It’s Christmas of next year, and there’s a big soccer match on. Suddenly a strange light appears, and within seconds, a group of armed commandos sprints onto the pitch, weapons drawn.
And then they lower their guns, look into the assembled cameras, and say, “We are you.”
They’re not aliens or people from another dimension.
They’re from the future, and they need our help.
That’s the premise behind The Tomorrow War, dropped direct-to-streaming by Amazon thanks to the pandemic. (Paramount had originally planned to release it last summer.)
While it’s the rare adventure movie not based on an existing property, it has a bit of a throwback quality, being more of a star-oriented affair.
That star is Chris Pratt.
Pratt plays Dan Forester, a former soldier who studied biology after being discharged. Forester is a high school science teacher, but dreams of working at a major lab. Those hopes are dashed on Christmas of all days, moments before warriors from the year 2051 appear on worldwide television and plead for people to come to the future to help them fight an alien invasion.
Within a year, the military is decimated and civilians are drafted to fight the “white spikes.” If they survive after seven days, they get sent home. Many, however, don’t come home, and those who do don’t often return whole.
The central idea, that people from the past are drafted to fight a war in the future, is kind of cockamamie, but writer Zach Dean (Deadfall) and director Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie) really commit to it. The first 40 minutes of the movie are tasked with meticulously building the world and its central conflict, with Forester as the identification figure who gets drafted.
Dean and McKay, however, center the movie around Forester’s relationship with his family. He adores his wife (Betty Gilpin) and their precocious daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). But Dan also has a fraught relationship with his father (J.K. Simmons), who ditched him and his mother when he was young, and now tries to make amends and meet Muri.
Your enjoyment of the movie will largely center on whether you enjoy Pratt, and he’s fine here, doing his best to be believable as both soldier and scientist. He’s better at one than the other – I’ll let you guess which – but still strong enough to carry the movie. Gilpin is underutilized here (especially if you’ve seen her exemplary turn as a taciturn badass in the otherwise ho-hum The Hunt) while Simmons has a little more time to flesh out the Forester men’s fractured bond.
It’s Sam Richardson, however, who steals his scenes as Charlie, a nervous, fast-talking tech company exec who befriends Dan in training. The Detroiters and Werewolves Within star has impeccable comic timing, but also exudes charisma, overachieving in what could have been a one-note comic relief role.
Unfortunately, he gets sidelined for much of the middle section (along with an intense Edwin Hodge playing a volunteer on his third tour), which mostly becomes a two-hander between Pratt and Yvonne Strahovski as his no-nonsense commanding officer. Strahovski’s character has a secret I won’t spoil here, and she handles the material with more sensitivity than it probably deserves.
The effects are mostly fine, although the creature design for the antagonistic white spikes is about as uninspired as their backstory. And while the action scenes are mostly fine, if a bit repetitive, perhaps they could have been a little gnarlier and scarier.
But The Tomorrow War isn’t really about the war. It’s about one man’s struggle to make himself and his family whole, and about Chris Pratt proving he can drive audiences to watch without a franchise propping him up. And to answer that question, sure.
Maybe it’s best The Tomorrow War skipped theaters for Prime. It’s a by-the-numbers blockbuster like they used to make in 1997.
And while it’s a little too long, a little too sanitized, and a little too dumb, it’s also a fun ride with enough of a heart to keep you absorbed.
I don’t know if that would have been enough to rule the box office, but it’s enough for a Saturday afternoon in your living room.
Amazon Studios will exclusively release THE TOMORROW WAR globally on Prime Video July 2nd, 2021
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Executive Produced by Rob Cowan, Chris Pratt,
Brian Oliver, Bradley J. Fischer
Produced by David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger,
Jules Daly, David Goyer, Adam Kolbrenner
Written by Zach Dean
Directed by Chris McKay
Starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin,
Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge, Jasmine Mathews, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Keith Powers
