The Tomorrow War (2021)

Overstuffed Copycat Scifi - The Tomorrow War review by GI

Overstuffed, over long scifi actioner that is so derivative you can spot the rips from other films a mile off, so much so that the film sometimes feels like a series of scenes from other movies stitched together - Edge Of Tomorrow (2014) is the easiest to cite, but you have Starship Troopers (1997) , Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), A Quiet Place (2018) and even The Thing (1982) etc etc. Chris Pratt plays Chris Pratt alias Kit without the tone of comedy that makes him usually good fun in an action role, a former special forces soldier (of course he is!!) who's happy married life, with a young daughter, and as a teacher is shattered with the arrival of soldiers from 30 years in the future who announce that humanity is on the verge of extinction due to an attack by some alien monsters. Recruits are needed from the past and eventually Kit gets sent into the future to fight and it turns out he's a key role to play in the war. There's some time travel conundrums to drive the story forward and whilst there's some entertaining set pieces it all feels so hackneyed. Much of the story is piffle and great big holes can be driven through it, for example with mankind desperate for troops and with a time machine available, albeit with limited capability, the raw recruits receive no training and no information about their foe, this is no doubt so the audience can be suitably in awe of the aliens when they first appear. Believe me you'll be unimpressed. Big budget, loud and overall dull and disappointing I can see why Paramount sold it to Amazon Prime.

A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT... - The Tomorrow War review by Frank Talker™

The usual Hollywood America-wins-a-war-against-aliens for the benefit of the entire human race movie - just as bad as the frequent American claims that America won World War 2.

A preposterous plot of sending untrained soldiers into the future to fight a war with aliens resulting in the inevitable demise of most of them is reminiscent of currently sending poorly-trained troops to the front lines in the Russo-Ukraine War.

This film compounds its idiocy with a soap-opera concern for the relationship between the hero and his daughter. This tells us nothing about such relationships and merely serves up cloying sentimentality, while actors flounder with awful expository dialogue; revealing little of character.

The aliens are the usual identity-less horde whom consume humans as food. Yet there is no explanation as to what they are likely to do when they render their own source of nourishment extinct. These evolutionary misfits merely serve to symbolise all of the fears of White culture: Mass migration, ongoing global-warfare, declining birth-rates, economic stagnation, rising crime, social collapse, etc.

Götterdämmerung was never so silly nor so easily solved. This is all good solacing entertainment, but you just can't kill what you fear with imaginary solutions because the problems, themselves, are just as imaginary. An impossibly-limitless supply of bullets won't help here, either, nor will the highly-derivative nature of the plotting - especially as regards the movie "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014).

Ultimately, the movie leaves-out answering the question as to what the goals of these soldiers really are. What civilisational, cultural, social, familial & personal goals are to be achieved here? What is the point of surviving and winning when there is nothing to live for afterwards. Survival for its own sake does not make much of a compelling narrative.

These fundamental existential issues are not explored in favour of a movie that is little more than a re-creation of the mindless destruction and brutal exploitation of colonialism; this time presenting White people as its most obvious victims - a hidden-in-plain-sight confession that what they have done to others can just as effectively be done to them.

Only the supporting players offer any of the only real special-effect in any movie - the quality of the acting - but they are not on screen enough for the audience to ever really care about them. Jasmine MATTHEWS and Sam RICHARDSON are particularly effective here, while Chris PRATT shows just how mediocre an actor he is in a straight drama.

...FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING