I saw The Tomorrow War on Amazon Prime Video late last night. Some myopic critics gave it mixed reviews. I thought it was just excellent. And not because of the time travel, which was ok, but because of the unfolding plot of the movie, which brings in interstellar species, climate change, and parent-child relationships in an original and rewarding way.
The time travel set-up is the most ordinary part of the movie. Humans from the future come back to our time to recruit soldiers to help in a desperate, losing fight against a species from outer space that moves around here on Earth so quickly they're very difficult to kill. Severing their heads from their body does the trick, but that's tough to do when dozens of these creatures are on screeching lightning attack for every one human soldier. So ... former Green Beret and biology teacher Dan Forester is sent pretty much on a suicide mission to maybe briefly delay the extinction of humanity when he's recruited aka yanked from 2022 and whipped three decades into the future.
Until he meets his daughter, Muri, whom he last hugged when she was a precocious little girl, now in the future a fighting colonel and a brilliant scientist working on some last hopes for humanity. Here's where the movie takes off. The relationship between the embattled Muri and her father is heart-rending and beautiful. Dan helps her develop a toxin that can kill the horrific creatures, but of course all they have is a small amount of it, so the only way it can save the day is for Dan to go back in time and kill the Whitespikes (that's their name) right after they first arrived.
But when did they arrive? Much earlier than anyone thought. And here I'll leave this recounting of the narrative, on the slight chance that you're reading this and haven't seen the movie.*[footnote spoiler] But the location and time of the interstellar arrival and why the monsters took so long to emerge is a compelling slice of cli-fi.
Meanwhile, the action scenes -- the battles with the Whitespikes -- are breathtaking and top notch. Yvonne Strahovski -- who was excellent in Dexter and 24: Live Another Day -- was even better as Muri in The Tomorrow War. J. K. Simmons is a pleasure to see in any role, and he was perfect as Dan's estranged father. And Chris Pratt was fine as Dan, reminding me at times of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
My advice: forget about the nitpicking critics. Sit back and enjoy an adrenaline pumping, thought provoking, A-1 summer science fiction movie.
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*I will say, for people who saw the movie, that we could call the world in which Dan goes into the future, before he destroys the Whitespikes, World 1. In that world, the adult Muri dies. The destruction of the Whitespikes instantly shifts World 1 into World 2, where the narrative concludes with Dan reunited with his family and young Muri. She probably will become a brilliant scientist, but she won't be fighting the Whitespikes and won't be killed by them, because they no longer exist. That part of the story is the best time travel part.
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