Movie Breakdown: The Tomorrow War (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
Chris Pratt hasn’t done anything remarkable in the gaps between his Marvel work. And let me tell you, from the tentacle-y monsters and the slo-mo Chris Pratt screaming into the void shots of the trailer, this looks far from remarkable.
Post-Screening Ramble:
The core concept of The Tomorrow War is so poorly developed and so poorly executed the rest of the movie really doesn’t have much of a chance. So, in the future, a bunch of scary, thorn shooting, ape-octopuses are hunting humans. To fight them, the future humans go back year and years in the past to recruit the past humans of that era. Chris Pratt’s Dan, a super-ripped data scientist, is one of these recruited humans. But here’s the thing, instead of training the recruits – mostly sad-seeming middle aged folks – the future soldiers just give them guns, a forty-eight hour notice and then drop them (literally drop them, like thousand of humans just falling from the sky, impaling themselves on fences and the sides of buildings) into the midst of scary ape-octopus land. More so they aren’t told anything about the monsters they’re about to face. They are given ZERO details about the flailing ape-octopuses that are built only to kill them. Instead, they’re just handed an assault rifle, sucked through a ceiling pool with a hope and prayer. As you might imagine – they don’t do very well. Which would be fine, if anyone in the film ever mentioned that the plan wasn’t so hot. But they don’t, they just keep sucking people through the ceiling pool to their doom. And if the movie was interesting, if Chris Pratt’s persona of oafish stud wasn’t so lacking in charisma, if the story wasn’t just a shaky rehash of Predator and time machine movies, if Betty Gilpin wasn’t so thoroughly wasted in the role of Chris Pratt’s wife, if, if, if, maybe the movie could glide past the glaring dumbness of the plot. But it isn’t, this is every big, explosion-filled sci-fi film of the last forty years stitched together into a redundant mass that shuffles along, ticking off boxes until it ends. The plot of the film isn’t really a plot, it’s a device. Every choice, every droning bit of exposition, every sci-fi conundrum is just a means to sloppily push the characters from one scene to the next. And yes, Betty Gilpin is wasted, horribly so, stripped of any character and instead pushed into the role of “crying, sad lady”. It’s a mess. One you should avoid.
One Last Thought:
The monsters in this are, to their credit, very scary. They have an almost stop-motion animation feel to them and it gives them this jittery, unstoppable presence that is very unsettling. The long intro to the creatures with Sam Richardson trying to kill one in a staircase is pretty terrifying.
