Chris McKay’s first live-action feature, The Tomorrow War, lacks the gleefully anarchic sensibilities of his work on Moral Orel and Robot Chicken, even The Lego Batman Movie. Aside from the occasional sardonic wisecrack from Dan (Chris Pratt), an ex-military science teacher fated to save the world, the film seems almost skittish about invoking a touch of frivolity. And this is largely due to the Zach Dean screenplay’s crippling dependency on exposition, as every detail pertaining to various sci-fi technologies, the sorry state of Earth in the year 2051, and the characters’ backstories is belabored to the point of inertia.
In the film, Dan and other present-day people are drafted to fight a future war against monstrous aliens hellbent on eliminating the human race. More than one aspect of The Tomorrow War recalls Starship Troopers, though McKay’s film completely lacks the sharp satire of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic. In fact, as evidenced by the deafening, frenetic action sequences that incoherently depict all sorts of acts of wanton destruction, The Tomorrow War is practically jingoistic in its depiction of military might—and dubiously retrograde in the implication that any old schmoe, like the nervous corporate scientist played by Sam Richardson, can be turned into a ruthless killing machine for geopolitical purposes.
The Tomorrow War may lean into its brutish side, but that isn’t to say that it’s without compelling insights. In an early classroom scene, one of Dan’s listless students ponders the ostensible pointlessness of human progress in a world with an imminent expiration date. And Dan’s relationship with his daughter, Muri (Yvonne Strahovski), who in the future is a pedigreed scientist working at the forefront of the titular war, represents a welcome, almost calming departure from the film’s default bellicose posturing, especially when father and daughter touch on the ethics of scientific innovation used for warfare objectives.
Such moments may leave you wishing that The Tomorrow War’s thematic terrain weren’t so narrow—that the film weren’t so quick to get to another run-of-the-mill, senses-assaulting battle sequence or some belabored bit of world-building. In fact, after the umpteenth machine gun is unloaded into an alien, it’s hard not to view that as a visual metaphor for The Tomorrow War’s creative approach—because it doesn’t just feel missing, it feels obliterated.
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