We Agree: The Tomorrow War

2021, d. Chris McKay -- amazonprime

As Toasty referenced in his review I have a theory that The Tomorrow War was originally intended as a trilogy but then had its trilogy compressed all compressed into one film.

While there is something to be said about compressed storytelling, this jumps far too fast through both the themes and story, and narratively each act takes a sharp 90 degree turn from the previous.

The first act is really strong. It sets up Pratt as a veteran who is trying to find a good job in the sciences but is relegated to teaching, and he's discontent. He's got a wonderful family (Betty Gilpin in a thankless wife role), but is estranged from his father (JK Simmons), a Viet Nam vet who abandoned him when he was younger. 

Suddenly one evening soldiers arrive (literally in the middle of a football game) from the future, explaining their plight, and recruiting people across the globe to come fight an invasive alien species three decades ahead in time. 

A year later all the acceptable volunteers (the people who can be moved to the future without disrupting the timeline) have been exhausted (read: killed in battle, wounded, or traumatized), and now a draft finds Pratt on the block.  He meets his squad, a couple military (including some Tomorrow War) veterans, but mostly hapless civilians.  They're given no training.  There's no time for training. They head to the future on a mission that goes very, very poorly.

The alien "white spikes" are seriously scary in this first act. The whole first 45-ish minutes builds in creepy, uneasy intensity until we encounter them.  While they're not  completely unstoppable, they are very difficult to kill and they move in such large numbers making the odds always in their favor. 

The draftees are basically stopgaps, bodies meant to buy time for other, more experienced combat teams.  There's a stomach churning sense that so many lives are disposable, but when it comes to war it's less about humanity and more about numbers.  Comedic personas like Nick Wiger, Sam Richardson and Mary Lynn Rajskub make the center of this crew, and once again, if this first act were an entire film, there would be more action sequences, with more pauses to really build these characters out, build up their comraderie, and really make some of their deaths very impactful.

But, the film as it is moves pretty briskly past most of that.  In failing in their objective, with Pratt as one of the few survivors, he his daughter's future self, the woman in charge of his mission.

Thus the second act begins with the daughter and her father from whom she has been estranged bonding over both science and life and death situations, with Pratt learning that he eventually became like his own father.  They dance around why she's so upset with him for only so long, but I like the concept of exploring generational trauma, how JK Simmons' Viet Nam trauma impacted Pratt, and thus how Pratt's various service trauma impacted his daughter, all with repeating patterns (likely Simmons' father served in WWII and had his own trauma).

But the film though casting a glance at exploring generational trauma has no time to really get into it.  The production is all done well enough that we can feel the emotional connection as well as the hurt, but it never gets deep enough.

This second act also completely defangs the "white spikes".  They capture one of the creatures at the beginning of the act and then proceed to experiment on it, but this study of the creature is competing for time with the father-daughter issues, as well as the ticking clock of their base about to be swarmed.

There's room enough for an entire film in this second act.  Not only could it expand upon its secondary characters from the previous act (who were all either killed or sent off on their own mission(s) which we never, ever see) but it could really work through the discovery process on the white spikes zoologically.  I could see a whole mission which is just "observe and report" that would be less action, more suspense.  A slower breakdown of the aliens could also still potentially maintain their scariness, instead of having to broad-daylight them as much as they do here.  By the end the white spikes are more white noise than the stuff of nightmares.

The third act find Pratt returning home to his own time, and it's clear he's been traumatized by his experience.  The prediction that he becomes like his own father starts to manifest, but it's almost like it's a dismissive montage rather than a genuine exploration of PTSD.  Not only should there be scarring, and grieving, but also a pervasive sense of hopelessness for a moribund future (hey, sound familiar?).  

If this were a full third film, it could really get into these themes of trauma and nihilism and their impact upon the family.  It could have done some really good work in showing what soldiers with PTSD need to go through to maybe never recover, but just cope.  It could examine the way society treats its veterans, and work it all into a big action franchise.

What this third act does instead is really smooth over the trauma, reconcile Pratt and Simmons far too easily, and reconnect with characters last seen at the start of the second act in an almost superfluous way.  There was a real opportunity to show men dealing with their problems, and emotions, together, and they completely muffed it.  

[Minor spoiler]

The third act reveals that the aliens are dormant in the modern day, frozen under ice.  So Pratt and Simmons and others form a plan to go blow them up.  This "plan" is all discovered, conceived, and initiated in less than ten minutes.  There's no sense of build up, there's no tension, only inevitability.  The film has no runway to get into Pratt and Simmon's relationship, or Pratt and Gilpin's marriage, never mind deliver any sense of adventure to their discovery. 

In its own film the search, the discovery and the planning/execution could handily satisfy three acts, and do some incredible world building along the way. We never get to really feel the impact of time travel on the "present day" of the film.   We never really get to feel the effects of so many lives lost on a war that seems far more conceptual than tangible.  We really don't get to know what the people left behind experience.  The film we have has no time for it.

The third act should resolve the emotional connective threads, and it picks at it a bit, but amid its action focus it doesn't have time to really dig into it.

As a whole The Tomorrow War is decent yet unsatisfying entertainment.  The first act is stellar but followed up with diminishing returns, unable to deliver on all the threads it sets up.  It needed another 8 more acts to really flesh it all out.

I also think that Gilpin and Pratt should have switched roles.  I think the film would have worked far better with her in the lead.  Have you seen The Hunt, she can hold down an action film no problem.