A Buncha Short Paragraphs: The Tomorrow War

 2021, Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie) -- Amazon

I really should write up the posts for these highly promoted, streaming service blockbusters as they come out. It would just seem more relevant. But I hesitated on saying anything about this incredibly mediocre flick, as I was hoping an opinion would germinate. But really, the only thing that stands out in my mind was a comment by Ken't (not a typo, just his Kryptonian name), in that this movie was made with three movies in mind, each act being incredibly distinct from the other. I will let him expand on that.

Dan Forester (Chris Pratt, Her) is a veteran, a family man, and not being very successful at finding meaningful work, despite being a popular biology teacher. And then the youngsters from the future arrive. They tell the world of an invasion by aliens called the Whitespikes (not the Jack & Meg White band) who are successfully wiping humanity out. They ask for, and get help, sending 2022's military into the future to assist. It doesn't help, so they start drafting average people. Dan is one of those draftees. Dan is the main character, he will save the future.

Act One. The draft is ludicrous, as they just grab up a bunch of civilians, shove whatever guns they have handy into their hands, and send them to the future. If they survive seven days, they can come home, with a brand new type of PTSD. Dan's jump suffers a glitch and drops the civilians from high in the sky above Miami, and only those who land in the roof top swimming pool survive. The resulting mission is to just introduce us to the Whitespikes, weird white coloured lizardy bug-y tentacly things that shoot (ahem) spikes from their tentacles. This encounter scene is exciting, tense and more than a little foolish. While they complete their mission, only Dan and a few others (out of a thousand?) survive.

Act Two. Dan meets the future miltary led by Colonel Forester (Yvonne Strahovski, I, Frankenstein), yep you guessed it, Dan's daughter all grown up. We learn how the draft works (anyone who died before the current date) and exactly how badly things are going. But taking a nod from Starship Troops they believe by taking down a single central alien, the Female, they can stop the war. But they need to capture her first, so they can make their super poison. Dan helps Colonel Daughter do so, and they transport her to an offshore safe base. That is until, the rest of her brood swims out to the base and tears everything down. Colonel Daughter's final act is to send Dan back into the past/present with the poison, so they can mass manufacture it, and perhaps eliminate the Whitespikes before they have a hit album. The time machine is destroyed in this final act.

Act Three. Dan has even a newer more powerful PTSD in his back pocket, when he and his wife conceive of an idea that the Whitespikes have been here all along, and something in 2048 revealed them -- perhaps polar ice caps melting? With the remaining future youngsters, and Dan's estranged father (scarily buff JK Simmons, Palm Springs) they hunt down and find the alien ship frozen in ice and blow it up good, but not before releasing the toxin in the alien ship.

When Act Two ended, I noticed the time left on the movie, and was rather surprised they were going for a third act. This final act, as opposed to Colonel Daughter's final act, seemed entirely tacked on. There was so much that could have been explored, if this had been a movie on it's own, as Ken't postulated, but like pretty much the rest of the movie, all the interesting stuff was left out to compress all these ideas into a single movie. What we ended up with was a definitely exciting movie, but not one even as coherent as the comparative Starship Troopers. There are some great characters never explored, some great ideas barely hinted at, and so much potential just abandoned.