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.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement. And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre. Cinderella (1950) I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre . But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected. I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul ,...

Lamb: The Controversy of Vulnerability

In a landscape where the court of public opinion is ruled by sensationalism, where there is a reward for snap judgments and “thumbs down” reactions, it is imperative that we continue to train ourselves in the art of nuance and ambiguity. Some things aren’t easily classified as one thing or another, as good or bad, and they reveal limitations within our individual and collective perspective. This life and its overlapping matrices create more pressure points and junctions than we can hope to avoid. And so, we expose ourselves to contradictions not to desensitize ourselves or become permissive, but to add texture to our definitions. Which brings me today’s subject, Lamb, a 2015 independent film directed by Ross Partridge. Based on the novel by Bonnie Nadzam, the film finds a despondent 47-year-old man, David Lamb (played by Partridge himself), who strikes up a friendship with a neglected 11-year-old girl named Tommie (Oona Laurence). Their relationship is a sort of ac...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Making Room for Classic Movies

Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...

REVIEW: Superman

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters. The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention. And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture. I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

REVIEW: Lilo & Stitch

By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!"). These are all present in this summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth. The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in b...

REVIEW: Artemis Fowl

Fans of Eion Colfer's teen fantasy book, Artemis Fowl, have no doubt been eyeing this movie adaptation with some unrest in between all the shuffling of release dates and strict secrecy pertaining to the movie's plot and development. A beacon of hope amidst this was the assurance of Kenneth Brannagh's proficiency as a director. Unfortunately, Brannagh just appears complicit to this movie's ultimate dive-bombing. Brannagh remains one of my favorite directors currently working, some of my favorite works of his (such as his 2015 reimagining of Cinderella) even came from under the Disney banner, so I can only imagine what must have happened to Brannagh that caused him to forget how to competently direct a film. The film follows 12-year-old super genius, Artemis Fowl, (Ferdia Shaw) son of controversial public figure, Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) the only person for whom Artemis has any respect. When his father mysteriously disappears and Artemis receives a sinister ransom...

Year in Review: 2020

January 1st, 2020 was one of the most stressful days of my life. For weeks, January 2nd had been marked in red ink as the premiere date for this weird new project. My first three essays for my new blog were all spruced and pruned and ready for exhibition. I had spent months eyeing this date from a comfortable, hypothetical distance. Hanging over the precipice was giving me vertigo. It's not like I wasn't used to writing about film. This is more or less what I did for three years working for a film degree. Goodness, I have notebooks as far back as 5 th grade full of writings about favorite films--I've technically been doing this for a long time. But this is the first time I’ve shared my work with the public. And when you're writing for an audience, you feel transparent. Naked. But I took a step into the oblivion anyway, and this blog has been a labor of love for me over the last year. Easily one of the best decisions I've ever made. If you're interested Some i...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog