#735 – The Tomorrow War (2021)

The Tomorrow War (2021)

Film review #735

Director: Chris McKay

SYNOPSIS: Visitors from the future turn up to announce that they are losing the war against an alien race, and have come back to the past for help, enlisting everyday people to go to the future and fight. When Dan Forester is conscripted, he finds that things are going well in the future, and a personal stake in it all leads to him looking for a way to win it all before humanity is doomed…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: The Tomorrow War is a 2021 sci-fi film. Soldiers arrive from thirty years in the future to inform the world that they are losing a war against alien invaders, and begin to take reinforcements from the past to help them. One such man that is conscripted is Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a former soldier turned science teacher. there’s an overarching air of genericity in this film from the outset: not only Chris Pratt being every other Chris Pratt role, but a rather typical alien invasion story punctuated with stereotypical characters and personalities. the film’s goal is clearly stated with regards to stopping the alien invasion, but the various setups and scenes are all over the place, and all of the jumping around means there is very little focus in the film, and is strung together with very little, apart from obvious minor characters at the start that are obviously going to be called back to later on; it’s very predictable.

While the plot fails to endear any of the characters or their specific relationships, there is at least a fair amount of action that keeps things going, and the aliens designs are interesting enough. It’s clearly got a comfortable budget to make a lot of large scale scenes (and to blow them up), but it just feels so directionless a lot of the time, and there’s specific points in the film where the objective becomes something completely different, and there’s no space to connect with anything that’s going on. It’s entertaining enough throughout it’s runtime, but hinges on very basic and predictable tropes that are not going to make this a memorable experience. It’s very much a “cinema by numbers” experience.