The Tomorrow War (2021) Review

The Tomorrow War (2021)

The Tomorrow War follows Dan, who gets drafted into a war that is destroying Earth 30 years in the future. With the help of his daughter, Dan must travel back to the present to stop the war from ever happening.  

My unofficial Chris Pratt trilogy wraps up today with this new release. My expectations were through the floor with this, just looked like an uninspired science fiction movie (terrible marketing) but I was surprised that it’s actually quite intelligent, if not even a little sincere. Up until Dan’s jump to the future, a strong emphasis is put on him as a father and husband, and just how different he is from his own father who abandoned him. So when he jumps to the future, only to meet his (obviously much older) daughter, it’s fascinating to see that Dan, in his own unhappiness, abandoned her and her mother the same as his father. McKay takes the (much needed) time to poke & prod this fractured relationship and it makes you forget about the looming apocalypse just enough to really feel for both characters. And it’s in trying to right his wrongs, that sets up the back half of the film and the allows us to explore that broken relationship he has with his own father. 

Where the film gets silly though is it’s overall premise, pulling people from the past to fight a war that hasn’t happened yet (and right off the bat, killing 3/4 of Dan’s unit in a mistake). All they really accomplish is killing off most of the current population. I get it, the main goal is to buy time to make a serum to go back in time with, but pulling regular civilians to the future (with zero training) to just have the majority of them die immediately just seems incredibly fucking stupid. 

We get a pretty odd cast in Betty Gilpin, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Sam Richardson, Jasmine Matthews, Edwin Hodge, J.K. Simmons, Yvonne Strahovski, and Chris Pratt. I really enjoyed Strahovski and Simmons here, acting as separate anchors to Dan’s past and present that provide a lot surprising emotional depth, with both nearly bringing me to tears on more than one occasion. Richardson however, was the comic relief, a role this film could have really done without as he felt like more of an out of place nuisance than anything. 

The Tomorrow War, directed by Chris McKay (the Lego movies?), is an inventive and admittedly unexpected sci-fi action film that does suffer from a rather odd premise and begrudging length, but hits the mark with heart-pounding action and an accurate portrayal of the hardships military families go through. 

7.8/10