REVIEW: The Tomorrow War

With the summer season comes the slate of action movies, what with their monsters and superheroes dueling it out. With this particular summer season also comes scorching heat suffocating a world fresh out of a global pandemic. It's into this landscape that Chris McKay's "The Tomorrow War," hits Amazon Prime, at once an escapism dream and a wake-up call.

Dan Forester is a retired soldier now teaching earth science to high schoolers. He is no more prepared than anyone else when armed soldiers emerge from a timehole to pronounce that thirty years from now, Earth will be overrun by an alien army. Mankind is losing this fight, and the only way the future stands a chance is if the present takes action now. Dan is among the drafted, and when he is launched into the future to fight this war, aliens won't be the worst monsters he has to face.

The impending devastation has obvious parallels to real-world threats (e.g. climate change, racism, political discord, etc.) No part of this connection is subtle, but neither is it tactless. The metaphor lands because the future sometimes looks like the wreckage of an alien infestation, and the film acts genuinely interested in what it feels like to fight that battle.

The movie explores this with a refreshingly wide emotional palette for an action film. Humor that might feel out of place in a film so focalized on the apocalypse emerges naturally in this film. There's something amusing about grocers and bankers suddenly being asked to gun down the enemy. But this only comes full circle when these civilians are thrown into the fire. It's not just toy action figures crashing into the aliens, but average joes who might remind you of someone you know. It's disturbing just how much the audience sees themselves among the slaughtered in this film. It's this dimension that makes the film's many action scenes feel not just heart-pounding but threatening, maybe even invasive.

You'd think anchoring such a film with Star Lord/Prince of the Raptors would disrupt this approach, but Chris Pratt (also an executive producer on this film) gives an unguarded, approachable performance. The superhero gives way to the doting husband and father compelled to take extraordinary action only to protect his family. It's like Dan doesn't know he's being played by Chris Pratt. This dismantling of the Snake Plissken brand of growling, bullet-hungry action heroes really stretches the emotional capacity of a movie of this make.

For all the movie's biting tension, there are valleys in between the story's high points. (I couldn't help but notice that the film's biggest lull occurred when Sam Richardson's "Charlie" disappeared from the action.) The movie has a stretch with Dan teaming up with the head of the futuristic military, Romeo Command, played by Yvonne Strahovski. It's during their scenes, at least the front end of them, that the movie exhales a little too long. Just so, many of the biggest plotpoints occur in this window, and Strahovski herself is responsible for selling the film's biggest emotional punch. You'll see.

Offscreen, we're still figuring out how to combat the alien monsters of the future, but maybe this film has the right idea. Maybe the key to saving tomorrow is to bring a little heart into the fight.

--The Professor

Comments

UnknownJuly 10, 2021 at 11:05 AM
I loved this line: "It's this dismantling of the Snake Plissken brand of growling, bullet-hungry action heroes that really stretches the emotional capacity of a movie of this make." The Snake Plissken reference took me down memory lane. I remember when that movie first came out, and I recalled liking it. Years later, I was mentioning it to one of my sons. So, we watched it together, and I was surprised at what a B-movie it was. Its funny how you can remember a movie in a totally different way, simply based on your age at the time in which you first saw it.
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