138 min | PG-13 | July 2, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A future war against aliens is losing, so the military drafts civilians from the present and sends them forward in time to fight. A schoolteacher gets conscripted into a battle his future self is already part of. The hook is sharp, and the movie spends two hours dulling it.
Dan Forester is a high school science teacher who wants a research job and gets passed over. Then soldiers from 2051 arrive in the middle of a televised soccer match to announce that humanity is losing a war against an alien species and needs reinforcements pulled from the past. Dan gets drafted and jumps thirty years forward into a fight that is already lost. The Tomorrow War wants to be a war movie, a creature feature, and a story about a father reconciling with the daughter he abandons. It is too busy juggling those modes to commit to any of them, and the time-travel premise functions as a delivery system for set pieces rather than an idea the film actually thinks about.
Chris Pratt plays Dan with the same affable competence he brings to every role, which works against a script that keeps insisting the stakes are personal. Yvonne Strahovski plays Colonel Muri Forester, the adult version of Dan’s young daughter, and she grounds the middle stretch with a controlled grief that the surrounding chaos does not earn. Their scenes in a research lab generate the only real tension in the film. J.K. Simmons plays Dan’s estranged father James as a survivalist with a chip on his shoulder, and he chews through his few scenes with more menace than the aliens manage. Sam Richardson plays Charlie, the nervous scientist drafted alongside Dan, and his comic timing exposes how flat everyone around him is written.
Chris McKay directs his first live-action feature after animation work, and the seams show in the action geography. The creatures, called Whitespikes, attack in swarms shot with strobing cuts and shaky handheld coverage that obscures the spatial logic of every fight. Zach Dean’s script stacks one premise on top of another until the third act abandons the war entirely for a snowbound expedition that belongs to a different movie. The production design gives the future a generic gray-rubble look with no specificity. Only the final volcano sequence, lit in cold blue against the white creatures, achieves a composed image worth remembering.
The Tomorrow War assembles parts from better films and never figures out what it is building. The time-travel mechanics raise questions the script refuses to engage. The emotional core, a father trying to be worthy of his daughter, gets buried under exposition and ordnance. There is a lean, frightening alien-invasion movie inside this one, and a sharper story about the present sacrificing the future inside that. Neither survives contact with the machinery built around them.