(Don't) Stream it on Amazon Prime
I watched this movie less than an hour ago as of this writing, and I'm still unbelievably irritated with how aggressively mediocre the whole affair turned out to be! This is a movie with a ton of talent and an awesome concept that I should technically love and enjoy with wild enthusiasm. Instead, I am left beyond disappointed and aggravatingly annoyed! Everyone involved in this movie deserved better and should have done better, given the resources and capabilities at their disposal. Even the people who made this awesome retro-style poster I'm using for this review deserved a better movie to make a poster for. This is the kind of absurdly generic, unbelievably stupid, and depressingly dull works of cinema that are genuinely and wholeheartedly inexcusable for a 2021 release. For a company as financially well off and as well-connected as Amazon, they have done nothing but completely disappoint audiences with their mediocre and pathetic excuses for entertainment!
The story (or rather what attempts to pass as a story) follows a middle-aged man named Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a biologist with military experience. While happily married with a young daughter, he yearns to be part of something greater in the realm of science. Things take a sudden and life-changing turn for him, and indeed the whole world, when a group of soldiers bursts out of a mysterious celestial wormhole. Apparently, in the future, humanity engages in a war with a massive invasion of aggressive and hard-to-kill monsters called the White Spikes, and humanity is losing. The soldiers explain that they are from the future (28 years in the future, to be exact), and they need our help.
So, since the film establishes that the future people have invented time travel and can go back in time to decades before the alien invasion begins, what do they do? Do they bring back data and samples for the past scientists to examine and determine a useful biological weapon? Do they use the advanced knowledge and experience of the future soldiers to fortify their defenses? Do they put together the best team of researchers and detectives to figure out where and how the alien invasion will begin and prevent it from happening in the first place?
No! They institute an international draft and demand that everyone from the past come back to the future (see what I did there) and fight the monsters alongside them with practically no training or briefing on what they're actually up against.
I mean...WHAT!?!
Normally, I avoid writing words in all caps, but I seriously need to convey how utterly dumbfounded I felt upon realizing the level of terrible writing I was about to deal with while watching this slow trainwreck of a movie! Humanity is on the verge of extinction, they invent time travel as their last-ditch effort to end the war, and they waste this technological advancement for cannon fodder? I haven't seen a more ridiculous misuse of time-travel in a narrative since Terminator: Genisys.
While this may be the biggest problem with this movie, the rest of it doesn't fare well either.
For starters, Chris Pratt, while a talented and lovable actor, is horribly miscast in this film. Chris Pratt is best when he's playing goofball characters that only require a handful of moments for dramatic poise when needed. It's the reason he perfectly embodies Starlord in Guardians of the Galaxy. However, this role appears to demand fewer goofball antics and more dramatic nuance, which Pratt seems incapable of delivering. This kind of role is better suited for Tom Cruise or even Leonardo DiCaprio (the latter would have been my preferred choice).
Another issue found within the film's writing is the jokes, or rather failed attempts at jokes. Some side characters exhibit quirky antics that would feel less out of place if the film itself had a better sense of necessary levity, which it doesn't.
The alien monsters are probably the weakest aspect of the film. They only move lightning-quick; their scenes drag on for far too long, thereby diminishing their impact and horror factor, and they get incredibly annoying to watch after the first five minutes of seeing them run like rabid dogs and shriek like munchkin banshees. It hurts to watch scenes with these under-designed monsters. Plus, the special effects used to bring them to life aren't all that impressive.
There are few things in the world more frustrating than watching a film loaded with so many things you normally enjoy, only to watch it all crash and burn from misguided execution. The Tomorrow War does not do a single thing right, and what few things in the film I did like, such as parts of the cinematography and some of the cast, none of them were utilized properly enough to overlook the film's complete and utter awfulness.
If you want to watch a better movie with an alien invasion and clever use of time travel, watch Edge of Tomorrow, a.k.a, Live, Die, Repeat. It is a substantially better and far more entertaining execution of a similar concept with much better effects, superior writing, and nuanced performances. Even if you're not a fan of Tom Cruise, it's far more enjoyable than the incomprehensible mediocrity of The Tomorrow War. If you really, really, really don't like Tom Cruise, then watch Independence Day instead.
Ladies & gentlemen, I am TheNorm; thank you all for reading.
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