The Tomorrow War

While it might not change your life, The Tomorrow War is an enjoyable sci-fi actioner that delivers all the futuristic military action, impressive CGI aliens, and time-travel paradoxes that you could ask for.

Premise: When time-travelling soldiers from the year 2051 arrive in the present day, they beg for help in fighting a losing war against alien invaders. Knowing that the human race faces extinction within the next 30 years, the nations of the world institute a global draft, randomly selecting people to serve a 7-day deployment in the future via the wormhole connecting the two points in time. When former soldier turned high school science teacher Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is drafted, he vows to make it back from the future to see his wife (Betty Gilpin) and daughter again.

Review:

Although The Tomorrow War has been released as an Amazon Prime streaming exclusive, it was originally planned by Paramount Pictures to be a cinematic release (until the Covid-19 pandemic hit). I mention this only so that the film is not dismissed as being a straight-to-streaming action flick (which don’t have the best of reputations), as The Tomorrow War is a blockbuster film that would have been worth seeing on the big screen.

In that respect, it reminds me a lot of those good “mid-sized” sci-fi action films of the early 2010s, like Oblivion, Looper and Source Code, that weren’t massive commercial hits, but which had some really interesting concepts and delivered a couple of hours of solid entertainment. In the similar vein, The Tomorrow War may feel a little derivative or familiar in places, but it’s consistently enjoyable and, if I’m being honest, a lot better than I was expecting.

“…does a good job of addressing the paradoxes that the time-travelling premise presents…”

The premise is an engagingly inventive one: what if humanity faced almost certain extinction 30 years in the future, and its only hope of survival was to conscript people from the present to travel forward in time to replenish their dwindling numbers of soldiers? This makes it truly a temporal war on two fronts; humanity in the future is on the verge of extinction, but in the present day, society is also on the verge of collapse because most families either have adult members who have been killed or maimed during their tour of duty in the future, or younger members who have lost all hope in their future, knowing what is to come.

The film does a really good job of addressing the inherent paradoxes that the time-travelling premise presents. I don’t want to give too much away, but during the course of the film, all of the questions I had about the logic of the film’s temporal mechanics were satisfactorily answered. But equally, the film never allows the sci-fi elements to slow down the action too much, meaning that this should still work as a more straightforward action film for those viewers who don’t know or care what the Grandfather Paradox is.

“…Chris Pratt’s character acts as the emotional core of the film…”

Chris Pratt makes an engaging lead here, and although his character Dan Forester is a much more straightforward and earnest hero than, say, Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy, and is less roguish than Owen Grady from Jurassic World, he’s still three-dimensional enough to act as the emotional core of the film. His character’s emotional journey during the course of the film takes a few unexpected turns, and is all the better for it.

The film is very much Dan’s story, and so most of the other characters flit in and out only when they cross his path. Yvonne Strahovski has arguably the most screen time after Chris Pratt, playing one of the few remaining military leaders in the future, while Betty Gilpin finds some interesting notes playing Dan’s wife, who works as a therapist in the present helping veterans who have made it back from the future war. J.K. Simmons doesn’t have a lot of screen time as Dan’s estranged, survivalist father, but obviously makes an impression with what little he has, because he’s J.K. Simmons. Sam Richardson plays Dan’s fellow draftee who’s also a scientist, and although his character is essentially there for comic relief, he still gets a couple of moments to bring home the reality of the horrors of war.

“…the main action sequences take place outside in the daylight, without any gloomy CGI…”

The Tomorrow War also delivers some surprisingly effective action sequences, and although the film is rated 12, some of the scenes can get pretty intense for a 12-rated film. The creatures themselves, nicknamed the Whitespikes, are impressively realised in CGI, and are a cross between the Bugs from Starship Troopers and the Mimics from Edge of Tomorrow, while also establishing a tone all of their own. And while the action sequences are all built around fairly standard set-piece missions (a search and rescue mission, an evacuation mission, and so on), they’re effectively executed, and most impressive of all, all of the main action sequences take place outside in the daylight, so there’s none of the usual gloomy, hard-to-see-what’s-going-on action sequences that are usually used to hide weaknesses in the CGI.

One of the other things I really liked about this film is that it clearly wants to highlight the importance of science when it comes to solving the world’s problems. There was a time when science was an integral part of stories about saving the world (just think of Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day), but given society’s shift in the last decade or so away from listening to experts and scientists, it’s refreshing to see an action film (and it is, first and foremost, an action film) that takes the time to acknowledge that for all the physical heroics, it’s the scientists not the soldiers that are the key to saving humanity’s future. There’s also an interestingly ironic subtext that many of the characters in the film who insist that there is a moral obligation for the adults in the present to do all they can to save their descendants in the future from the alien infestation, are precisely the same type of people who, in the real world, won’t lift a finger to save their descendants in the future from the impact of climate change.

“…the positives far outweigh the weaker elements…”

Ultimately, the film’s not perfect, and despite the inventiveness of the premise, the action sequences themselves are entertainingly familiar rather than groundbreakingly inventive, and the plot and dialogue can certainly be a little cheesy in places. But overall, the positives far outweigh the weaker elements, and by the end of the film, I’d found that I’d enjoyed it far more than I had been expecting to. The Tomorrow War delivers an interesting time-travel plot, proper blockbuster action scenes, and a heartfelt message about the importance of scientific curiosity, which is not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.