Massive spoilers ahead! Let's not let bother with hiding spoilers. Let's get it all out in the open! Just watched, "The Tomorrow War" and man was it super dumb but entertaining enough. Here's what kills me. At the end of the movie Chris Pratt's character's wife theorizes that the aliens are already on Earth which then leads to Pratt and his buddies and one of his high school students (YEP!), figuring out where the aliens are frozen in ice. That is, in and of itself hilariously silly but what I really love, and by love I mean what I really think is dumb is that ostensibly nobody in the future stumbled across this same theory! After fighting the aliens for three years nobody in 2052 figured out where the aliens ship was located or when it landed but the Pratt gang piece it together in no time flat! Also the 2052 solution to fighting the aliens was to somehow learn that time travel can actually happen and then BUILD A FORKING TIME MACHINE at a time when the planet is being overrun by aliens and then the big plan was to go back in time and draft a bunch of civilians with ZERO training to throw at the aliens and hope for the best! On the flip side the 2022 people decided, "hey let's just figure out where the aliens are before they attacked in the future and kill them now before all of this starts!" Why in the world didn't any of the 2052 people have this idea? Even if the 2052 people didn't know where the aliens were located in the past why wasn't their plan to travel back to 2022 and find the aliens before they attacked rather than recruiting a FORKING SOUP CHEF to fight the aliens?!?!? Hahahahahaahahaha!!! In fairness after the 2022 people learned about the alien invasion in the future they initially DID NOT look for the alien ship and blow it up before everything goes to hell in the future. Instead they IMMEDIATELY SIGN UP TO TRAVEL TO THE FUTURE AND FIGHT THE ALIENS THAT THEY HAVE NO ACTUAL PROOF EVEN EXIST!!! Amazing! The 2022 people don't even know what the aliens look like in the future. All the world leaders just went, "Welp! Did you hear what those random people said at the World Cup? I'm convinced! Let's do this thang!!!" We live in a world where people don't believe COVID-19 is real and yet this movie posits that the world leaders were sold on the idea of a future alien invasion! Let's get back to the time machine! In real life COVID has had a massive impact on supply chains and as a result people can't even find a new Playstation 5 on shelves. But in "The Tomorrow War" the alien invasion that has whittled the population down to half a million people hasn't gotten in the way of these folks CREATING A TIME MACHINE!!! I love it. Another thing. A significant amount of time is devoted to Pratt and his daughter in the future creating a toxin to destroy the aliens. Eventually the toxin is created and Pratt and his buddies use it to kill maybe...five or six aliens AND THEN THEY JUST C4 THE REST OF THEM OUT OF EXISTENCE!!! Love it!!! Hahahaha! Why did they bother with the toxin at all? Why wasn't the plan to go back to 2022 and C4 all the aliens while they slept?!?! Forget the toxin! Hell if Pratt and his buddies did that instead of injecting a few of the aliens then none of the Pratt gang would've been killed! At least more of them would've probably survived if they skipped out on poisoning five of the aliens which woke up the colony. Creating the toxin arguably got MORE people killed than if they just blew the ship up in the first place. There are a zillion other super dumb things about this movie but the above are my favorites. Can't wait for the sequel! I'm guessing we'll learn that there was more than one ship frozen in the ice.
For a film with so many things wrong with its plot, it was actually pretty entertaining. And the aliens were a nice design. But yeah, the future folks were really stupid. Okay, even if you don't want to change the timeline by going back and destroying the alien ship before the war even happened, there are much better strategies than "throw craploads of untrained infantry at it". Have we learned nothing from WWI? You want to use resources from the past, then fine - why not get everyone building bombers and rockets for 20+ years instead of pulling people out of their time in a stupid draft? Also, they know the aliens are susceptible to fire, right? But then they go into all the trouble building their central command fortress thing in the middle of the ocean... and NOT install giant burners on top of the perimeter walls in case the aliens swarm them? Or, you know, dump a lot of oil around the base and set it on fire?
Does anybody actually say, "we, the people of 2052, don't want to change the timeline because changing the timeline will wipe us out of existence?" I was waiting for that explanation but I don't think we ever got. Even if we did it wouldn't make a lot of sense since the aliens are about kill every single human on the planet. If you change the timeline then yes, the future that we see in 2052 will disappear but on the bright side humanity won't go extinct! If the 2052 people didn't want to disrupt the timeline then that means the future people are asking the 2022 people to sacrifice their lives so that the 2052 people will survive but the 2052 weren't willing to sacrifice their lives so that the 2022 people will continue to exist. But again none of that matters because I don't think anybody actually states that they can't change timeline. Also...they ARE trying to change the timeline. Chris Pratt's daughter's whole plan was to send the toxin back to the past which would change the future which, again was a super dumb plan because they could've skipped over creating the toxin and gone back to 2022 and blown up the aliens when they were still in hibernation. Instead of sending thousands of 2022 people to their death this whole nightmare could've been avoided if they let Chris Pratt's wife and high school student and Pratt's two buddies spitball some ideas for a day. Boom. Problem solved.
I kind of see this as being the dumber B-movie counterpart to Edge of Tomorrow - still fun, but not nearly as clever or consistent.
As a fan of the Doughboys podcast, my only interest in this movie is that Mike Mitchell is in it -- but, as I understand it, he's not in it very much. Also, I really don't get Chris Pratt as stoic action star. Seems too much of a departure from Chris Pratt as cocky, plucky, and vaguely dumb everyman.
The transformation of Chris Pratt from lovable sidekick type with excellent comic timing to chiseled/sculpted action hunk has to be one of the more memorable career makeovers in cinema history. He and Jason Momoa are pretty much it in terms of classic action stars for that generation in terms of not having been completely gobbled up by Marvel/DC.
When the aliens come back in the sequel they need to have the volcano kid and Chris Pratt’s wife on speed dial!
The time travel elements don't exactly hold up that much but I do like how bleak it is, even if they don't state it, that the future where his daughter came from literally dies in fire and alien eating the entire population. That straight up happened, we saw it happen The alien design is probably the best stuff about it, very nasty, very Aliens-inspired, felt really unstoppable. Best bit was when Pratt injected the alien in the arm with the killer serum and it bit the damn thing off and kept on going.
