The Tomorrow War Review - RTMM

The Tomorrow War was slated for a theatrical release on December 25th 2020. Paramount delayed the movie until finally releasing it on amazon prime just a few weeks ago the movie is directed by Chris Mckay who directed the robot chicken star wars special three this director has mainly worked in animation and this is his first live action film although there is a lot of CGI I thought the performances were fine for the most part I didn't think anything from a directorial standpoint was fantastic but my main gripes are with the story and when you're involving aliens and time travel it's inevitable that I'm going to be frustrated by the logic of how this movie works especially because the time travel in this movie doesn't make any sense what this movie is really banking on is Chris Pratt and the action sequences of him shooting at aliens it just wants to be entertaining it isn't an intelligent science fiction film it will not change your world view it just turned out to be a dumb action movie my criticisms here are with the story the unoriginality of the plot the convenience of the time travel and how it's used in the movie and there are a few other things this is the spoiler alert warning if you don't want me to go any further watch the movie first moments like this can be so over the top that they're entertaining There are some positives to this movie positives it's got a solid cast of actors that are good in other movies the strongest component of the movie for me was the relationship between Chris Pratt and his dad played by JK Simmons who is a Vietnam veteran and I guess he's never really been there for Chris Pratt growing up not like that other movie at all right they go and fight aliens together unoriginal movie much like tom cruise's movie oblivion this movie is inspired by a bunch of other things when they found that spaceship buried in Russia I just thought of John Carpenter's The Thing the entire father and daughter story that spans from the present to the future well that just reminded me of Interstellar even the poster just looks like Annihilation what this movie does with these concepts isn't interesting it's loosely thrown together world building so we can have an excuse to have a whole kind of war zone drop sequence in the beginning where a bunch of soldiers fall from the sky and land onto a city and then Chris Pratt can just run around with a comic relief character and a tough chick and shoot a bunch of bland CGI aliens with machine guns take a bunch of other concepts mash them together a bunch of dumb action and then everyone would just eat it up and buy amazon prime subscriptions it's just clearly lacking in so many areas for me feeling any sort of genuine emotional connection with the characters was difficult they always have to do their best to make the main character a relatable funny charismatic awesome guy so that the audiences eat them up and buy amazon prime subscriptions so they make him like a high school teacher who's like a really cool guy but he's trying to go for a better job but they don't like him because who cares and of course this all comes into play because two hours later when Chris Pratt is trying to fight a volcano where the aliens were originally buried and that's where they're going to start their invasion he goes back to a random student in his class who was really obsessed with volcanoes instead of a scientist or some kind of government agent figuring this out he couldn't ask anyone else he couldn't find a scientist see Chris Pratt's character didn't need that big job because he really just needed to be a high school teacher and be around his cool students this kind of writing doesn't add to the movie it just makes the characters in the situation far less believable Chris Pratt plays Dan Forster and I guess he can't help but like the guy he's played by Chris Pratt the character of Dan Forster is just a good guy and I couldn't really tell you much more about him aside from that JK Simmons plays his father James Forster Chris Pratt has a scene with him before he goes off to war for the first time they're very disconnected from each other at least there was conflict here that was interesting but the film does not focus on it for a long time Chris Pratt goes off to war and you forget about this character this isn't quite Deer Hunter you know there's already a lot of [ __ ] you gotta swallow with the aliens and the time travel logic the girl from Chuck plays Dan Forster's daughter we see her as a kid but then we also see her fighting in the war as an adult the dynamic between these two characters was actually interesting Emmy Forster is very underdeveloped the other major characters are Dorian Charlie Lieutenant Hart they didn't do a lot in the movie there were points that found the character of Charlie really annoying early on in the film humans teleport in from the future and broadcast to the world that there will be an alien invasion in 30 years which will destroy all of humanity and civilization so they recruit people from our time and teleport them into the future for one week to fight a bunch of aliens and then go home my original thought when they showed up is the movie would have some kind of twist where the humans from the future are actually revealed to be a group of bad guys who were teleporting people into the future to kill themselves that's not what happens at all Chris Pratt shoots at aliens for an hour the movie starts with Chris Pratt falling from the sky he happens to land in a giant pool and then it just cuts to a title card that says 28 years later we see Chris Pratt hanging out with his family at some Christmas party he's watching the tv and then suddenly humans from the future appear whoa this is total schlock isn't it oh man there's a bunch of news footage explaining what happened people get drafted into the military to go fight very unique way of dumping exposition oh look a dog dogs are cool Chris Pratt's teaching his class when suddenly he gets an alert on his phone that he's been drafted the military puts some bands on his arm if he tries to escape they'll just track him down then there's a briefing and there's so much exposition in the scene you'd swear Christopher Nolan wrote it it would become virtually impossible to fill that anger okay cool next time someone asks that you should probably just lie oh there's an emergency and they need to be teleported into the future for some reason something with the time machine went wrong and they get teleported miles into the air they all start falling down and die except Chris Pratt who happens to land in a pool Chris Pratt's daughter is talking to him over the radio at this point he doesn't know it's his daughter she tells them to go find some scientists in some building they're all dead they bring some stuff out with them and then it turns out that jets are coming in to bomb the city so they have to shoot their way out of the city but then one of the guys falls down a thing and they have to go rescue him then the bombs come in and there's a giant explosion Chris Pratt wakes up at the army base with his daughter and they go on a mission together to go find the alien female there's an action scene where they throw her in a cage helicopters take her away and then they're chased down by aliens and they drive out of there as the daughter shoots a machine gun then they go on the beach for a bit and bond I guess so they're bonding and it's quite dramatic because the camera is zooming in as they talk at the same point they're trying to make a virus that'll kill the alien queen and once the computer's done with that it says a hundred percent bond we're gonna save this world together 100 bond isn't that clever like the bond they have like they have a 100 bond now I'm being sarcastic suddenly the aliens start attacking the base they climb over the wall like world war z they destroy the entire base Chris Pratt sees his daughter die in the future being eaten by a bunch of aliens before he's teleported back to his time that's pretty traumatic and I actually thought that was a kind of cool part of the movie and I feel the movie kind of drops it to make way for a bunch of scenes of JK Simmons and Chris Pratt shooting at aliens upon a first viewing when saw this scene I was like wow this must be the climax of the movie but it wasn't the end of the film it goes on for a while and it was such a dramatic high note that I thought the movie was over then we just go back to the present we never see that character again after Chris Pratt talks about it with his wife we never address it again for Chris Pratt to go back to the present with the virus that was the only way for the story to work it was very anticlimactic though it's revealed that the aliens were actually buried in a volcano many centuries ago and once the polar ice caps melted they would thaw out and take over the world so it's some kind of climate change message in there too so the aliens dug underground waited to attack a lot like war of the worlds we deserve it because the melted polar ice caps because of that random student in Chris Pratt's class they find out the aliens are buried somewhere in Russia the arctic climate reminded me of The Thing they blow it up the alien female gets out though so JK Simmons and Chris Pratt go to hunter down really over-the-top action sequence where JK Simmons builds a snowman to distract the mother alien they stick the virus in its mouth and then it dies Chris Pratt reunites his family I'll never leave this family because my best future it turned out was always right in front of me the time travel logic of the film is flawed by today's standards it just doesn't fly so as it turns out these weren't time-traveling humans from the future these were dimension-hopping humans that were from the future also and in a desperate attempt to save their own reality opened up a dimensional portal to ours hoping that we could help him out but all that happened was Chris Pratt from the main storylines dimension was able to get the virus to kill the queen and gather enough information so he could pinpoint the aliens and destroy them in this timeline meanwhile on the other timeline they were always doomed to just die you're just supposed to believe some point after Chris Pratt was brought to the present this universe just disappears all these characters everything that happened with the aliens because in this scene the daughter has dialogue saying we were never going to make it and then she says you have to make sure this doesn't happen as if Chris Pratt bringing the virus back will just make this version of what happened disappear if that's the time travel logic this movie wants to go by I'd say that's pretty bad the movie could have made a point of this they could have used the word dimension or alternate universe or something it's far too vague if it never happened how would humans be able to teleport to our time in the beginning then the whole movie wouldn't have happened but see Chris Pratt reunited with his dad they teamed up and fought a giant alien they're absolutely terrifying um I don't do well with uh creatures that look real what were the aliens trying to do seriously what were they trying to accomplish yeah they were kind of scary for a couple seconds they mentioned that they click or something you want to tell us anything you remember clicking and then you see them click but then they never do that again there are just endless hordes of these aliens and they don't really do anything they were just ugly monsters that ran around eating everyone the aliens also had a queen like in that movie Aliens the alien things in this movie are totally disconnected from the time travel things going on there's just a random alien invasion and then off to the side a scientist somewhere builds a time travel machine when it comes to giving the tomorrow world rating I didn't really enjoy the film at all and I found it quite stupid there were a lot of shooting aliens and dropping into cities and time travel all sorts of crazy science fiction logic but in the end I didn't really feel a genuine connection with the characters it reminded me of a bunch of other science fiction films that I thought were much better and it also just kind of felt like a vehicle for Chris Pratt maybe a few of the other actors but his character just wasn't really that compelling I would veer toward a two star so it's not quite two and a half which is right in the middle bland if Chris Pratts character have been a bit more interesting if the time travel logic had made sense if I had actually cared about the action sequences and they didn't go on for so long and the aliens aren't interesting at all they're just monsters they might as well be anything it could easily be zombies too and at the end of the movie they go to the arctic to find a lab where the zombie virus started they got that intel from the future because they happen to have a time travel machine too that was the element World War Z was missing

Channel: ralphthemoviemaker

Views: 286,307

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Id: Re4a0cxTZfM

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DiogoSN]

"100% BOND"

Thanks movie, I was too dumb to understand the moment that the two characters had resulted in a beautiful and time-transcending father-daughter love.

The message was delivered so unsublty and so forcefully to your head that you could convict it with blunt-trauma murder.