The Tomorrow War (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, January 2022) I like many of the elements that went into The Tomorrow War. The idea of the future coming back to the present to ask for help fighting an alien opponent; the concept of conscripting ordinary citizens to fight; the relationship between the present and future; the third-act twist bringing the fight closer to home. That’s strong stuff (even if familiar to prose Science Fiction readers) with a lot of promise. Combine that with a big-budget execution, fast-paced action sequences, likable performers such as Chris Pratt and J. K. Simmons and an expansive direction from Chris McKay and this should be an unmissable proposition. But an undercooked script brings everything down a few levels. The moment you start asking questions about its science-fictional premise (and science fiction practically invites such questions) is the moment The Tomorrow War starts falling apart. For all of the occasional lamp-shading of the more obvious objections to the premise’s crazier elements, the film often feels more beholden to a misguided sense of dramatics than any sense of logic. Taking ordinary people off the street, giving them a (largely ineffective) rifle and sending them off to fight killer aliens will, of course, result in a mere 20% survival rate. But, you know: it’s better for the audience to be surprised at all this. Science Fiction, as a genre, often has to do a lot of inglorious work in order to marry outlandish premises with personal stakes, but The Tomorrow War takes an unbelievable number of shortcuts to do this in the bluntest, least credible way one could imagine. The third act takes unlikeliness to ludicrousness and stays there far longer than it should, and that’s after completely missing the point of the future reaching to the present in order to save itself. The characters become increasingly stupid until the only thing left to do is to ask a high-schooler for advice. It’s a funny moment, but an ill-fitting one for a grimdark film talking about the end of humanity. Not that it’s the only such moment—the tone of the movie can feel oddly comedic despite its end-of-time atmosphere, and I’m not sure if that’s a welcome bit of relief, or an inability to commit to a serious tone without undermining it. Suffice to say that The Tomorrow War is a frustrating experience—it’s constantly undercut by big and small objections, repeatedly taking viewers out of its narrative flow. I can still appreciate a big-budget one-shot original Science Fiction film, but that script needed at least one rewrite to fix its most egregious elements.