Like a dope, I had to go and watch The Tomorrow War (2021). I'd heard some off-the-cuff comments about it ("It wasn't as bad as Tomorrow War, was it?"), but I figured, what the heck, how bad could it be?
Chris Pratt is an ex-Green Beret, high-school science teacher, husband and father. His ordinary life is interrupted when visitors from the future appear all over the world. The message: In the future, the earth will be invaded by monsters from outer space. Humanity is being creamed. They need soldiers to help prevent the extinction of humanity. The world comes together and sends a thousand soldiers into the future for a one-week tour. Not many come back. The world institutes a universal draft.
Of course, Pratt gets drafted. His wife, Betty Gilpin, convinces him to try to run, and get his estranged father's help. His father is J.K. Simmons, with a buffed bod and bushy beard, an underground conspiracy nut. He could get Pratt out of the draft, but antagonizes Pratt so much that he just leaves to go to the future.
There's a basic training section, where Pratt meets Sam Richardson, a soft genius type. Between them they realize that everyone drafted has a death date (known to the futurians) before their target date, and all the futurians are young enough so that they weren't born here in the present/past. This is the first and last intelligent point in the movie. They also note that they aren't being told anything about the monsters or how to fight them. It seems nobody really cares.
They get sent to the future and it's an immediate cluster. The monsters are everywhere and can take a lot of machine gun fire. Which made me wonder right off - why are they sending soldiers with machine guns against them? They barely work, and soldiers are not expendable in this world. Human population is rapidly approaching zero. Have they considered different weapons and tactics? Here's an idea - they have a time machine! Could they use that in any way?
Anyhow, Pratt meets up with his superior officer, who turns out to be his grown-up daughter, Yvonne Strahovski. They have a bunch of bang-bang adventures together, trying to get a toxin that will kill the female monsters. They achieve this goal, but Strahovski dies sending Pratt back to the present with the toxin.
He is one of the last ones to return. The time machine is fried. The world is ready to give up. They have the toxin, but nobody knows where the aliens come from or how to get at them when they arrive. Then Gilpin does the incredible: She thinks things over for a minute. Something no one else seems to have done.
So they realize that the aliens are here now, they just haven't come out. They need to get to Siberia to kill them in their cradles. Fortunately, Simmons is a pilot. Oh, you thought they would go to the governments of the world with this? Why would they do that, when they can attack this world-ending menace with 5 or 6 randos and an old guy?
They find the alien ship and surprise, it looks like a Giger knock-off. Also, the monsters, like the xenomorphs, are weapons for clearing out populated planets. Or maybe pets, who knows? The monsters are in embryo sacs (not eggs, so it isn't a total Alien rip off) so they start administering the toxin. They get one or two, but they start waking up. So they just blow them all up. I guess they didn't need that toxin after all. And we all live happily ever after, including in the future, where Strahovski presumably doesn't die. Oh, but Simmons does, but he was old.
I understand that time rravel is hard, but I've rarely seem it done so stupidly. The idea that the world wouldn't exploit future knowledge but just throw cannon fodder at the enemy is - ok, pretty believable. But not at all satisfying.
All that aside, we enjoyed it when things were asploding and Pratt was yelling, "Move move!" But even there, while Pratt was clearly a super competent soldier, he never figures out that spray-and-pray was not working. Oh well, he can't think if the writers won't.
This seems like a perfect example of a streaming blockbuster. Big, loud, stupid and released without a thought to whether it's good or not. People will stream it when it comes out and forget it immediately I guess I should too.
No comments:
Post a Comment