuum to an apocalyptic nightmare where near certain death awaits them. Somewhat shockingly, everyone in the present-day agrees. This “throw-human-bodies-at-the-problem” strategy, however, does not prove to be the miracle solution that our time-hopping offspring had envisioned. The soldiers sent into the future are being slaughtered, and potential recruits are running thin. In a last act of desperation, Earth’s governments institute a worldwide draft, summoning every (kind of) able-bodied man and woman to warp into the future and blast the beasties.
Dan’s number inevitably comes up, and he is promptly sent off to “basic training,” where the curriculum is so condensed that one doesn’t know whether to blame it on the turmoil of a dejected military or a screenwriter desperate to cut a few pages out of their portly final draft. The recruits, out of shape and middle-aged, are little more than cannon fodder (there is a throw-away line — during the requisite shooing away of all the logical questions that arise from the film’s time-travel plot — in which we are told that draftees are typically over forty, in order to “prevent paradoxes”). They are handed a gun, instructed on the best places to shoot the aliens (necks and bellies) and promptly sent off into a future hellscape with little more than their polo shirts and cargo shorts to protect them from multitudinous hordes of razor-fanged, nigh-indestructible space monsters. With a plan as hare-brained as this, is it any wonder Earth is losing the war?
Absurd as it is, this ridiculous plot point is perhaps the only engaging idea The Tomorrow War pulls from its big bag of movie cliches. A rag-tag group of regular folks in over their heads against impossible odds? That’s one tired trope worth revisiting, and the early scenes of average Joes and Jills thrust into combat with no preparation, forced to traverse an obliterated downtown Miami while being stalked by seemingly unkillable monsters is frightening and fun. It’s also brief, as the film quickly abandons any pretensions of entertaining banality in favor of endless machine gun salvos interspersed with soporific meditations on the importance of family.
To that end, we are given the parallel relationships of Dan with his grown-up future-daughter Muri (Yvonne Strahovski) and his present-day, “I may have been at the Capitol on January sixth”, father James (J.K. Simmons). Dan hates his dad for not being there when he was young, yet he discovers — with a little assist from time travel and man-eating aliens — that he ended up doing much of the same thing to Muri, becoming, in his own future, a sad imitation of the father he so despises. I now invite you to guess as to how all of these heart-rending complications are resolved. Will lessons be learned? Will Dan re-commit to his family? Will father and son reconcile their differences through the cliffside slaughter of a gigantic killer space alien? Reader, I dare not spoil it for you.
It’s all something of a shame. The Tomorrow War was probably never destined for greatness, but if it had stayed true to its early schlocky instincts instead of trying to shoehorn in prepackaged Hallmark moments, it might have been good enough, or at least shorter. Its cast is certainly able — Pratt is as charming and funny as ever, Strahovski is magnetic in her depiction of stoic grief, and the supporting cast are all fantastic, particularly the ever-delightful Sam Richardson as Charlie. But none of them can break the movie out of its formulaic chains — you don’t watch scenes in The Tomorrow War so much as you wait them out, all in the hope that something more inventive might be around the corner. It never is.
And while it’s true that mainstream American sci-fi/action cinema has always been derivative, there’s something different about movies like The Tomorrow War. With the coming of the imperishable Marvel cycle, studios are no longer interested in dressing up tired plots with novel variations so much as they are with implanting a successful, near-identical formula — right down to the dialogue — onto everything they make.
The Tomorrow War certainly attempts to utilize this Marvel blueprint. Since it would take a separate essay to catalog it all, I will cite only one particularly incessant example here: the film’s use of the “Marvel quip.” This is the not quite fourth-wall breaking moment contained in every Marvel movie when a character comments on the absurdity or scariness of the situation in a overly eloquent stream-of-consciousness spiel, or drops a one-liner at a time when no sane, amygdala-possessing person would — like when you’ve just traveled through time to a place where you’re being hunted by aliens bent on murdering you. It’s often very funny — a kind of winking acknowledgement from an embarrassed screenwriter that, “hey, we get how silly all of this is too, folks.” But that’s precisely the problem. The Marvel quip is bolted on, artificial, and rarely true to the story or the character. We can feel the writer intruding into the scene, and in an instant the movie reminds us that it’s just a movie, a joke that we’re all in on.
In the end, The Tomorrow War isn’t so much good or bad as it is — there. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a stiff breeze, a whistling fart, a thing that happened. It is, to quote critic A.S. Hamrah’s memorable dismissal of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, “…easy to forget, an app you just closed.” It has light and sound and yelling and machine guns and a big Hollywood star and CG monsters galore. For some people, that might be enough.
As for me, the only thing I took away from the movie is that I won’t remember any of it — a realization for which I am eternally grateful.
