Many of us have been revisiting favoured old genre classics in recent months in the name of comfort viewing and, as the credits roll on the likes of Starship Troopers, Live Die Repeat, Total Recall, and even Independence Day, we have probably sat back with a sigh and muttered “Why don’t they make films like that any more?” to no-one in particular. Well, stop the presses, hold my beer and back the truck up because it turns out that they do make films just like that (perhaps a bit too much like that, in fact) as Amazon Prime’s The Tomorrow War is a time travel/alien invasion film that will hurl you right back into your cinematic past even as its story yanks you into a battered, war-torn future.
Chris Pratt – probably the closest we’re allowed to a big, macho, red-blooded action hero these days – plays everyman hero Dan Forrester, an ex-soldier dissatisfied with his post-service life as a biology teacher. He is inadvertently given a shot at redemption – he’s a disappointment to his grizzled Vietnam War vet father James (JK Simmons) – when a troop of soldiers appear through a portal and announce that thirty years in the future Mankind is on the brink of extinction, the Earth having been ravaged by blood-hungry creatures called Whitespikes. Man’s only hope in the future is to recruit soldiers from the past to fight against the invaders and a worldwide draft begins that results in fewer than 20% of those enlisted returning from their perilous missions into the future. Twelve months later and there are increasing calls for the draft to be abolished, but not before Dan is himself enlisted and, with a bunch of other terrified rookies, finds himself pitched into a nightmare future where his old military skills are all that stand between him and a quick, brutal death.
The Tomorrow War, directed by Chris (The Lego Batman Movie) McKay, is a big, loud blast of a movie, two hours of extraordinary, explosive action and effects sequences that stagger in an era where we’re no longer supposed to be staggered by effects sequences, threaded into a time travel story that doesn’t concern itself with the logic of time paradoxes and alternate timelines and just gets on with blowing things up. The film explodes into action when Dan and his troop finally arrive in a devastated, blazing Miami on a mission to rescue a group of scientists working on a way to finally defeat the Whitestrikes – they’re hideous, hooting, scuttling, arachnid-type thing – and what follows in a breathless, edge-of-the-seat action sequence driven to extreme heights of tension by Lorne Balfe’s urgent, throbbing score. Dan and his team prowl through the devastated city and all Hell breaks loose around them. The whole film is studded with similar FX-heavy scenes as the human survivors are pushed closer and closer to absolute extinction and, for his own part, Dan discovers that his past has caught up with him in the future and the fight for survival has suddenly become a lot more personal.
The Tomorrow War is, first and foremost, an unpretentious raucous action movie and its attempts at human interest can’t help but seem a bit trite and obvious. As a leading man, Dan is all about the importance of family and the realisation that sometimes all we need is right under our noses no matter how frustrated we may be or dissatisfied by our lot. The dialogue is often a bit creaky and the morality and humanity achingly simplistic but on this occasion, it really doesn’t matter because hey, look, horrible aliens, big explosions and lots of guns and impossible escapes! The Tomorrow War, a remarkably confident achievement from a director with no prior experience of film-making on this scale, was destined for the big screen but sadly it became yet another victim of recent circumstance and it finds itself on the small screen thanks to Amazon Prime. We’re glad to get to see it, of course, but this is a film that really needs the biggest screen and the loudest sound system and we can’t help feeling that this is a film that could have become this generation’s Independence Day. Don’t leave it a moment longer; catch up with The Tomorrow War today.
The Tomorrow War is streaming now on Amazon Prime
