The Tomorrow War opens with a pitch built for a streaming platform: time travelers arrive from 2051, announce that humanity is losing a war against an alien species called the White Spikes, and recruit present-day soldiers and civilians to fight it. Paramount Pictures originally set the film for theaters, but Amazon Studios acquired the distribution rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. It landed on Prime Video on July 2, 2021. The result is a $200 million movie that understands its own premise and almost nothing else.
Trailer, via Prime Video.
Dan Forester and the Draft
Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester, a biology teacher and former Green Beret who fails to land a job at the United States Army Research Laboratory. He is conscripted for a seven-day tour and fitted with an electronic vambrace that tracks him and returns him home when the week ends. His wife, Emmy (Betty Gilpin), pushes him to see his estranged father, James (J.K. Simmons), an engineer who could cut the device off. Dan visits, they fight about the abandonment, and he leaves with the vambrace intact.
That is the film’s best material, and it lasts about ten minutes.
The draftees ship to Miami Beach in the future and get dropped at the wrong coordinates, high above the city. Most fall to their deaths. The survivors reach Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, where Dan learns Romeo Command is run by his adult daughter, Colonel Muri Forester (Yvonne Strahovski). The reunion is strained. Then they go capture a female White Spike, which are rarer than the males.
What the Cast Is Given
Pratt is fine. He is always fine. The problem is that Dan is written as a stack of traits — teacher, father, veteran, estranged son — with no scene that forces them to collide.
The supporting cast fares worse. Sam Richardson plays Charlie, and he gets the only lines that sound like a person talking. Edwin Hodge, Jasmine Mathews, Keith Powers, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Mike Mitchell fill out the draftees, and most of them exist to die in the wrong-coordinate drop or the lab run. Gilpin is a strong actor handed a wife role that amounts to encouragement.
The mechanics are the real failure, and they are worth listing because they show how little the film trusts its own rules:
- Time travel that only moves forward and back on a fixed schedule, with no explanation of who controls it.
- A draft that conscripts people who already died before 2051, a detail Dan deduces and the film never uses.
- A vambrace that can be removed by an engineer, which would end the plot in act one.
- Lab research data recovered from a dead staff, then never mentioned again.
None of these are fatal alone. Together they signal a script that wrote the ending first and backed into the middle.
The Sequel Problem
A sequel is in development, per Wikipedia, and that is the strangest fact about The Tomorrow War. The film ends with a clear hook and a clear threat. But the movie that exists does not earn that confidence. It is derivative in execution, as the mixed reviews noted, and derivative is a generous word for a third act that borrows the shape of better alien-invasion films without the tension.
The concept is not the issue. The concept is genuinely good: a war you can only fight by borrowing people from the past, and a draft that quietly selects the already-dead. That is a real idea. The Tomorrow War just never sits with it. It runs to the next set piece, then the next, and by the time the third act arrives the film has stopped pretending to be about anything.
What is worth watching here is Richardson, and the twenty minutes before the drop. What is not worth watching is the rest, which is loud, long at 138 minutes, and convinced that scale is the same thing as stakes.
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