Movie Review: 'The Tomorrow War'

The Tomorrow War stars Chris Pratt as a High School science teacher and military veteran who gets drafted into a very unique war. While watching the World Cup at a party, Chris and the rest of the world are shocked to find the famed tournament interrupted by the arrival of soldiers from the future. As these soldiers will eventually explain, they’ve developed time travel technology specifically so that they can go back in time to recruit soldiers to fight in a future war against alien beasties.

The war is happening some 10 or 15 years ahead of where Pratt’s reality exists. These soldiers will take just about any soldier they can get, regardless of age or ability. The only requirement is that you must have died before the time of the war so there is no chance of creating a future paradox by meeting your older self. This is a bit of a bummer as it pretty much reveals that draftees are dead before this war arrives.

How Chris died is part of the weird time travel paradox of The Tomorrow War. You see, Chris is able to go into a future that he’s not part of but, he can also die in this future and thus negate his future death and all that comes with that, including how his death might inspire a future generation of soldiers who might or might not become soldiers after having heard of Chris dying tragically. It’s weird and necessarily vague to avoid getting too bogged down in time travel theories.

The Tomorrow War is about a war against giant alien dog-spiders(?), beasts with claws that are like bullets and shoot out of their extremities. The beasts are both original and yet deeply derivative in their look. Derivative is the operative word for most of The Tomorrow War as the movie lacks depth in originality while leaning heavily on classic alien and horror movie tropes. This doesn’t have to be a fatal flaw, even a derivative sci-fi plot can be entertaining with the right cast of characters, see Independence Day as an example.

Sadly, The Tomorrow War isn’t as clever as the cast and creators seem to think it is. Chris Pratt, desperate to try and show something other than his Star Lord persona from Guardians of the Galaxy, puts on a moody veneer at times which causes him to lose so much of what audiences find appealing about Chris Pratt. Whether he likes it or not, audiences don’t come to see Chris Pratt act, they come to watch him be Chris Pratt, a snarky, good hearted, trickster with quip in one hand and action movie machismo in the other.

Moments when Pratt’s charms are unbridled are all too rare in The Tomorrow War but very welcome. Muted and earnest is not a movie star mode that he appears comfortable in and it is not a mode that audiences tend to find entertaining. This type of performance is more suited to a less charismatic and affable performer, one who can settle into an ensemble and provide bland heroics ala Vin Diesel whose persona lends itself to unguarded earnestness and pathos.

Diesel may not be a great actor but he has a genuine quality and confidence to his machismo that Pratt lacks, or rather, carries very differently in his best starring roles. You can sense Pratt holding back his charm and good nature in The Tomorrow War as a specific choice to avoid comparisons to Star Lord or his equally quippy and macho Jurassic Park hero. Pratt appears to be straining to restrain himself from being himself and it is a thudding failure. His lack of energy, wit, and charm as a choice sinks The Tomorrow War into a self-serious funk that the movie never gets out of.

The best performance in The Tomorow War is from former GLOW star Betty Gilpin and she’s left on the sidelines for most of the movie. Playing Pratt’s wife and the mother of a character who will go on to great importance in the plot, Gilpin pops off the screen in her minimal number of scenes. I could not help but wonder how much better the movie would have been if Gilpin had been the lead character as opposed to Pratt. Her intensity matches the movie while her more understated charm might have better matched the tone of The Tomorrow War. She is far less straining to be serious than Pratt appears to be.

The Tomorrow War is an ugly and dark movie in terms of the look. The grimy cinematography is intended to match the grim atmosphere of the war that humanity is losing in the future, I get that, but it doesn’t make it much fun to watch. Other movies have managed to film war in a fashion that captures the brutality while not making the movie a chore to look at. The cinematography in The Tomorrow War isn’t bad in terms of technique, it’s just a poor choice to mirror an already grim story with an equally grim and unpleasant visual palette.

The Tomorrow War is available to stream now on Amazon for Prime customers.