Calling a movie The Tomorrow War proves that there isn’t one shred of creativity or originality to be found amid the cliched sci-fi alien invasion action movie.
Like some other movies on streaming services this was originally planned to be released in theaters but postponed to Covid. If one thing good came out of the pandemic, movie studios were given time to realize you can’t polish a turd. So why bother with all the marketing and distribution costs? Cut your losses and sell it to a streaming services.
Paramount, which sold Without Remorse to Amazon earlier must have had a two-for special because this is also from their vault. I’m sure they tried their damnedest to pass Infinite on to someone else, but they couldn’t.
All three movies are a mess. I’m not even sure if I’ve been able to assemble ten minutes of good material among three movies, even though this one has a few good points I’ll touch on later.
Chris Pratt plays a former Green Beret turned high school science teacher in the Atlanta suburbs who is watching a futbol game at a Christmas party at his house in 2022 when military soldiers burst through a huge electrical force ala The Terminator movies and tell the audience and world they are from the future and there has been an alien invasion in the near future and they need our help.
That is where the originality ends. There’s some stuff about Pratt’s character, Dan Forester, wants to get a job in the private sector but it’s irrelevant and easily forgotten once the soldiers from the future arrive.
Nations around the world ban together and send their troops to the future only to have them obliterated and then they start a worldwide draft. Apparently, by 2051, the world population is down to about 500,000.
And those being drafted it is revealed are those who have died between 2022 and 2051. But why? There’s some discussion about avoiding paradoxes but it goes nowhere.
This creates a lot of questions it never really answers.
Is there are cut-off time of people who have died between 2023 and 2051? If only half a million remain, why is there even a paradox? Why isn’t there more of an outcry about being sent to their deaths earlier? If people know when they are going to die in the future, can they avoid it thus negating their deaths being they can’t be drafted?
As a matter of fact, how come more isn’t done in the 27-28 years before the aliens begin their rampage to stop it, since they know when it starts when it starts and where. People sent to the future are only given seven days of training but yet they keep wondering why people keep getting killed by the aliens, called the Whitespikes, who look like cross-creatures similar to the ones in The Descent and Pitch Black.
This is explained later in the movie, but just like my problem with A Quiet Place, it made me wonder how come it takes a young person to help figure something out when there has to be many minds working together.
Also, doesn’t anyone understand the laws of physics. They’re supposed to be time jumped to Miami Beach in 2051 but as always there’s a problem and Dan’s squad is jumped to hundreds of feet in the air over downtown Miami (Atlanta filling in because of tax incentives) and people fall into a swimming pool in a high-rise and even on top of each other, even though many of them would’ve been killed in the fall alone including Dan himself.
And just like in Starship Troopers, the Whitespikes can’t easily be killed by simple gunfire unless people empty entire magazines of rounds into the creatures. And just like Reign of Fire, we there are many species of one sex and not many of another sex. And taking out that sex will solve all the problems. However, this time, there are many more males fighting over the few females.
I’m not going to give too much away because if you’ve seen them once, you’ve seen them all. There is some subplot of Dan meeting his daughter, played by Yvonne Strahovski, now grown, who is a colonel. And there is a strained relationship, similar to Dan’s relation which is own father, James, played by J.K. Simmons in one of the few best things about this movie.
Apparently, after returning to 2023, Dan became redrawn and got a divorce from his wife, played by Betty Gilpin in a throwaway role and died in a car accident on her 16th birthday.
You can spot all the time paradoxes of knowing your own future her that was explained in the Back to the Future trilogy, Time Cop, The Final Countdown and even 12 Monkeys.
Because it’s rated PG-13, there’s only so much violence they’re allowed to show and Sam Richardson’s character says “shit” several dozen times as he encounters a whitespike on a stairwell.
It’s even strange for a movie that uses time-travel as a device, there’s a not of it actually set in the “Tomorrow” of the title as you might think or expect. It’s like The Cannonball Run II where most of the actual race consisted of a silly subplot involving Las Vegas and gangsters and the rest was just shown on an animated sequence. At least that movie had Frank Sinatra and I would’ve much rather seen Captain Chaos take on the aliens.
Zane Says 