A Rather Routine Alien Invasion in The Tomorrow War

The Tomorrow War is yet another alien invasion movie that embodies so many clichés and tropes that it borders on satire. It’s saddening, in fact, that this film is instead entirely earnest in its attempt to fit firmly into the Independence Day format. The only major difference between the two films is that The Tomorrow War takes itself far too seriously, and even charisma champ Chris Pratt isn’t enough to save it.

Christ Pratt as Dan Forester in The Tomorrow War. Amazon Prime Video

In modern times, the people of Earth are visited by representatives from the future who warn of an alien invasion that could ravage the planet if they don’t find a way to stop it soon. The soldiers of tomorrow urge global leaders to send forth military reinforcements into the future to combat the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go well, and heavy losses soon lead to drafts in the war effort.

Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester, an ex-soldier and scientist who has a keen relationship with his daughter and a bitter one with his father (J. K. Simmons). This war in the future, despite breeding hopelessness in humanity, provides the perfect stage for reconnecting with his family—while killing aliens. When Dan is drafted to serve in the war effort, the strict soldiers who force a time-altering band onto his arm notice he served before and state with cold recognition, “Thank you for your service . . . again.” The line might makes you think that this picture will have some commentary on the nature of military service being a seemingly unending battle as wars persist across time, but you’d be wrong.

There are so many aspects that The Tomorrow War could have tapped to avoid being just another run-and-gun alien invasion blockbuster, but they’re never explored. I like the setting of the present, where the public is skeptical that the war is doing anything with the low chances of survival and the worst cases of PTSD. There’s some hope that the future people are lying. They’re not. There really are aliens in the future and they’re nasty ones. They have long teeth and spike-shooting tentacles, and they howl for their brethren as they swarm upon the humans they can easily savage.

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Pratt’s character is posed as the well-meaning dad whose faith in family and science are put to the test, and he stays firmly within his lane. His reconnection with his daughter breeds little more than melodrama, and his dad will finally look up to him as a real man and not the weak “metrosexual” he’s come to associate him with. Pratt stays so entrenched in the specifics of this role that he rarely ever makes a wisecrack that ascends past passive dad jokes.

The film doesn’t stray far from the formula for serving up the type of simplistic summer action tailor-made for July. There are a handful of sequences in the future in which Dan finds himself leading unprepared soldiers into combat against the aliens that want to munch on their flesh and bone. These scenes mostly equate to fast-paced shootouts in corridors and dodging creatures and fireballs (choreography that should be familiar to Pratt after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom).

The aliens themselves are nothing special. They don’t have any grander goal than eating us all and having hordes of their brethren to wipe out the human race quickly. We eventually learn the origins of the aliens, but we never get much more than the basics of where they are and how to kill them. Design-wise, the creatures look okay, somewhat of a cross between the winged Evangelions, the monsters from A Quiet Place, and Doctor Octopus. But the mesh is more of a mess than it is a combination of all things cool, as the creatures are no more competent or compelling than your mindless beasts of other alien pictures.

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The film is also loaded with heaps of plot inconsistencies that’ll make the more nitpicky audiences explode with frustration. The idea of traveling back and forth in time leaves a lot of unaddressed oddness about how the function works. There are some loose excuses given as to why the time travelers didn’t develop more time-travel devices and why they can’t go further back in time, and then the film moves on. Even the ultimate scientific resolution isn’t answered until the fourth act, and the solution involves a high school student and some Jeff Goldblum–style of word-association logic from Pratt.

But honestly, the paradoxical and scientific absurdities are less straining than the fact that the film goes to all the trouble of staging a mixture of alien invasion and time travel, only to turn up little more than clichés seen in any number of big, loud summer action flicks. The Tomorrow War feels more like it’s traveling more backward than forward with how much it harps on previous alien invasions. Even worse, it seems to actively refuse to explore the areas that have always felt lacking in similar sci-fi films. Remember how Independence Day never seemed to take much note of the international response to an alien invasion? This film merely continues that tradition by ensuring that the key to saving all of humanity lies in Miami. The final result is another military sci-fi production that will quickly leave the memory and be tossed into the bin of other samey pictures where action heroes fire guns at human-munching monsters.

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