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The Tomorrow War is the latest science fiction movie where the time travel element is baffling. Chris Pratt is the lead in this film where he plays Dan Forester, a veteran from the year 2022. Tremendously, he is willing to do anything so that one day he can be a role model to his daughter. In the movie Dan is projected thirty years into the future and he battles an alien invasion that has ravaged Earth to an unsustainable state.
It’s 2022 and Dan is an ordinary guy. He is Emmy’s husband (Betty Gilpin) and a father to Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) while also being a high school science teacher. His daughter is into science big time, so that allows her to be close with her father. During a holiday party while celebrating at home, Dan learns he has been denied for a research grant which feels like the doom of this entire science career. A few seconds later, during a soccer match on TV, people suddenly appear on the field in a flash of light and smoke. They claim they are from 2051 and that the earthlings are about to be eradicated and turned into food for an alien species called White Spikes (because they shoot what look like stone spikes out of their tentacles). These soldiers from the future can teleport a ridiculous amount of people into the future to assist them in battle. And so, they ask (in 2022) for help.
Planets working together is a tough idea to digest. The Americans in the movie fought during the Cooper’s War, but they seemed to cooperate a lot more than I imagined. By the end of the war, we had a global draft and compulsory military service. After enlisting, men were sent into the future in groups. They returned after one week with around thirty percent of the men being alive. Even fewer came back in one piece or mentally stable. Dan got drafted eventually. After getting fitted with a tracking device, he was assigned to basic training. Dan’s group learned the enemy was far worse than they had imagined. I love that future soldiers do not have pictures of the aliens to even get the present soldiers worked up further.
Some of the people Dan opens up to includes Charlie (Sam Richardson, Werewolves Within), who seems to have a knack for smothering conversations in nervous banter and hiding instead of facing challenges; and Dorian (Edwin Hodge), who is about to start his self imposed tour of duty number three. The time travel part of the mission is a bit of junk-science masterpiece, so that Dan’s group is delivered hundreds of feet above Miami and only those lucky enough to hit a pool survive the drop. Pratt is called upon to wear many hats in The Tomorrow War: dutiful and loving father, caring husband, angry scientist, military leader, and your simple, gentle everyman, to name a few. It’s safe to say that not all of them are roles he is completely capable of convincing. With works like the Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World franchises, we know he can tackle the charming leader stuff fantastically, but it seems some emotional driven material falls short of his talents. Rather, I wouldn’t say he fully embarrasses himself trying to make the effort, but I shall agree that the film is slightly hampered due to the efforts he puts in.
However, I have to admit that when it comes to fighting aliens, Pratt and the rest of the crew do a pretty good job. The White Spikes look and sound like every other alien from the last twenty odd years, and I mean like ninety percent of them (most of which seem to have ripped off Starship Troopers and the Alien films by having the creatures attack in overwhelming bearish numbers only to be warded off effortlessly by the humans, which is supremely illogical). He is first commanded by something in his ear whom he nicknames Romeo Command (Yvonne Strahovski), but who is in reality Muri Forester, now fully grown, skilled scientist and unbeatable leader, but a bit too veteran to her father very much for reasons we learn later on.
I believe I am not spoiling too much when I say that Dan’s return to the present day is brought at a steep cost, which entails emotional distress on his end where he is quite sure he had never saved Earth and there is still around a third of the film left. He slowly starts making sense of it all, and understands that it is very possible that the aliens who seemingly just materialized on Earth, may have in fact been on the planet way longer than anybody realized. He then pulls together a team of some recognizable faces and sets out to covertly search a specific area in ice-covered Russia, where the aliens might have been frozen beneath thousands of years of snow and ice. As it relates to The Tomorrow War and its emotional component, Dan needs to reconcile with his estranged father (J.K. Simmons, who is sporting a prominent beard and earning the nickname “conspiracy Santa”) who wraps the name of ‘conspiracy Santa’ around a healthy scepticism for the government and a helicopter he owns. So they have set off to ensure that the war with the aliens which can’t be won never starts.
His direction may seem puzzling at first, but Chris McKay’s vast experience as the head creative on Robot Chicken and working on The LEGO Batman Movie makes him more than capable of building new and intricater worlds. In combination with his talent for action sequences, he fits this encapsulating yet complicated screenplay provided by Zach Dean unbelievably well. While the combination of The Thing and Independence Day is highly unique and entertaining, I feel it could have been executed better spread over two films rather than in this 140-minute epic. I can say this is another movie where I would have loved to sit in the theater, engulfed in the impressive sound design combined with the various burning cityscapes. Nonetheless, The Tomorrow War delivers most of the action and science fiction action at the correct intervals, so watching it with the sound all the way up is a must.
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