The Tomorrow War 
Directed By: Chris McKay
Starring: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons
My Rating: [rating=4]
I heard different things about this movie, but I generally avoid most reviews. Since the days of Siskel and Ebert nobody has come close to their caliber of movie analysis. Granted, I rarely agreed with Ebert who once said that a comic book movie wasn’t “realistic enough” … because comic book characters are real. Anyway, enough soapboxing about those guys, may they rest in peace.
This is a time travel movie and we all know how I feel about time travel movies, it’s rarely done right. However I really like Chris Pratt and I was very curious about this movie so why not check it out.
Quick Synopsis and My Review
A wormhole opens suddenly and armed soldiers come through. They say they are from the year 2050 and the humans are losing a war with an alien race. The population of the planet has been decimated to the point of extinction so they need to draft people from the past to fight a war in the future. The entire human race is at stake.
The following content contains spoilers for The Tomorrow War.
My father-in-law said this is “definitely a Matt movie” and I can’t argue with that. I did enjoy this movie and I may even watch it again some time. It does rely heavily on the suspension of disbelief and I will get to that in a bit. I cannot recall very many (if any) dramatic roles for Chris Pratt. I know the Jurassic World movies had their dramatic moments but those are more adventure driven than drama. However he’s always been Andy Dwyer and Starlord so this movie is definitely outside his typical range. In all honesty I think he did a pretty good job.
Also, J.K. Simmons is jacked in this. I mean, for 66 years old the dude looks like he could arm wrestle a grizzly bear. You may also recognize Hanna from the Dexter series.
A Paradox On Both Your Timelines
This is where the spoiler comes in so if you want to see the movie first, then stop reading. When Chris Pratt’s character is drafted and he’s sent into the future to fight the aliens his team is receiving their orders from a Colonel. It turns out that this Colonel is Pratt’s characters daughter, now an adult. In fact, not only is she a Colonel, she’s also an MIT trained bioengineer and she’s working on a toxin to kill the aliens.
When she creates the toxin she asks her dad (Pratt) to return to the past and synthesize the toxin and return to the future to eradicate the aliens. Things happen and he can’t return to the future, however they discover that the aliens have been on the planet for 1,000 years buried in ice in Russia.
This is where that suspension of disbelief comes into play. This movie creates a time paradox. Chris Pratt gets the toxin from biological material extracted from the alien in the future. Then he returns to the past and kills the alien using the toxin. So if he kills the alien in the past, how does it exist in the future to create the toxin in the first place? It’s a paradox but I think it’s just subtle enough that the suspension of disbelief works here.
Did you see it? What did you think of The Tomorrow War?
“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.”
– Stanley Kubrick
Onward