Movies: The Tomorrow War - Prime (Update: Sequel in the works!)

[The Crypto Guy]

Damn that was a good movie!

Ignore the “critics”, and their low scores. Audience reviews are high. One of the better sci fi movies i’ve seen in a long time!

Click to read more...

 

[Primary Assist]

My opinion is on the opposite end of the spectrum; I really didn't like this movie and thought it was a horribly flawed piece of filmmaking.

Chris Pratt may have some fine dramatic roles under his belt, but when he's cast as the hero in a straitlaced action film he always comes up short. It's hard to take him seriously, especially when he has that same half-confused look on his face in every scene. It's fine when he does this as Star Lord, since that's part of the humor and fits perfectly with the whimsy of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but in a movie like this that takes itself too seriously it just ruins the immersion.

The pacing of the film was also pretty amateurish. It seems like the first 100 minutes were one movie, then the third act was just cobbled on from a different script. There was no reason for this movie to be over 2 hours long when the whole story could have been told, better, in just over an hour-and-a-half.

The humor also fell totally flat to me. I get that big blockbuster films want to have the occasional comic relief, but this movie missed the fact that the humor actually has to be funny and not just thrown in there in the screenplay when the writers can't figure out how to help a scene move along. There were quite a few moments when I honestly couldn't believe that a professional screenwriter wrote the lines of dialog that were just said out loud on screen.

Finally, I have a hard time classifying this as a sci-fi film. Sci-fi is supposed to be a proxy for philosophy, in which we can examine the limits of human ingenuity and advancement through a fictional lens to better question the inner workings of our species. There was none of that here, nor was there any science. It was just a hastily described time travel scenario and Chris Pratt using a machine gun to shoot giant bugs.

I'll cut my review there in the name of brevity - it's pretty clear that I didn't like the film and thought that it was poorly-made and of particularly low quality.

 

[Stylizer1]

A very average summer action movie. No sophistication, just grab your gun and go.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

I watched it last night and I agree 100% with @AwesomeMatthews

Chris Pratt may have some fine dramatic roles under his belt, but when he's cast as the hero in a straitlaced action film he always comes up short. It's hard to take him seriously, especially when he has that same half-confused look on his face in every scene.

He overacts the first shot of the film. Took me about 3 seconds to be tired of him.

The pacing of the film was also pretty amateurish. It seems like the first 100 minutes were one movie, then the third act was just cobbled on from a different script. There was no reason for this movie to be over 2 hours long when the whole story could have been told, better, in just over an hour-and-a-half.

The fact that the third act tried to go Aliens/Engineers was the worst to me.

The humor also fell totally flat to me. I get that big blockbuster films want to have the occasional comic relief, but this movie missed the fact that the humor actually has to be funny and not just thrown in there in the screenplay when the writers can't figure out how to help a scene move along.

Humor was indeed miscalculated but the most obvious sign of lazy writing was the convenience of every subplot - when the nerdy volcano kid came handy, my brain barfed.

There were quite a few moments when I honestly couldn't believe that a professional screenwriter wrote the lines of dialog that were just said out loud on screen.

"When I came back from 'Nam, I was in a... dark place." I finished the sentence out loud with him.

Finally, I have a hard time classifying this as a sci-fi film.

Thank you! You really should be a regular of the last movie you saw threads...

The one thing I thought the movie did right was to hold back the creatures and hype them (even though they are ultimately somewhat disappointing).

 

[The Crypto Guy]

To each their own haha.

I was enjoying a few adult beverages with the SO during it so maybe it made it more enjoyable and I was able to look past some of the bad writing, but I did think the storyline was pretty interesting. Plus I'm always a sucker for a good time traveling type movie.

Though I do disagree with people barely classifying it as a SciFi....Aliens and Time Travel, can't really get more sci fi than that IMO.

 

[Adam Warlock]

Decent sci fi flick, but defintely flawed. I feel like this wouldve been better served as as a mini series or even a series with multiple seasons. Just too big of a concept to flush out in a 2 hour movie.

 

[Viggo Mortensen]

Did I miss the explanation on how they discovered time traveling? Or maybe I just don't remember it?

I liked it as a shut your brain off, alien invasion, type of movie.

Spoiler

Why did they need to find the location/origin of the aliens, they could've just mass produced the toxin in 2022 and build weapons that shoot it to easily beat them in the future?

 

[kihei]

It only reminded me of better summer blockbusters. I would have no objection if the composer of the score was fed to the aliens.

 

[beowulf]

I liked the premise but the movie as a whole is average.

 

[SniperHF]

It was fine, it has the trappings of a good scifi time travel action movie.

The humor with the guy from Veep basically playing his Veep character was way overdone (also got annoying in Veep after a couple seasons).

Ending was way too long, movie needed better editors. They should have hacked all that stuff in Russia out. Should have ended with Pratt going back to his family as he did, vowing not to do what his future self was going to do, and dedicating himself to figuring out how to stop the White Claws. Open ended with a decent feel good ending that isn't a cliche wrap everything up happy ending, doesn't overstay its welcome, simple and elegant.

 

[LeafalCrusader]

I enjoyed it. Mindless dumb action flick but it was a lot of fun.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

Relentlessly idiotic. Some good splatter, gore and action but it's all sandwiched around a completely moronic story. The humour is jarringly out of place in a premise that should be stone cold: humanity is 99.999% wiped out by the time of contact, right? There wouldn't be jovial, witty banter going around. The loud, mouthy sidekick is deeply annoying every time he's around. It's like he wandered in from some screwball comedy movie and couldn't be bothered to find his way back out again.

Bad, bad movie.

 

[Stylizer1]

It was fine, it has the trappings of a good scifi time travel action movie.

The humor with the guy from Veep basically playing his Veep character was way overdone (also got annoying in Veep after a couple seasons).

Ending was way too long, movie needed better editors. They should have hacked all that stuff in Russia out. Should have ended with Pratt going back to his family as he did, vowing not to do what his future self was going to do, and dedicating himself to figuring out how to stop the White Claws. Open ended with a decent feel good ending that isn't a cliche wrap everything up happy ending, doesn't overstay its welcome, simple and elegant.

That guy from veep is actually way funnier in Detroiters.

 

[Osprey]

That guy from veep is actually way funnier in Detroiters.

If you're talking about Sam Richardson, I thought that he was pretty funny in his other movie out this weekend, Werewolves Within, which I watched and reviewed last night. I was impressed with him. Maybe it's just how his character was written and directed in this movie. I'll probably watch it tonight.

 

[mouz135]

Well, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, but a good Saturday night action movie to eat popcorn to

 

[TNT87]

I didn't mind it.

 

[Prairie Habs]

Thought it was decent. I like whenever time travel movies use the multiverse version rather than the time loop version. It lets them actually focus on the story rather than spend half the time trying to close loops and make sure the time travel works.

To dig a little deeper in the world building:

Spoiler

I wish they would have stuck with their premise of "regular people travelling into the future to fight aliens". After that first fight they just abandon it and make it a father daughter thing.

I liked the idea that the had to send regular people, typically older people, into the future because you can only go if your future self is dead. But, they kind of step all over that when they say the earth is down to 500,000 people. Even if you ignore that some of the survivors wouldn't have been born yet in 2022, the vast majority of the world would have been able to travel.

Another issue I had was that they don't train them at all. I know the future needs people quick, but surely some training would have helped. Maybe just a line about how once they have been linked to the future to check if their 2052 self is alive the link starts to deteriorate quickly and they have to travel immediately? Or that they were getting too many run-aways and people intentionally injuring themselves in training for it to be worth it?

When they split the R-team off they said it was because they were researchers and scientists. So that means that they were sending untrained scientists who were completely new to the situation in to saved (possibly) untrained scientists who had survived in this situation for years and could probably handle themselves a lot better. I would have changed it to say that the scientists had been killed so they were sending in R-team to try and salvage the data because they were the ones most likely to know what to look for.

No movie is perfect though, especially time travel ones. Overall its still enjoyable.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

I watched it last night and I agree 100% with @AwesomeMatthews

He overacts the first shot of the film. Took me about 3 seconds to be tired of him.

He just can't project intelligence. He just always looks stunned.

The fact that the third act tried to go Aliens/Engineers was the worst to me.

Aliens/The Thing...but it had I think bits and pieces of maybe three or four different film cuts in there, and somewhere along the line they just decided ah hell with it, and threw everything in.

Humor was indeed miscalculated but the most obvious sign of lazy writing was the convenience of every subplot - when the nerdy volcano kid came handy, my brain barfed.

Ohhh that was just so f***ing stupid. That whole bit was so cringe.

"When I came back from 'Nam, I was in a... dark place." I finished the sentence out loud with him.

So did I. Mrs. PC and I took turns anticipating the script moments.

 

[Osprey]

It's watchable and has an interesting premise, but is also really bad and really dumb. It's strange to say, but I actually kind of enjoyed watching it because it was unintentionally hilarious and made me feel smart.

Spoiler

The movie spends a lot of time on the testing and recruitment, making it seem pretty selective because only people in their 40s who would be dead by 2050 are eligible to go. On the other hand, we eventually learn that there are less than 500,000 people still alive in 2050, which should mean that that over 7.9995 of the 8 billion people in 2022 are eligible to go. The chance of testing someone in 2022 that's still alive in 2050 is less than 6/1000ths of 1%, or, put another way, for every 1 million people drafted, only 60 would be disqualified (but, really, probably half that because half of the 500,000 in 2050 wouldn't be alive yet or old enough to be drafted in 2022). Maybe someone should've told them that before they limited themselves to out-of-shape 40-year-olds.

Also, what sense does it make to send ordinary people, especially people with science backgrounds, into the future to act as grunts and die? Wouldn't it be a lot smarter to simply warn mankind and allow those smart people to stay in the present and contribute to 30 years of developing technologies and preparing to prevent or win the eventual war? 30 years of doing what they're good at to try to avoid a losing war... vs 7 days of doing what they're not good at and likely dying to win a war that's already lost. The choice seems clear, but everyone in the film does the opposite of what makes the most sense.

On top of that, why wouldn't they give these people some basic training prior to sending them into the future? They're teachers and scientists. I get that they're in a rush, but can't they spare at least one day to teach them the basics and give them a little target practice? That one guy was just about to jump and didn't know which way to load the magazine or how to turn the rifle's safety off.

Along the same lines, that experienced guy with the trophy necklace knew that the only vulnerable parts on the aliens' bodies were the neck and belly. Why didn't he share that with the other recruits before they got into action or, better yet, why didn't the trainers teach that? I mean, it's no wonder that 80% of people that they send into the future fail to return. They're handing weapons to out-of-shape common folk and sending them into the future without any basic weapon training or tips on what to aim at.

BTW, 30 years into the future, they're still using Humvees, F-22 Raptors and modern weaponry. No wonder they're losing the war. All of their technology is almost 50 years old. You'd think that they'd realize that and, again, tell 2022 Earth to spend the next 30 years developing new advanced technologies that might prevent or win the eventual war, instead.

I liked how Dan returned to the present day with the toxin and we were supposed to think, like him, that he failed. Is having a cure too early ever a bad thing? If you took a COVID vaccine back in time to 1991 and weren't able to bring mass produced amounts of it back to the present, did you fail to stop COVID? Of course not. It's better to have it too early because you're sure to have plenty of it ready to nip the threat in the bud when it finally appears.

Speaking of the toxin, did they actually even need it in the end? They could've simply blown up the dormant aliens with C4 or, to be safe, exploded a nuclear bomb on the ship. In fact, Dan didn't even need to go to the future. If he or someone else had just thought to analyze the claw that the guy had around his neck when they were first recruited, they could've cut out literally half of the movie and gone straight to Russia (after a stop at the local high school to consult the world's premier volcano expert, of course).

 

[Cole Caulifield]

It's the type of silly turn your brain off summer action flick where if you spend a minute thinking about it, its flaws become obvious. Any time travel movie will have logical inconsistencies and ''what ifs'' and ''wouldn't it have been better to''. I guess it comes down to your expectations when you sit down and watch the movie. For me, it killed 2 hours of boredom and had enough action to keep me entertained. But yeah certainly not a masterpiece, and I agree with the sentiment that the movie should have ended after he was back from the future.

 

[Shockmaster]

I enjoyed it. Mindless dumb action flick but it was a lot of fun.

Critics too often look for movies to have some kind of deeper meaning or to fit certain agendas. They can't wrap their heads around such mindless action movies that are just made for fun and not made for any sort of social or political statement.

 

[Stylizer1]

I'm just glad they didn't say global warming and only insinuated it.

 

[The Crypto Guy]

Did I miss the explanation on how they discovered time traveling? Or maybe I just don't remember it?

I liked it as a shut your brain off, alien invasion, type of movie.

Spoiler

Why did they need to find the location/origin of the aliens, they could've just mass produced the toxin in 2022 and build weapons that shoot it to easily beat them in the future?

Spoiler

Once the time machine jump thing broke, Earth was basically on course to self-destruct before the Aliens would even come up from Russia. Everyone knew all hope was lost and a huge part of the population already died by being sent to the future to fight the war. Everyone would have ended up just killing themselves probably with war between themsleves. They had to kill the aliens at that point and give everyone a reason to live. Of course Pratt's character could have done a hell of a lot more to try and let people know he had the solution but that wouldn't have made for a good ending haha`

 

[Osprey]

Critics too often look for movies to have some kind of deeper meaning or to fit certain agendas. They can't wrap their heads around such mindless action movies that are just made for fun and not made for any sort of social or political statement.

I think that what critics look for in films, besides general filmmaking quality, is intelligence. Intelligence can come from deeper meaning or a social/political statement, but it doesn't have to. Edge of Tomorrow has a similar premise to this movie and no meaning or statement, yet has an RT critic score of 91%. Even though it's basically just a fun action movie with nothing to say about anything, critics loved it. Why? I think that it's because it has intelligence that this film is short on. The premise is cleverer, the plot holes are smaller, it's less reliant on convenience and coincidence (like just happening to know a volcano expert and a rule-breaking pilot), the humor is more natural and less lazy (i.e. not supplied by a comic sidekick) and so on. On top of that, it has better pacing, better acting, better CGI and a better soundtrack.

The fact that a movie was made just for fun doesn't mean that it's immune to judgment and deserves a positive score. No matter how high or low a movie's ambitions are, it can still be awful, excellent or anywhere in between. Critics shouldn't be afraid to call out a low quality result just because a movie's ambitions were also low. "Made for fun" and "is fun" are too different things. This film was obviously made for fun, but that doesn't mean that it will be fun for everyone. People look for different things in films. Critics and some of us tend to look for intelligence in films (again, not necessarily deep meaning, but for everything to fit and come together, well, intelligently). Other people seem to not care about that and can enjoy anything. I kind of envy that, but I think that there's also value in being critical of poorly made films because it helps you to appreciate the better films even more.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

Man, this was an annoying one to watch. I really wanted to like it, but too many little moments that made me say, "wait, what?"

Like why are we sending completely untrained civilians into the future to fight these things, and not even showing them what the creatures look like?

I get that they said that 50% of soldiers are ineligible to jump, but that's implied that they want people who are 'already' dead in order to avoid paraxodes. There was a line from the newscaster stating that the 'future population is currently estimated to be less than 500,000 people' (which is a stupid enough line on its own). If 99.9999% of the human population has been wiped out, pretty much anybody should be able to go to the future, right? It doesn't help that when the characters ask about how the time travel works, the movie just says "don't worry about it bro!"

the most obvious sign of lazy writing was the convenience of every subplot - when the nerdy volcano kid came handy, my brain barfed.

Also very annoying. They had the whole class yell VOLCANOES just to make sure we got the message. Then when Chris Pratt visits Daddy Issues, the camera focuses on the C-130 as he drives up, which was fine. Then J.K. Simmons goes "HEY DID YOU SEE THE C-130 PARKED OUTSIDE?"