The Tomorrow War (2021)

The Tomorrow War is a film about humans time traveling to try and stop an alien invasion in the future. Humans travel back in time to recruit people to travel forward in time to help them fight. This review will contain SPOILERS, but since this is an older movie it should be fine for most readers.

An international draft is held and Chris Pratt's character, Dan Forester, is drafted to travel back in time. Has he was getting ready to go, I kept thinking that he was going to bump into the adult version of his daughter. In a way the movie foreshadowed this and was also in a way predictable in taking this approach. Leading up to him going back in time they kept talking about how low the survival rate was and his arrival shows why. They dropped people in from skyscraper height and they just fell with no parachutes to help them survive. You only survive if you get lucky and land on a skyscraper and then it also depends on how hard you hit. Many got left on the roof because of broken bones and other injuries. Dan is extra lucky because he lands in a roof top pool. The movie doesn't make it clear if every transit is like that or if something went wrong to drop them from that high. You would think if it happened each time that they would try to give them a parachutes. The movie has a lot of things like this that just doesn't make sense or that isn't fully explained. In a way the time travel makes a time loop that Dan is able to break when he decides to try and find where the aliens crashed instead of following what his future self did in his daughters story of him. When they find the alien ship with the creatures in it they see that there is two different kinds of creatures on the ship. The crew is dead and someone makes the comment that they think the crew was taking these aliens to another planet to wipe that planet out instead of Earth being the target. WTF!!! That is a jump in logic and the movie should have dived into that more. Where did the aliens come from? What was their target? It would have been cool if they would have spent more time on the ship digging into it before trying to kill the creatures. Also, if there was one queen and you could clearly see her as being different in the incubators, why would you not go for that creature first to kill. The choices in this movie just did not make sense to the point of it just being stupid. I just found myself going "REALLY" during a lot of this film.

When it comes to the acting in the film I would say it was ok....I think that Chris Pratt did an ok job with what they gave him. I wish they would have made his character a little more happy go lucky, Star Lordish, before the time travel so that the personality change could have been more extreme when he returns from the future. It would have allowed for more character development. Yvonne Strahovski who plays the adult version of his daughter was stiff, and when I say stiff I mean Kristen Stewart Twilight stiff. I've seen her in other films like The Predator (2018) and I, Frankenstein (2014) and she did ok with those parts. Here though I think she got confused on how to build a character that had experienced trauma and an apocalypse, even taking into the military/scientist aspect of the character. For me the character that I gravitated to the most was actually the side character Charlie, played by Sam Richardson. He was the comic relief that had no idea how to survive a combat situation. You find yourself hoping that he will make it to the end of the film. He is also the smart one that puts a lot of the pieces together in finding out where the alien ship is. They also did a lot of foreshadowing with this as well, like with the kid who was obsessed with volcanos. The movie did leave a lot of clues in the front part of the movie that would become important later on.

The CGI for this film was good. I actually really liked the design of the aliens. They were somewhat turtle like in that they could pull their heads into their bodies to protect their soft parts (neck). Making them white reminded me of another Chriss Pratt movie, Jurassic World, where the main monster is white to add to its scare factor. I will say that the foreshadowing they tried to do about the clicking sound they made did not match the sound they made very well. They should have hyped up on the sound use more and made the sound more intimidating. When we actually hear the sound it doesn't seem that bad to have the psychological impact that survivors seem to have because of it. I will also say how they did the dropping of the people from the skyscraper height was also well done to the point that my vertigo was going crazy with the height references in it. 

Overall I would give it 3 stars out of 5 or a C. It was ok. If it was on TV I would watch it again, but I wouldn't buy it for my personal collection.

I decided to add this picture as well because it in a way had a DOOM feel to it.

Picture 1 From: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9777666/mediaviewer/rm1479735553/

Picture 2 From: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9777666/mediaviewer/rm1295840001/

Picture 3 From: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9777666/mediaviewer/rm2604331777/

Picture 4 From: https://www.framestore.com/work/tomorrow-war

Picture 5 From: https://www.awn.com/vfxworld/designing-tomorrow-wars-vicious-deadly-aliens

Picture 6 From: https://www.awn.com/vfxworld/designing-tomorrow-wars-vicious-deadly-aliens

Picture 7 From: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9777666/mediaviewer/rm171766529/

An Epic CGI shot from the film.