The Tomorrow War
Amazon StudiosTo fight the future, we must confront our past. Apparently, that will win us the war against time itself. The Tomorrow War thinks so, as does family man Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a man whose name is so generic he could’ve been scraped away from the disastrous remnants of Infinite or some other shoddy action flick from this year. They are ten-a-penny. We are in no short supply of big-name powerhouses suffering their way through an action flick in the vain hope of becoming the next big “thing”. What that “thing” is, though, is still unclear. The Tomorrow War makes no comfortable stab at what it could mean either.
Had it done so, perhaps Pratt and J.K. Simmons would feel more at home with this Chris McKay-directed feature. Time bends and stretches on a whim throughout this clumsy adaptation of reality-shattering enemies. Who’d have thought the World Cup would be interrupted by future soldiers breaking through a portal to deliver a speech of nondescript ridicule. McKay has no sense of how these scenes should be framed or portrayed. Cutting from angle to angle as its spiel of being a “last hope” is delivered to the audience, the real meaning behind it all is a tad disgusting. Thinly veiled and horridly dense, The Tomorrow War is all too proud of its civilian-turned-soldier mindset. It is what we audience members should be proud of. Well-to-do families risking it all in the vain hope of saving the world and being a hero.
The desire and design of The Tomorrow War are two different mindsets. Whilst the film wishes for severity and harsh actions, it is designed to feel like a maddened cross between the explosive functions of Godzilla and the happy-family functions of a National Lampoon Christmas Vacation gathering. Trying to balance the two is a bold choice, and Pratt adapts the same attitudes he brings to his role in Guardians of the Galaxy here. It does not help that his performance is guided by miserably poor storytelling techniques and a puzzling, near-insulting aversion to the real world. Glossing over an “anti-war effort,” the bulk of The Tomorrow War is focused on those bold and brave volunteers, who risk it all to stop a war that is yet to happen. Its narrative turns and socially charged message is ridiculously contrived and does feel like a test of patience. Zach Dean’s script spoon-feeds its audience with belittling incompetency.
Where the sci-fi genre succeeds is in its novelty. What harsh and repressed emotions and ideas are going to bubble their way to the surface as creatives scribble at their scripts and throw their deepest desires and fears to the screen? The Tomorrow War is studio-controlled gibberish. Lower our expectations for the heightened charms of mediocrity. That is what Pratt and these producers wish us to do. Expect nothing, receive little, and blow it up and out to some cracking experience that will distract us from the fettered remains of our lives. There are better escapes in this line of art than The Tomorrow War, which, at best, is a light and loose time that will provide slight pockets of fun to those who do not remember the action classics. Somehow, those lingering notes of Vietnam and old-school action are present but never utilised. The Tomorrow War doesn’t know what to do with its endless possibilities and shies away from them almost immediately.