Long runtimes can get a bad rap. In the hands of the
right filmmaker, a prolonged runtime can ensure that a movie has enough room to
breathe, that its ideas get fleshed out to their maximum potential. Filmmakers
like Masaki Kobayashi and Chantal Akerman, just to name a few, have created narratives
that use extremely lengthy runtimes to channel unique facets of the human
experience.
But a movie like The Tomorrow War, which
concerns Chris Pratt being sent to the future to blow up aliens, should not be
a lengthy feature. It should be an 80-90 minute, tops, B-movie exercise.
Running 140 minutes with credits, The Tomorrow War is an excruciatingly
overlong endeavor, more of a chore than a cheer-worthy summer blockbuster.
The Tomorrow War stars
Pratt as Dan Forester, the beefiest science teacher you’ve ever seen. He lives
a nice but not especially exceptional life in the suburbs. That all gets
upended once humans from the year 2052 arrive to deliver devastating news: the
Earth is under attack in the future. The human population has dwindled so heavily
that people from the past are being called upon to fight for humanity. Forester
is recruited in “the first-ever worldwide draft” and is subsequently sent to
the future to fight the aliens wrecking the planet.
What follows is just a string of boring set pieces
that never figures out a concrete character thread for Forester to navigate
during all the shooting. Like most other major American blockbusters, daddy
issues factor hard into the proceedings. Our lead character has problems with
his father, James (J.K. Simmons), while the prospect of saving the world for
his daughter informs Forester’s gung-ho nature in combat. All of that, and any
other surface-level attempts at characterization, get jettisoned once the
action-heavy sequences fire up.
The Tomorrow War is
an exercise in watching money burn as director Chris McKay and writer Zack Dean
keep churning out new set pieces that clearly cost a lot of money but have zero
imagination to speak of. The aliens look like the Cloverfield monster got
crossed with the otherworldly beings in Edge of Tomorrow. Meanwhile, a sequence
where they attack an oil rig retrofitted into a command center see’s them
acting like water-bound versions of the World War Z zombies. All the
while, there’s no real excitement to speak of, no characters to get invested
in, no unique visual flourishes to liven the mood. They’re all rendered with
zero personality, all that cash in the service of total creative emptiness.
The only distinctive trait in the script is its weird obsession
with human suffering. As Forester and his fellow time-traveling soldiers first
arrive in the future, the camera lingers as some of these poor souls plummet to
their deaths in the fiery debris below. This emphasis on just watching pointless
anguish continues as McKay lingers on the screams of people being torn apart by
aliens. There’s also an uncomfortable fixation on women getting slaughtered to
help further motivate male characters. It’s hard to get invested in the fight for
humanity when The Tomorrow War doesn’t see humanity as much more than
just cannon fodder for extra-terrestrial adversaries.
Beyond that, McKay and Dead don’t take any risks
whatsoever in the story or in how it’s presented. Several of the usual clichés
of any time travel movie get trotted here with no sense of inventiveness.
Meanwhile, the backdrops for this movie’s action scenes range from sterile labs
to abandoned hospitals to CGI exterior landscapes. They’re all cheap-looking as
they are distractingly reminiscent of environments from other superior films. The
Tomorrow War doesn’t dare to imbue any sense of unique identity into its
generic action movie, it just settles for looking low-budget and derivative.
One could be here all day prattling off the problems
with this movie, including lines of dialogue in the first act that are way too obviously
getting paid off in the third act. There are also severe shifts in tone that
see cartoony gags (like one recruit for the future war showing up in a chef’s
hat) getting accompanied alongside brutal sci-fi violence. Neither end of Tomorrow
War’s tonal spectrum is interesting, leaving this a movie that’s trying to please
everyone but managing to just disappoint everyone instead.
Headlining the whole thing is a wasted cast, with J.K.
Simmons and especially Betty Gilpin getting criminally little of substance to
do. Worst of all, though, is how Chris Pratt is once again inhabiting a generic
action movie lead role. As Jurassic World and Passengers showed,
these parts do not allow him to indulge in his better traits as a performer.
Saddled with such a poorly written character, Pratt is a total blank slate as
boring as the rubble-covered future environments he inhabits. Sam Richardson
scores a few chuckles as Forester’s best friend, but his puzzlingly prolonged
absence from the middle of The Tomorrow War robs the movie of its best
acting asset.
The best way to describe The Tomorrow War is
that it’s miserable, just an utterly unpleasant experience through and through.
It’s a spiritual successor to Battle: Los Angeles in being a bunch of
ugly-looking noise that seems to stretch on for an eternity. There isn’t an
ounce of heart or fun or ingenuity in here, a sharp departure from Chris McKay’s
work on the excellent The LEGO Batman Movie from 2017. Though its
primary setting is the world of the future, The Tomorrow War is a movie ripped
straight out of yesteryear.
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