The Tomorrow War is an interesting piece of filmmaking. Some of its aspects are competently made, while others leave much to be desired. If you have read the overwhelming critical response, you’ll find that most of the things they panned are indeed there in the movie. Yet, by the time you finish the film, you just might find yourself oddly entertained.
Dan Forrester (Chris Pratt) is an ex-military man (and current school biology teacher) who wants to do more with his life. He gets just that when a group of soldiers from the future pop up in the middle of a football World Cup match and warn the world about a deadly alien threat that’s driving humanity towards extinction. A year after, the world has depleted most of its military personnel in the war effort, and now it looks to drafting ordinary people to join the war effort. As you would expect, Dan is drafted and soon finds himself fighting a desperate battle and racing against time to save the future.
Chris Pratt doesn’t get to play to his usual strengths in the straightforward role of a middle-aged family man who tries to save the future for his daughter. None of the characters actually have much depth to them, though Sam Richardson does his best to give life to the comic relief character, Charlie. J.K. Simmons and Yvonne Strahovski turn in understated performances, and Betty Gilpin is criminally underused as Dan’s wife.
What does work for the movie are the competent action set pieces and the sweeping (though generic) soundtrack by Lorne Balfe.
The ‘whitespikes’ are built up and then revealed in the first action scene. In this initial encounter, they are formidable and the soldiers have a lot of trouble taking them down. By the end of the movie, however, Dan and his allies take care of them with a few well-placed shots.
The internal logic of The Tomorrow War is also inconsistent. Since the future doesn’t simply try to end the war in the past before it began, it suggests that it’s a separate timeline that cannot be changed by actions in the past. However, the film ends with Dan successfully dealing with whitespikes in the past and preventing the war. Does that mean the war-torn future will now never happen? Or does it still exist, and is essentially lost?
Furthermore, just throwing bodies at the whitespikes doesn’t make much sense. The draftees barely get any training and their jump to the future is mismanaged, with most of them falling to their death and leaving only a handful of soldiers ready to fight.
This is a disappointingly generic effort by director Chris McKay, who also directed The Lego Movie. Still, The Tomorrow War is an okay watch if you want to see an action movie. Maybe the critics are annoyed that the movie doesn’t make any effort to create anything memorable. The film is certainly guilty of that, but that probably won’t bother you if you’re looking for mindless entertainment.