Chris Pratt, the lesser of the Chrises, plays a science teacher who watches in amazement as travelers from the future arrive and inform humanity that, thirty years from now, we will be embroiled in a war against an alien race that has decimated the planet, wiped out our species, and that they are here to recruit soldiers from the past to fight in the future. Of course, Chris gets drafted and goes to the future to fight.
The Tomorrow War, streaming on Amazon Prime, is a movie that could have been over before it started if anyone in the film had two brain cells to rub together. The idea that people from the future would travel to the past to recruit soldiers and not even consider, you know… changing history to prevent the war in the first place is amazing. The fact that people from the future would travel to the past to recruit soldiers and not even consider changing history in the first place and the nations of the world rally behind it like it’s the best idea ever is astounding.
Yes, dear friends, you will have the solution to the movie’s problem in your head during this film’s entire run so that, when Chris Pratt says, “wHy NoT gO bAk N tHyMe aN cHaNgE hIsTuReE?” you will slap your forehead so hard that brain damage may result.
Don’t worry, though. That will qualify you to write the sequel.
The Tomorrow War is so fundamentally flawed from the beginning that it’s nearly impossible to enjoy anything about it. While the aliens are cool, Chris Pratt seems particularly unengaged and even bored with what he’s doing, not to mention that the movie has a stunningly out of place comic relief character who is written so badly that you’ll be praying that he ends up a five course dinner for the aliens.
What’s more, it astounds me that a military, even a fictional military from the future, would send people into battle with a race of aliens and tell them next to nothing about it. I know this was the movie trying to be mysterious and scary, but it seems to me that, if you were as desperate as the future force claims to be, you would want to give your soldiers a little intel so they wouldn’t… you know… die.
Everything… everything about this movie is stunningly and insultingly stupid. It’s a movie aiming for the lowest common denominator while, at the same time, trying to pretend that it has a high concept idea behind it. Don’t get me wrong, in more capable hands, this could have been a great science fiction actioneer, but in it’s present form, it’s just dumber than a box of defective hammers.
This could all be forgiven if the action in the movie was at least passable, but it comes off as a mixture of shaky cameras, badly edited sequences where it’s next to impossible to follow what’s going on, and lazily put choreographed sequences.
In short, not only is The Tomorrow War as stupid as a puddle of contaminated Ovaltine, it’s boring… just boring.
I streamed this for free and still think that I overpaid with my time.
Jason Gaston 