Chris Pratt is a likable actor, but honestly, I think he’s a bit limited in the sorts of roles he can play. That’s actually true of a lot of actors, many of whom have great careers and find steady work, so that’s not meant as a slam. But it does mean that Pratt basically can play a genially, somewhat goofy everyman in whatever movies he ends up in, particularly in action movies, though he can probably do just fine in comedies. Heck, he first made a name for himself in a sitcom. So, really, giving him a lead role in a movie like The Tomorrow War makes a lot of sense.
That doesn’t mean the movie is automatically good or something. He’s just a good fit for a lead role like that. As far as the movie itself goes, well, it’s on Amazon Prime Video now.
It’s a rather average holiday season in 2022 when something strange happens: a portal opens and armed soldiers emerge in the middle of the World Cup. Apparently, they are from thirty or so years in the future, and there’s a war on there. Oh, and the human race is losing badly against an alien enemy known only as the Whitespikes. If something isn’t done soon, then there won’t be any humans left. The initial solution seems to be to send the world’s militaries because, fortunately, the world’s governments opt to believe this story without too much trouble for whatever reason.
It’s that kind of movie.
However, that doesn’t work out, so a worldwide draft is taken of ordinary people given rather minimal training to do the fighting. Very few come back. But among them is the film’s point of view character, an Army veteran that teaches high school biology, one Dan Forester (Pratt). He’ll have one week before a retrieval device zaps him back to his own time. While the in the future, he’ll have to match wits with a nearly unstoppable enemy that leaves piles of bodies in their wake and doesn’t seem much interested in anything but killing. Can Dan survive and maybe find a way to win the war with his own dwindling number of allies?
In many ways, this is a perfectly functional and even fun action film. Director Chris McKay’s background is in animation, and he does OK with his first live action movie. Yes, there are few if any truly memorable characters–the one real exception may be the great J.K. Simmons’s as Dan’s survivalist father though that’s probably more because of Simmons than anything else–but there are a number of likable characters even if I couldn’t remember many of their names afterwards. The fight scenes are well-executed, and the movie does a lot of work to keep the aliens hidden from view for as long as possible.
All that said, this was still a rather rote and cliched movie. True, it’s rote and cliched without being outright bad, but there wasn’t a lot going on that seemed truly original. The Whitespikes reminded me a bit of the Quiet Place creatures with a bit of the Xenomorph thrown in. The time travel aspects, something that isn’t really talked over much so the rules are a wee bit fuzzy, probably won’t stand up to too much introspection, but that could describe time travel in just about every movie that features it in some capacity. So, while I wouldn’t say there was anything wrong with The Tomorrow War, it also isn’t something likely to stick with me much in the long term. It’s a fine and passable movie, and that’s probably about all it is.
Grade: B-
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