The Tomorrow War (2021)
Directed by Chris McKay; screenplay by Zach Dean; starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski and J. K. Simmons.
2.5/5
Time-travel in, well, any form of narrative-based entertainment can be a really very messy affair with its endless questions and paradoxes and timelines. Most recently in recent blockbuster history – if we’re ignoring Nolan’s Tenet, that is – we had the not-quite-finale of the MCU, Avengers: Endgame, enlisting “quantum-realm” mumbo-jumbo and hand-waving to justify the use of time-travel in an attempt to back out of the rather dark story commitments it had made in the franchise’s prior outing.
But the narrative device isn’t exclusively used in the biggest tent-pole films of the decade, it’s also something considered and explored by even the tiniest of tiny indie flicks. Shane Carruth’s Primer springs to mind, a micro-(like $7,000 micro)-budget sci-fi wherein two engineers-turned-entrepreneurs sort of accidentally invent time-travel and have to deal with the consequences of their bumbling.
What usually separates these two kinds of films, both interested in the chronologically-transcendent – aside from vast sums of money, distribution deals and exposure – is the depth with which the central device is explored, the level of intricacy, of detail in which it is interrogated. Naturally, you’d think that, with their increased resources, those larger films might be able to dig further into these topics than their smaller counterparts, but in fact I’d suggest the opposite is true. Oftentimes, unbeholden to the need for large box-office returns, the smaller-scale film is able to go off in any direction, to ramble along, regardless of what we might think as the viewer.
It’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, not inherently, at least, but the whole debate does raise an important question: what’s the point of using time-travel in a film? Why would a film risk drowning in the mind-bending waters the device invariably brings with it?
And I think that’s the main issue I think I have for The Tomorrow War, the recent release from director of The Lego Batman Movie, Chris McKay, that – at best – is a little Edge of Tomorrow with a hint of Suicide Squad and a heavy, unsubtle heaping of Aliens, and at worst, is Starship Troopers without that film’s irony or social commentary. It sort of splits the difference between the two extremes of Primer and Endgame – it’s half-baked – not quite smart enough to not feel entirely hollow in the point it purports to make, but not content with just being the dumb action-flick it probably should have been.
The film follows Dan Forester, a family-man and biology teacher with a past as some kind of special forces operator. Being played by Chris Pratt, he’s the kind of all-American hero you’d expect when you hear that name “Dan Forester,” the kind of badass who’s ready to “go” at a moment’s notice that Pratt is now also synonymous with.
After an incursion from the future by a humanity pushed to the brink of extinction by a dangerous alien species known only as the “White Spikes” – who the visitors from the future refuse to share any information on because they might be a bit scary (!) – individuals deemed to be “compatible” are swept up into a draft, equipped with a fancy bracelet that does… something and packed off into the future – to the precise time and place in which a sort of transmitter that enables said time-transcending travel has been installed – to fight said aliens.
It's a really simple premise, and even with some very predictable twists and turns later on down the line, it never really strays from that path.
And I think it’s that simplicity and also predictability that acts as both a benefit to the film and also betrays the sense of complexity McKay seems so eager yet unable to evoke. This is really the kind of film you will be able to plot out in your mind before it ends and just hope that you’ve stumbled onto some red-herring plotline, that some divergence from that path is coming your way – but that never comes here and it’s so disappointing.
I think, taken a different direction, The Tomorrow War could have been pure popcorn enjoyment. Pratt as Forester works because Pratt straddles so elegantly that line between stifling ruggedness and wholesome family-man. Sam Richardson as the bumbling PhD, Charlie, who finds himself drafted alongside Forester is also really entertaining but the pair’s natural chemistry is so tragically underutilised because the rest of the film has such an incessant need to also throw grit and seriousness into the mix.
That is in fact where my issues with the film’s tone also stem from – the indecision the film has over what it’s going for. At times it’s leaden with the super-seriousness of something like Eastwood’s American Sniper, but at others it’s attempting to hit the lightly comedic beats of a Joss Whedon project, but sort of just falls flat in both areas, conjuring an entirely dissonant set of tones.
There’s a moment in the film, where the draftees are being sent forwards in time, but something goes entirely wrong and the batch that Forester finds himself amongst is transported to above the city of Atlanta. Most of the individuals, the civilians, torn from their homes likely just days beforehand, unfortunate enough to travel forward in this particular wave are immediately dropped to their deaths.
The scene is played twice, once at the start and again about forty minutes through, each demonstrating the pain of the fall in excruciating detail, only the second time around, the film immediately rebounds, afraid of exploring why what just happened happened and what impact it had on any of the surviving group. Immediately, we get another quip and we’re onto the next beat.
This conflict of tones can also be seen in the interactions between the characters – between the hardened operators of Forester’s party that manage to survive the fall and the average civilians with literally zero training who find themselves brushing shoulders with a painful death. There’s a kind of horror that’s ever-present, it’s in the clothes the civilians are wearing – their own – the sense that they’re merely trying to survive, but it doesn’t figure with the preparedness, the badassery of the rest of the film – and that isn’t ever addressed, it’s just left to sit. It leaves the feeling that, in the end, the narrow focus on Forester’s relationship with his daughter is entirely solipsistic.
There is some creativity here, but it almost all feels hollow, as though the idea for the film was dreamt up in a writer’s room and never given the time it desperately needed in the oven for it to develop into a fully-formed premise. As I’ve seen – some will find something to enjoy here – but I just couldn’t. Really, it feels like a film whose strengths and flaws are just incapable of reaching any kind of equilibrium that could result in an assessment of its merely being average. My issues with its tone, with its inability to reach a balance between complexity and mind-numbing fun, its weird solipsistic narrative focus, all fog my attraction to Pratt’s driving performance, to the lighter moments of fun it has.
Watched 8th July 2021