The Tomorrow War (2021)
Starring: Chris Pratt, JK Simmons, Yvonne Strahovski
Dir: Chris McKay Writer: Zach Dean
Ok – so The Tomorrow War is an Amazon Original Movie. So it was made by Amazon, and it is released by Amazon and it is showing on Amazon. This baby is a stream baby. It was born for streaming. Surprisingly enough, even though it’s a stream baby, there is nothing lacking in terms of comparing it to any other movie. It doesn’t feel like a made-tv-movie, or a Hallmark movie or anything cheap like that – this movie feels like a real, bona fide blockbuster movie that would you see at a movie theater during better times.
That said – let’s get into it.
So, you take I Am Legend, Edge Of Tomorrow, and World War Z – and you mix them in a blender, and you put some tear drops in, and some funny Chris Pratt lines, and you get this movie. I’m not saying it’s bad – I’m saying they just borrowed from all of those movies to make this movie.
Director Chris McKay has not done much, but he has done The Lego Batman Movie – which a lot of us, including me, deem as a perfect movie. It was funny, it made sense, it explored Batman better then any Batman ever did, and it was a big hit.
Writer Zach Dean has not done much either. He has done 24 Hours To Live, and Deadfall – none of which I’ve heard of, and it makes sense, because he just took 3 movies and put them together to make this movie.
Chris Pratt does his best Chris Pratt here – a loving family guy, can’t really catch a break, but he loves his wife and daughter, and he is doing the best he can with humor and tenderness.
J.K. Simmons, as you may have heard and seen – has gotten super buff for this role. J.K. has called his incredible physique “Prison Muscles” that his character got while serving time. Apparently Mr. Simmons is the only one here doing any kind of character development. Mr. Simmons adds an immense amount of levity to this movie and helps you take all of this seriously, which is kind of tough to do.
Okay here’s the breakdown of this bad boy. During some big soccer game at Christmas time, some humans time travel back from the future to the present. They claim they are being hunted and killed at a very rapid rate by something that appears in the future. They are waging a war against this thing and losing badly. Like really badly. Like the future population went from over 8 billion to just 500,000 people in the entire world. So it’s pretty bad.
Now for some reason no one on future Earth has looked for a toxin to kill these things until now, when the human population is only 500,000.
The very best thing about this movie that Director Chris McKay does is the suspense he builds showing us what the hell is killing all of us. Apparently something is killing and eating us – and it takes a while before we find out what it actually is. Well the suspense builds and the reveal is really cool – it turns out to be some kind of spider / dinosaur / dog kind of creature. Kind of like you don’t know what the things are in Edge of Tomorrow, but they just showed up? Same thing here, and bullets aren’t exactly doing anything to slow them down unless you hit them directly in the head. So, yea, they are scary, and they eat us, and they move super fast and gallop large distances quickly over land, and yes they can swim really good too.
So Earth is covered with millions of these things at the point of our entry into the future, and I guess no one wants to nuke, so they go the science way and try to develop a toxin to kill them. This is the part that is like I Am Legend. Except they didn’t keep studies of other ones, they just extremely quickly create a toxin. Now so far they only have a toxin to kill males, but they want a toxin to kill both male and female before releasing it. Why, I don’t know, but that’s the plan. You would think since there are only 500,000 of us left, you would start killing the males, but that’s not happening.
Also, Chris Pratt, a high school science teacher is picked to help with the toxin. Now they pick people from present day, when there are still over 7 billion of us, so why not pick an older, accomplished scientist to help? We don’t know – but just go with it. So in a world where a high school teacher is the best we got for creating toxins to kill aliens, off we go.
The movie is not bad, it’s quite enjoyable – Chris Pratt is charming and funny as always, Mr. Simmons adds levity to it all and of course the whole family thing is heart warming. I won’t reveal that part because that’s the only good thing about this movie. Also the fact that it is free with Amazon Prime, I didn’t have to wait in lines, spend $40 on snacks – makes this movie a good choice for a family night if everyone is over 16 and can handle scary alien creatures eating people.
