The Tomorrow War Review
★☆☆☆☆
An alien invasion in the future forces humanity to look to the past for salvation.
Chris Pratt’s The Tomorrow War is bad. Not like “Independence Day bad”, but more like “bad bad”, and it’s a real shame as its basic premise, playing like a reverse Terminator, is actually pretty awesome.
Unfortunately, the final result isn’t very good. The screenplay, another from blacklist favourite Zach Dean (I’m beginning to understand why his movies never get made), is so rote and inorganic that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was written by an AI version of Fred Durst.
And yes, there’s a Terminator reference. Of course there is.
Brainless ‘bad’ movies aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Personally speaking, I love a healthy dollop of silly sci-fi nonsense. But the nonsense has to be at least somewhat fun, and there wasn’t much fun to be had despite the presence of the always likeable, always hunky Chris Pratt, who headlines as well as produces.
Pratt has developed a reputation for being Hollywood’s go-to quirky action star — he even voices Italian plumbers these days — but the same charisma that saw him catapult to leading man status in James Gunn’s excellent Guardians of the Galaxy series is nowhere to be found here. The best we get is an inadvertently funny temper tantrum at the start, and a seemingly unending final boss battle at the conclusion that sees him act with the same dry hostility you’d expect from a teenager who’s just been told to stop dragging their feet.
The Tomorrow War is punishingly long, overly familiar, and processed to the point of resembling mush. It’s the cinematic equivalent of baby food.
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