Stupidest premise of the year. Maybe several years. I really do have to give it up for The Tomorrow War; it is not every film that gets stupid right out of the gate. The bell sounded and this horse ran sideways and crapped on the infield. And while Tomorrow War probably won’t make fans of anybody who ponders time travel, it might satisfy folks who like to see monsters, gun battles, and carnage in that order.
The year is 2022 and everybody in America is watching the World Cup – gee, this is already a fantasy, huh? Then -out-of-the-blue- soldiers interrupt the big game on the field of play –wow, they must loathe soccer almost as much as I do- to announce they’re from the future and the future sucks! Aggressive, lethal, squid-like spider monkey aliens called “Whitespikes” have all but eradicated the human race in 2051. So … get this – the plea is for the soldiers of the world to come visit the future and die in an unwinnable war.
Seriously. That’s the premise. No talk of how to stop the threat before it begins. No talk of letting them win, then die out and repopulate the planet with humans using time travel to leap over alien conquest. No talk at all of how to defeat the things.
You can time travel and this is the best you can do? “Hey, how would you like to die 28 years in the future?”
It gets better. After they run out of soldiers, the government starts conscript
ing normal citizens, especially anybody who will be dead by 2050 anyway. Do they train them? Not really. Do they give them special weaponry? No. Do they even show them pictures of the aliens? No! You know, this may play great to the Steven Spielberg world of “hiding the shark,” but when you’re gonna send average Joes to their inevitable death, you might arm them a little better.
Which, of course, leads to another huge and easily spotted strategic problem: their weaponry is ill suited to the task at hand. So I’m not sure if you’re following this, but deadly and hungry monsters have overrun the Earth in 2051 and despite being able to use time travel, the best plan Earth has so far is: take an average guy who’s gonna be dead soon, give him a blindfold and a popgun, magically place him in front of the monsters, and pray. You had brains enough to invent time travel and this is the plan? Who are you?
Let me see if I can put it in terms more recognizable to Americans. Imagine it’s March of 1865. The Union is about to win the Civil War when suddenly the South invents time travel. And what they do? Assassinate Abraham Lincoln before he becomes President? Send repeating rifles back in time to insure quick and easy victory? Use their knowledge of history to aid the British in 1812 and then offer a peace treaty establishing the Confederacy as a sovereign nation? No. The equivalent in this scenario is waiting until the night before Appomattox, then summoning 17th century Chastity Goodewyfe and her husband’s bb-firing musket to come keep General Grant and 114,000 Union soldiers at bay.
I cannot in realistic terms express how stupid this premise is, nor how much it detracts from anything I might have enjoyed in the movie, like Chris Pratt or the bitchin’ monsters.
Dan Forester (Pratt) is a brilliant down-on-his-luck virologist (?) immunologist (?) necrologist (?) – quite seriously, I challenge the screenwriter to explain exactly what is Forester’s field of expertise, and then apologize for telling
us that his life is worthless as a mere high school biology teacher. And no offense, Chris. I’m sure you’re a bright guy; I just find you far more believable as the lovable idiot in “Parks and Rec” than as a groundbreaking scientist. In a job interview that sounds like a news segment, we learn that Forester is ex-military which will come in handy when he’s leading Chastity Goodewyfe on patrol.
The world runs out of voluntary soldiers real fast, and, hence, Forester is conscripted and the government nails a homing device to his arm. Naturally, Forester turns to his estranged brilliant anti-establishment father (J.K. Simmons) to remove the device … then he reports for training anyway. Basic training lasts, I’m not kidding, seven days at which time the civilians are never shown what the aliens look like.
You guys don’t really want to win this war, do you?
As I said upstairs, this idiocy makes it all the more difficult to appreciate the potentially nice relationships in the film, like between Dan and his daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong young/Yvonne Strahovski older).
I can’t say I wanted to love this film, not after that opening. And I’m not going to root for The Tomorrow War or its inevitable sequel, but I grudgingly accept having laughed aloud a few times at the screenplay and finding the monsters sufficiently imposing. If the film weren’t so stupid, you might have something. Otherwise, every viewer of The Tomorrow War is better off watching Attack the Block.
“Decades for now, they’ll cause devastation…
You must help with this grave infestation!!”
“I don’t want to be a pest,
But go bug-bomb the nest
And let me get back to Play Station.”
Rated PG-13, 138 Minutes
Director: Chris McKay
Writer: Zach Dean
Genre: What you get when science is written by the NRA
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Chris Pratt believers
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Scientists
