- UK release: July 2021 (Prime Video)
- Director: Chris McKay · Writer: Zach Dean
- Studio / distributor: Skydance Media; New Republic Pictures; Amazon Studios
- Genre: Science fiction action / time-travel alien war · Runtime: 138 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World) as Dan Forester; Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck, The Handmaid’s Tale) as Colonel Muri Forester; J. K. Simmons (Whiplash, Spider-Man) as James Forester; Betty Gilpin (GLOW, The Hunt) as Emmy Forester
- Rotten Tomatoes: 52% critics / 76% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
The summer tentpole had a strange 2021. With cinemas only half-trusted again, the films built for the biggest screens have been quietly slipping out onto sofas instead, and The Tomorrow War is the clearest case yet of a picture that wants an IMAX and gets a living room. Skydance shot this as a Paramount release, then sold it to Amazon, and so a 138-minute alien-invasion blockbuster with Chris Pratt at the front arrives not with a midnight queue but with a tap of the Prime button. It is the sort of high-concept B-movie the studios used to throw at July with both hands, dressed up in a clever hook, and the question is whether the hook survives the running time.
The setup
Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is a former soldier turned high-school science teacher, frustrated that life has not handed him the bigger purpose he keeps reaching for. During a televised football match, a unit of armed strangers materialises on the pitch and announces that they are from the year 2051, where humanity is losing a war against an alien species and has roughly eleven months left before it is wiped out. A makeshift time bridge lets them conscript people from the present and send them thirty years forward to fight. The catch is grim: the draftees are ordinary civilians, the survival rate is dismal, and Dan is called up. What he finds at the other end of the jump is a future already half lost, an army running on fumes, and a commanding officer with a personal reason to want him there.
The cast
Pratt is doing the thing he does well, the likeable everyman whose jokes are a defence mechanism, and he is a comfortable anchor even when the film around him gets silly. The performance that lifts the middle stretch is Yvonne Strahovski’s Colonel Muri Forester, who carries the future-set scenes with a brittle, exhausted authority and gives the film its only real emotional current; anyone who watched her hold the screen on Chuck and then The Handmaid’s Tale will not be surprised that she is the most convincing soldier in the room. J. K. Simmons turns up in the third act as Dan’s estranged, off-grid father and walks away with every scene he is in, all gravel and survivalist swagger. Betty Gilpin has the thankless job of the wife left at home and does what she can with a part the script keeps at arm’s length.
The craft
Chris McKay comes from animation, and he stages the action with a clear eye for geography even when the budget is straining. The creatures, christened Whitespikes, are a genuinely nasty design: fast, many-limbed, and bristling with the projectile barbs that give them their name, closer to the relentless swarm of insects than the stalking single monster. Larry Fong’s photography keeps the daylight battles legible rather than the usual grey murk, and Lorne Balfe’s score does the heavy lifting under the bigger set pieces. The film is at its best in two sustained sequences, a chaotic rooftop extraction in a ruined Miami and a snowbound finale that finally lets the monsters loose in the open. It is also too long by a good twenty minutes, sagging whenever it stops to explain its own time-travel rules, which do not bear much poking.
How it stacks up
The shadow it cannot escape is Edge of Tomorrow, the smarter, leaner time-and-aliens film from a few years back, and The Tomorrow War is the blunter cousin: more sincere, less witty, fond of a speech where the other film would have made a joke. The creature warfare and the cannon-fodder-conscript premise owe an obvious debt to Starship Troopers and Aliens, and the panicked global-collapse staging recalls World War Z. It borrows freely and never quite matches any of them, but it borrows from good places, and it understands that an alien-war film lives or dies on whether the aliens are frightening. These ones are.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split is wide and familiar. Critics are unconvinced, sitting around 52%, and the complaints are fair enough: the plot is derivative, the science is nonsense, and the emotional beats are signposted long before they land. Audiences are markedly warmer at 76%, and they are responding to something real, which is that the thing is paced like a rollercoaster and delivers exactly the monster-fighting it advertises. I land closer to the audience. This is not a film that rewards close inspection of its logic, and it is not trying to be. Taken as a Saturday-night creature picture, it does the job with more conviction than its reviews suggest.
Verdict
It is overlong, its plotting is held together with string, and it never reaches the cleverness of the films it is plainly chasing. None of that stops it being a good time. The Whitespikes are a genuinely strong monster, the future-war world has just enough texture to hold the attention, Strahovski and Simmons give it real performances, and the big sequences land. It is the kind of high-concept action I will happily put on again on a wet afternoon without pretending it is more than it is. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Amazon Prime Video now, included with a Prime membership. No cinema release; this one was made for the small screen whether it meant to be or not.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: a sequel was announced not long after the film’s release, with Chris Pratt and director Chris McKay both attached to return, though it spent a long stretch in development limbo. The film’s standing has not shifted much; it remains the textbook example of the pandemic-era blockbuster that bypassed cinemas for a streaming launch, and the critic-audience gap has held. It is still streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for moderate violence, gore, threat, horror, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is an intense and prolonged scene in which two men battle an alien creature, repeatedly stabbing at it and slashing its throat in a sequence that includes fantastical blood spurts.
Threat and horror: There are several scenes of prolonged threat in which creatures menace humans.
Language: There is also infrequent strong language (‘f**k’) and milder terms (for example, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘dick’, ‘shit’, ‘bullshit’, ‘ass’, ‘God’, ‘damn’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’).
Additional issues: There are scenes of emotional upset, and mild sex references.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
