Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tomorrow War’ on Amazon Prime, an Entertainingly Dumb Sci-fi Monster Mosh Anchored by an Amiable Chris Pratt

The Tomorrow War was supposed to be a tentpole blockbuster for Paramount, but thanks to the pandemic, now it’s a summer popcorn-muncher for Amazon Prime. Maybe the schedule change fits it nicely — it certainly feels like the type of escape-the-heat diversion (I call ’em “air-conditioning movies”) we got on and around the Fourth of July holiday, in the Before Times, at least. The nut graf: Chris Pratt headlines this aliens-attack time-travel noggin-knocker, a sci-fi explosionganza that’s the first live-action effort from The Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay. It sure looks derivative, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, right?

THE TOMORROW WAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s December, 2022. Dan Forester (Pratt) sits down to watch the World Cup with his nine-year-old daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) when a portal opens up right there on the pitch, and out march soldiers from the future. Talk about an entrance. Makes Ric Flair look like the act that comes in last place at the talent show. Their message: Thirty years from now, there are only 500,000 humans left on Earth because they’ve been killed and eaten by aliens, which is truly an unfortunate development. Scientists developed a rickety wormhole through the space-time continuum enabling them to send soldiers from the past ahead to the future to fight to save humanity from extinction. It’s a tough sell, since there’s a 20 percent survival rate — eeesh — so they activate a draft, which surely has everyone down on their knees praying for bone spurs.

Dan is a former Special Ops guy who did time in Iraq, and a smart scientist who’s teaching science to high schoolers who don’t give a single toot about photosynthesis because the world is under a cloud of mass depression in the face of a bleak future. Daddy issues pass as character development; his father James is a Vietnam vet who abandoned him long ago, and now is a nutjob who one character witheringly labels “conspiracy Santa,” and is played by J.K. Simmons After Three Years of Crossfit Workouts. Of course Dan gets the call to duty, because what do you think this is, a movie about a guy who just forges ahead with the lesson plan and goes home to chicken breast and steamed broccoli for dinner? No, this is the type of movie in which the Chris Pratt character delivers some hard-hitting, Geostorming dialogue like, “I’m not a hero, I’m just trying to save my daughter. If I gotta save the world to save her, then I’m damn sure gonna do it,” then barrels headlong into battle, blasting away at monsters that look like Godzilla if he was a chicken and also an octopus.

So Dan heads a group of scared-ass civilians trained to shoot machine guns but mostly to be tooth-and-claw fodder for the creatures, which are dubbed “white spikes,” although I’ll be damned if I don’t keep slipping up and calling them “white claws.” He pals up with comic-relief guy and nervous-talker Charlie (Sam Richardson), and happily teams with Dorian (Edwin Hodge), a badass who’s survived three tours of duty and don’t give a f— because he’s got cancer anyway. There are others in their squad that are barely worth mentioning, but one is played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, which is pretty cool. They arrive at the gnarly scene of war and destruction and Charlie quips, “I’m glad Will Smith isn’t alive to see this,” and after that one, I’m surprised they didn’t all pull on STRAIGHT OUTTA ALIENS T-shirts as their team uniform. After a skirmish that ranks closer to Help Me Lord Jesus Help Me than Mild Kerfuffle on the Conflict Scale, Dan meets up with a character known as Romeo Command (Yvonne Strahovski) to do some science research and find a way to attack the white spikes on a bio-molecular DNA level. It’s humanity’s only hope. Will they succeed? I HURL ALL SPOILERS INTO AN ABYSS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Aliens, Independence Day, Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, District 9, Geostorm, Battle: Los Angeles and The Terminator, just to name a few. Without giving too much away, I’ll also say it has the strangest father-daughter bonding moments since I watched Boss Baby 2 four days ago.

Performance Worth Watching: Seriously, Simmons is RIPPED in this thing. But he’s not given much to do, so I’ll highlight Pratt as the perfect type of earnest-smirking charismatic wisecracker to carry a big, noisy, blatant ripoff of 20 other movies.

Memorable Dialogue: This Pratt line is most fun when divorced from context: “When I come back I’m going to have a good job, and I’m going to eat ALL of your tuna Santa.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBTOGBIADBTF: Too Busy The Only Good Bug Is A Dead Buggin’ To F—.

Our Take: The Tomorrow War bridges the gap between high-concept and lowbrow with a near-miraculous leap. That’s the movie’s most admirable achievement, since it otherwise re-chews a lot of old cinematic bubblegum pulled from the bottom of the desk. And frankly, it’s pretty entertaining anyway, an idiotic chunk of escapism that only reminds us that one real-life cripplingly dispiriting global event — that would be climate change — exists, diverting us with sound and fury while Pratt uses his goofball charm to work his way through mega-scale action sequences studded with cliches and peabrained dialogue. This is the type of movie that deploys exclamatory lines like SOMEONE GET A HARPOON ON THAT TENTACLE and THE WORLD DOESN’T END ON A SCHEDULE without a single hint of an apology. You’ll either be annoyed or eyeroll-laugh at this silly junk (I fell into the latter camp).

Although the movie features real brain-bogglers like “What happened before I died?”, this is no Christopher Nolan time-travel mind-expander. It’s precariously close to being self-aware parody, the script explaining how time-space paradoxes are sidestepped in the briefest of tossed-off exchanges before getting to the mayhemic chaos. McKay’s direction is fine, just fine, a lot of whiz-bang kerflooey with halfway-decent CG monsters — workmanlike and watchable, which isn’t saying nothing, and I’ll even venture on a possibly shaky limb and declare that recent trends in actions films seem to have skewed away from trashy mega-edited Transformers discombobble. Tonally, it’s rah-rah, pull-together-for-the-sake-of-humanity hooray-for-science stuff that’s simplistic but generally effective; it digs a quarter-inch into for-the-sake-of-family stuff and some the-soldier’s-sacrifice/PTSD stuff so it’s not a wholly empty emotional experience. Not that you’re firing this thing up for any of that crap — it has all the depth and poignancy of a Snapple cap. No, this is all about the uptempo, thundering monster mash, and expecting anything else is foolhardy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Tomorrow War is stoopid, forget-your-troubles fun.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Tomorrow War on Amazon Prime