The Tomorrow War and the Battle Against Stupid
Relying Chris Pratt to Save the World is, Apparently, a Very Bad Idea
The Tomorrow War on Amazon Prime is an aggressively stupid movie. It walks in carrying a fairly interesting sci-fi premise, sets that premise on the floor, and then proceeds to squat down and defecate on that premise for two hours while maintaining eye contact with you.
That premise is, admittedly, kind of fun. One day a group of battle-scarred soldiers materialize and announce they are from the future, where a war with an invasive alien species called the Whitespikes is going so poorly there’s only about half a million humans left on Earth. Luckily, they’ve developed time travel technology, so there’s a solution: Start beaming humans from the past into the future to shore up the front lines1.
Nifty! Dumb, but not, you know, defecate-on-the-floor dumb. Just regular Hollywood sci-fi dumb.
Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester, a former Green Beret who teaches high school biology but yearns for a flashier career2. He adores his wife, Emmy (Betty Gilpin) and daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), though3. Some time after the initial arrival of Future Troops, Dan gets drafted. He has a sleeve of future technology painfully attached to his arm, and he’s told that he’ll be dead in seven years—the movie makes explicit the fact that the military is drafting folks who are dead in order to avoid paradoxes. They also make it clear via some Acceptable Quantum Bullshit Science (AQBS)4 that time travel is only possible between two fixed points that advance simultaneously into the future, so people can’t simply be beamed into any time that might be convenient5.
And then things get really, really dumb. And the dumbness is a series of self-owns so obvious it’s worth going through them to demonstrate how easily this could have achieved mediocrity instead of outright failure. NOTE: I’m going to spoil this movie. I’m going to enjoy spoiling this movie6. If you, for obscure reasons all you’re own, wish to remain unspoiled about this movie, stop reading now and go seek the help you need.
Spoilers, Ho!
Wait—did you see about the spoilers? Because I am not kidding. I’m going to totally and completely spoil this movie in the next few paragraphs in order to celebrate how stupid it is. So if you blew past that warning and now you’re about to destroy your Tomorrow War innocence, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
So, Dan is drafted to go fight the Whitespikes in the future a while after the initial announcement that we’re all boned in the future. It’s a significant length of time, because the world has united behind this effort and there’s an advanced infrastructure for the draft process, and there’s plenty of statistical evidence that the war continues to go very, very badly for humanity. Even though most of the recruits don’t return—or return badly injured—few people seem to run. So far, so good. Now, if you were running a nation when all this information about a future apocalypse came down the pike, you might imagine a conversation like this:
PRESIDENT: Well, the first group we’re sending out should be composed of combat veterans or active-duty military who fit the criteria (that is, they’ll be dead in the future anyway).
JOINT CHIEF: Uh-huh.
PRESIDENT: And we should start training everyone.
JOINT CHIEF: Uh—wait, what?
PRESIDENT: We should start mandatory training for all eligible future recruits. Physical conditioning, weapons training. And let’s issue some executive orders to get proper equipment made for them—body armor, etc.
JOINT CHIEF: Ha ha, LOL, no.
PRESIDENT: What?
JOINT CHIEF: Ha ha, good one, sir. No, we’re just going to give them a couple of days of light briefings, hand them a gun and some random utility belt shit, then blast them into the future killing fields. Should work a charm.
Yes, that is what happens. Despite knowing full well that millions of people are going to be funneled into the future to fight fearsome aliens that have destroyed humanity, absolutely no effort is made to train the schoolteachers, accountants, and mail carriers being dragged into this effort. And they’re all basically handed an automatic rifle and, I don’t know, a stress relief ball, maybe. Mall security guards get more training than humanity’s last hope. It’s so stupid it hurts7.
You Seem so ... Familiar
In the future, Dan immediately gets a mission, fights some aliens, and falls under the command of an intense blonde woman holding the rank of colonel, played by Yvonne Strahovski. Literally from the moment she contacts Dan over the radio and Strahovski shows up, I started praying that she wouldn’t turn out to be his daughter, Muri. I mean, no sci-fi story in 2021 would be so dumb as to use the hoariest, most obvious cliched plot twist. It’s unpossible.
Friends, it was not unpossible8.
We then get treated to a parade of sci-fi cliches I thought well-buried. In this disastrous future where there are literally fewer than 500,000 humans alive ... humanity somehow has cobbled together your typical high-tech labs, clean and well-powered, on well-defended floating cities made form old drilling platforms and cruise ships9. Except they’re not that well-defended, because the moment the plot requires it, the Whitespikes tear through those defenses like paper, something they had simply chosen not to do before this precise moment for alien reasons. In the real world my local community has trouble keeping the power on when it rains, but the rump of humanity, with all supply chains and processing plants destroyed, somehow has no trouble powering a small city in the middle of the ocean, in the midst of an alien invasion. Tomorrow War Fuck Yeah AMIRIGHT!
By this point, Dan has received two pieces of disturbing information10. First, he knows he dies in seven years (from his present). And two, he apparently turns into quite the asshole before he does, as his daughter has bitter memories, there was a divorce, etc. Just as his daughter—a brilliant biologist, just like him!—creates a toxin that can decimate the Whitespikes, the lab is destroyed along with the time travel technology. Dan travels back to the present at the last second, holding a sample of the toxin, but without the ability to travel back to the future it’s useless.
PRESIDENT: You mean we didn’t immediately start building backup time travel equipment? What are we, stupid?
JOINT CHIEF: Causality? Paradoxes?
PRESIDENT: LOL you’re sending a toxin back from the future to be mass produced in the past.
JOINT CHIEF: Get out. This is a coup.
Dan despairs, and for a brief moment the film flirts with a much more interesting story. Is Dan trapped by fate? Is he doomed to become a violent dick and become estranged from his family because he’s burdened by the knowledge that humanity’s future ends as food for alien monsters, and that he came really close to saving the world, only to fail at the last second?
LOL, no.
Because, you see, this is a traditional narrative centered on a very traditional protagonist. Sure, the whole world has come together to fight an existential threat, but in a story like this the protagonist, Dan Forester, must be essential to saving the world. He has to be instrumental. He has to be The One11. The entire plot, rickety and ridiculous as it is, is an engine designed to spit Dan out in a place where he can have the revelation12 and be in a position to take action on it. In other words, he has to be the hero.
And suddenly, the bad plotting and dumb ideas make more sense. This isn’t a sleek German-engineered plot engine, this is a Rube Goldberg Machine made from chewing gum and some of those old Sipping Birds. It grinds on for far longer than necessary, it often seems about to explode and/or collapse, but in the end it spits that character right where he needs to be.
Okay, I lied to you. Take a moment to recover from the shock. I won’t, for reasons beyond my understanding, spoil the ultimate end of the movie for you. It isn’t much smarter than the rest of the movie (and is, kind of, an entirely different mood altogether), but if you do decide to watch this thing, you can at least enjoy some slight uncertainty going into the ending. If that’s what you’re into.
Of course, I can be salty about all this because I know that if there ever was a Tomorrow War, my frail ass would never be drafted due to my people’s roach-like near-immortality and my complete lack of physical skills13.
Next week: The greatest scene in television history.
If the premise interests you, read Julian May’s Pliocene Exile Saga, which begins with the premise that in the future, folks who can’t fit into modern society are transported into the Pliocene Epoch, six millions years past — a time before human civilization, where they can do whatever they want without affecting history. When they arrive they discover a thriving alien civilization, and shit gets wonderfully complicated from there. I can’t recommend those books enough, and they are about a billion times smarter than this trash.
In case you’re not paying attention, this is Writing By Numbers rule 334: Make your hero a trained killing machine who also loves children and learning. This way underwear on both genders bursts into flame. Or would, if said hero wasn’t played by Chris Pratt, who has the charisma of a burrito.
And thus we exhaust the list of acceptable love objects for male heroes in too many stories: Their hot blonde wife and their adorable blonde daughter. The only other person Dan even smirks at in this film is your standard-issue Fumbler Dan treats like a pet dog.
Being an expert practitioner in AQBS myself (one of my novels literally ends with the characters returning to a previous moment in time, meaning the entire story never happened), I can’t say anything negative here.
The fact that the screenwriters thought they needed to explain this aspect of the time travel to us using a surprisingly effective water metaphor and yet treat the rest of the story like written Play-Doh is both amusing and enraging.
I do not, in my personal life, fear spoilers. If a story can’t survive being spoiled, then it is not a good story. That being said, I don’t judge folks who want to avoid spoilers, because I am a benevolent god.
As you can see, this movie made me physically angry. And generally speaking I’m a man who experiences anger as a fleeting, easily forgotten moment. When I was 20 I saw Hook in the theaters and that movie made me so angry I can still taste the bile. This movie is a close second.
I should have applied my own Law of Conservation of Characters here. If I had, it would have been obvious, because why bother creating a whole new character who might need, you know, their own back story and identity when you can just fast-grow another character? But Zach Dean got paid to write this. I’m starting to wonder if I’m the dumb one. Don’t answer that.
Also, in a world overrun with hungry aliens, there is a surprising amount of down time available for intense, emotional conversations.
You can tell they’re disturbing because Chris Pratt looks a bit grumpy in these scenes.
They even put a little hat on this plot point and make it do a charming little dance when Dan’s daughter tell shim she specifically brought him to the future for a reason.
To be fair, in a nod towards the fact that women exist, it’s Dan’s wife who actually has the revelation. At which point he pats her on the head and says I’ll take it from here, little lady. No, of course not, but the fact that you entertained that possibility for just a moment speaks volumes.
For example, while writing this essay I was eating peanuts and a nut slipped out of my hand and fell on the floor and I reached down to pick it up and wrenched something in my back and now I’m doubled over typing this on the floor. In short, if aliens invade, throw me at them to slow them down.
The minute they started dropping their own soldiers into a nice hard-surfaced urban setting so that most of them would die upon impact...
It was such a stupid script. I don;t understand how such a thing gets passed through so many hands getting the OK for huge sums of money, without someone saying "hey, wait a minute... can we clean up some of this story?" Did I mention agai the HUGE sums of money they put into such beasts?