Movie Review - The Tomorrow War
At first, the movie seems to have it all: Chris Pratt, flawless special effects, a reluctant hero... It's the perfect rendition of a science fiction blockbuster - with one exception:
It relies on the overused, worn-out, tattered cliché of a time-loop to defeat the Big Bad.
Oh, no, not this shit again.
Were it not for that one thing (and the movie leads off with it), I'd say this movie was a whopping big success. But not only does it rely on it, it does so in the most spectacularly disappointing way, by interrupting the key moment in a pretty good soccer match, thus cheating the team of a winning goal and a grand finish. So, not only does this do a "We interrupt this broadcast for an important news bulletin" type of trope, it does so with the messengers from the future saying, "We are you."
And were I not such a die-hard sci fi fan, I would have turned the television off right then and there.
And that's not even quite true. They are mostly the children not yet born.
Fortunately, the movie makes up for it. Pratt's character, Dan Forester, wants nothing more than to do something extraordinary with his life, but doesn't want to sacrifice time with his wife and daughter to do it. He ends up getting drafted into the military force that gets sent into the future to fight an alien menace which threatens to wipe out all of humanity. He does a pretty good job of it too, because he's ex-military himself. Naturally base command isn't clear about who's in charge beforehand, and command settles on Our Hero by default (of course).
In a well-done, drawn-out line of suspense, we do not see what the aliens look like right away. We only see them take out three soldiers with such blinding speed that we just know the good guys are totally fucked. When we finally do see what they look like (something like a nightmarish, overgrown cicada), the effect is truly terrifying.
The character of Gator, played by Sam Richardson, is done well. None of the civilian-soldiers seems adequately prepared to go fight, and he least of all. He's a larger black man with a keen brain who is ill-suited to being cannon fodder. He also can't shut up when he's nervous, which make the other draftees want to kill him. His mental gifts should rightly put him behind the lines working with the scientists to help outsmart the threat. Instead he's relegated to being cannon fodder. This injustice makes us sympathize with him, even as he nearly talks himself to death.
In the future, he finds that the Colonel leading the strike teams is none other than his own daughter, who has become a soldier-scientist. She doesn't want a "reconciliation with daddy" moment, but it seems to happen whether she wants it to or not. Together they succeed in capturing an alien queen, hoping to find a toxin that will be effective against it. They find such a toxin, but in a strange moment reminiscent of World War Z, the last-stand oceanic base gets suddenly overrun with alien monsters, almost as if they know that their doom has been spelled out.
A huge plot hole becomes apparent at this point: The alien menace kills and eats everything. But if the hunters destroy all the prey, they too die out. Why would such an alien menace even exist, or travel across thousands of light years just to do something so foolish?
The answer comes when Forester returns to his own time with the toxin that could save all humanity. He tries to make the nations of the world listen, but most do not. What's left of the future team does, however. They mass-produce the serum as much of it as possible, and set off to find where the aliens first arose from: in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. When they finally find the source of the alien menace, they find that it's a crashed alien spaceship. The payload of the ship was over a dozen incubated queens - undoubtedly slated for a planet other than Earth. That is the resolution of the plothole: the alien monsters were genetically bred to wipe out all life on an enemy planet - a military experiment that broke free from its cage.
The movie receives a second wind as the protagonists successfully deploy the serum and kill all the queens. Naturally, it doesn't go quite that smoothly, but such is necessary for good visual drama.
Overall, I give this movie 3 1/2 stars. It dug itself a hole, but then dug itself out of it again. Good job on not getting too bogged down. Poor job on relying on such a hackneyed cliché in the first place.
Eric
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