Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Aliens have attacked earth in the future, requiring the military to draft soldiers from the past, including a lot of lazy 40-somethings.
About: The Tomorrow War was written by Black List mainstay Zach Dean. It was supposed to be his entry into the big-budget Hollywood world. But then the pandemic came around, forcing the producers to rethink their strategy. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can tell you with 100% certainty what happened. They knew they had a dud. They knew this movie was D.O.A. in theaters. Streamer money was being thrown at them. They chalked up their losses, sold the film, and ran far far away from this abomination.
Writer: Zach Dean
Details: 140 minutes?????
Wow. We’ve got a Fourth of July doozy here. The state of science-fiction cinema is up in the air after this cinematic travesty. There are lame movies. There are bad movies. And then there are movies that become infamous for their awfulness. Is this Battlefield Earth bad? I don’t know. I’ve never seen that film. But something tells me that if I watched the two of them side by side, I would risk permanent brain damage.
Going to keep this summary short and sweet. Chris Pratt is a science teacher with a wife and young daughter. 30 soldiers who claim to be from the future but I’m pretty sure came from that 2017 Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial show up at a globally televised soccer game to tell the world they need army recruits to fight aliens in the future.
Chris Pratt, along with a bunch of out-of-shape 40-somethings, are given the minimal amount of info before being vortexed into the future. There they fight big white alien creatures in a destroyed Miami.
Chris is then called in by a general who happens to be his daughter, all grown up. She recruited Chris because he’s a scientist and she thinks science will defeat these things. She and Chris then kidnap a “queen” alien so they can study it on a remote barge. They try to figure out how science can defeat these aliens but fail.
This sends Chris back to the past, where he hugs the young version of his daughter and then recruits his father, who’s not from the future to go to Antarctica and destroy the aliens before they can take over the world. The end.
One of the frustrating criticisms of criticism is, “Oh my God, loosen up. It’s a movie!” I understand this criticism. Hell, I’ve used it many times myself when people criticize movies I like such as A Quiet Place, Wonder Woman, and It. Some movies are meant to be fun. They aren’t meant to be judged like Minari.
I get it. The suspension of disbelief threshold is different for every audience member. But one thing is certain. When you want your movie to be taken seriously, more will be demanded of your narrative, more will be demanded of your characters, more of your plot, and more of your mythology. If everyone in your movie is playing it straight, you better have the writing to back it up.
The Tomorrow War does not have the writing to back it up.
Let me just take you through an early section of Tomorrow War.
First off, the future army recruits out of shape 40 year olds to be soldiers. They justify this by saying they have to draft older people because they need them to be dead by the time they show up in the future, or else they risk a paradox, which of course makes no sense. But if you buy into it, you next learn that the soldiers will not be participating in training.
Let me get this straight: You’re taking out-of-shape older people who have never done so much as a push-up in their life and sending them off WITHOUT TRAINING to take on the most powerful enemy earth has ever seen?
Seeing any holes here?
It gets better. When it’s time to send the people to the future, they space them out on a gym floor, suck them up into a ceiling vortex, then drop them into a city from 10,000 feet in the air. We watch as 90% of these “soldiers” fall to their death. The only ones who make it are Chris Pratt and a few others, who survive because they happen to fall over a building with a 10 foot deep swimming pool on the roof. Not sure when 10 foot swimming pools were able to break 10,000 foot falls but okay.
Question. Why didn’t the soldiers who sent them to the future prepare them for this? Why are the soldiers finding out ON THE FLY that they’re arriving in the future 10,000 feet above the city? And, oh yeah, minor question here. If the future army knew this, um, just thinking off the top of my head here, why not maybe, oh, I don’t know, outfit everyone with a parachute?
There’s actually a bigger screenwriting discussion to be had about this. I read a lot of screenplays that involve people going to war. Whether it’s a war in the past, a war in the present, a war in the future – I read this plot all the time. And what always trips screenwriters up is training. Because, in reality, in order to become a soldier, you need to train. But training takes time. Ten weeks for most soldiers. And the writer doesn’t want to lose story momentum. They just want to get to the damn war. So they always fudge this section or speed through it or, for the writers who actually try, throw together a quick montage. They don’t want to deal with the reality of basic training since it’s in the way of the story they want to tell.
This is one of the laziest treatments of this problem I’ve ever seen. They literally just ignore it. Someone says, “You won’t be training,” and then walks away, lol. People… bad Hollywood directors… you have to put some effort into this stuff. It’s not hard. If you don’t want training, rewrite your story so that they’re only using military vets. “But we want to show that it’s so dire they have to use average people to fight,” the dingbats on this production would argue. Well then train them. Make it HALFWAY fucking believable.
Cause when you’ve got an overweight 43 year old office worker who’s never fired a gun before trusted to kill the fiercest beast in the galaxy, what are we even doing? Why even waste the particles required to send him to the future if he’s doubled over after jogging ten paces? Why would you think any halfway intelligent person would buy into this?
One thing that didn’t help was how disastrous the directing was. From the awful special effects (was that early city shot created by a film student using a 2003 copy of Photoshop 9?) to the terrible acting to the Directing 101 scene-blocking to the uninspired shot-framing to the overwhelming lack of vision.
But there was one moment in particular that infuriated me. Chris Pratt gets an emergency text in the middle of class so he walks over, picks up his phone… AND PROCEEDS TO POINT THE PHONE’S SCREEN DIRECTLY TO THE CAMERA.
You may see this as insignificant. But, to me, this embodied everything that was wrong with this movie. Good directors pay attention to detail and are obsessed with making everything look and feel believable. If it’s not believable, the audience will check out.
So either one of two things happened here. One, the director was so lazy that he didn’t even attempt to make it look like the actor was looking at his phone. That’s egregious in itself. But worse is option two: he was so terrified that the audience might miss the text that he committed to the 1,000,000x over-the-top choice of pointing the phone directly at the camera to make sure audiences got it. This despite the fact that THE AUDIENCE DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO SEE THE TEXT! This is a 2nd Grade Movie Concept. We know how it works. Something bad has happened, something the actor is going to talk about in 30 seconds, reiterating what we just saw on the phone. So why the fuck are you so obsessed with showing us this meaningless exposition-heavy message on the phone????
Go ahead. Check it out yourself. It occurs at 13.27 in the movie. It’s embarrassing.
Did anything at all work?
Bits and pieces of the father-daughter relationship worked. That was the one part of the script that had potential. You’re sent into the future to fight a war and your commanding officer is your daughter, who, five hours ago, was eight years old. That’s a cool idea. And it happened to be the only actor interaction in the entire movie that had chemistry. Every other scene felt like the actors met each other 2 minutes before cameras started rolling, which was probably what happened.
I also thought the aliens were cool. It’s hard to come up with cool aliens. And while I wouldn’t call these aliens groundbreaking, they were better than the aliens in Edge of Tomorrow. There was a scene, early on, where one of the aliens is coming at us in a hallway, using the floor, walls, and ceiling, to maneuver towards us, that was genuinely scary.
But that was it. Everything else in this movie was so bad, so embarrassing. The only good thing to come out of it was that this abomination didn’t make it into theaters. If it did, it might’ve seriously hurt Chris Pratt’s career. Since it’s streaming, nobody will bat at eye. I actually feel bad for Chris. One of the hardest things to do in this business is promote a movie you know is terrible because everyone knows you’re lying to them. And that doesn’t feel good. I think he’s hoping this disappears quickly.
If it sounds like I’m being harsh on this movie, it’s only because I’m desperate for a good sci-fi film. I could tell this wasn’t going to be great from the trailers but I was hoping it would at least be enjoyable. It wasn’t only unenjoyable, it was a disaster.
[x] One of the worst sci-fi action movies I’ve ever seen
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to the military and how they operate: DO YOUR RESEARCH. They have a very particular and specific way of operating that if you don’t know intimately, your script will come off as clueless and fake and dumb and lazy, which is what happens here. I don’t like to do research either. But it’s your job as the writer ESPECIALLY if that’s what your movie is about. I understand doing minimal research if the military is 10% of your movie. But 100%? And you don’t even want to figure out how basic training works? Shame on you.
