The Tomorrow War Takes Yesterdays Tropes to Craft Mediocrity Today
In late 2017, two academics published a study that claimed that reading science fiction made you stupid. After dealing with sharp criticism from a number of people, the original authors of that study revisited the subject and discovered that well written science fiction doesn’t make you stupid, poorly written science fiction does that. The Tomorrow War is as poorly written science fiction as one can get. With a foundation like that, things are only bound to get worse for a would be tent pole blockbuster.
Written by Zach Dean, the story (to put it politely) appears to be a mega-mash-up of various sci-fi films that came before it. A key plot point of The Tomorrow War is time travel, apparently riffing off of Edge of Tomorrow. But where the latter is a relatively smart time travel story, the former is just plain idiotic. Where Edge of Tomorrow took the time travel trope and turned it into an evolutionary defense mechanism, The Tomorrow War uses the device to go back in time and sacrifice people from the past for a future where the population has been decimated.
The plot actually forces a draft upon people from the past, conscripting them into a death march straight into the future. Genius! Humanity figures out how to time travel fifty years into the future and the best they can figure on how to use it is by dooming the past as well as the present. To make matters worse, the geniuses in charge in the future are drafting people from the past with little to no military training and no discernible skills that might make them a threat to the enemy.
At the center of the doomed patrol is Chris Pratt as the only recognizable ex-military (former Green Beret) and current biology teacher, Dan Forester. Pratt is a remarkably likable shlub. There is a slow-burn charm to his dimmed down movie stardom. It would have been nice to watch Pratt subtly suggest he’s in way over his head while demonstrating his character Dan is a sharp witted warrior/scientist. Instead we get a dimwit soldier/science teacher.
Characters in a story are very unlikely to come off as smarter than the authors who create them. Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick might have easily crafted a whip-smart biology teacher/ex Green Beret who suspects he’s just not smart enough or heroic enough to face the monsters ahead. Pratt could’ve easily played that part. Instead he’s stuck with the half-wit public school teacher with a modicum of military training.
It’s not that a really dumb sci-fi movie can’t be terrific. Independence Day (of which Dean squeezes into his mish mash of sci-fi tropes was a big dumb popcorn movie that astounds in its spectacle. Even then, as dumb as that movie was it’s infinitely smarter than The Tomorrow War. Sure, some might argue that Jeff Goldblum’s character’s suggestion of hacking into the alien’s hardware and giving them a virus is kind of dumb. What’s not dumb is the plot device that shows humanity learning how to fight smarter instead of harder.
Directed by Chris McKay of some of those Lego movies, The Tomorrow War doesn’t even come close to bringing the spectacle that was Independence Day. The time traveling future survivors interrupt a televised World Cup game by stepping onto the field from a goofy purple light show. The leader of the future squad (Jasmine Matthews) explains they are from the future. The world watches unquestioning as she continues.
The time traveling soldier explains how monstrous “whitespikes” have infested the planet and are eating humanity like earth is an all you can eat buffet. The solution she suggests is that people in the present travel to the future and put themselves on the menu. Humanity is nothing but cattle and time travel is the new rail roads to deliver this cattle to a new batch of consumers. The most horrifying aspect of this is that it is highly unlikely that Dean intends to tell that tale, it’s just what he stupidly stumbled upon.
Buried deep down in Dean’s tale is a find your father myth. Although it’s unclear if Dean is aware of that, what could’ve elevated this silly sci-fi popcorn movie into something great lies in the healing of generational wounds between father and son, father and daughter and grandfather finally meets granddaughter. Dean attempts to tell that tale but ultimately fails.
It also would have been a geeky fun story to tell a tale where the not only the future’s best and most able warriors are slaughtered by a ruthless insatiable enemy, but the best and brightest in general. The aliens at up all the bright and brilliant scientists so humanity, after stumbling upon time travel goes back in time to elicit the help of scientists from the past to find solutions for the problems in the future.
There was never any need to transport people into the future as if they’re cattle. That dystopian narrative could have been interesting if it’s the story the filmmakers wanted to tell, but it is clearly not. They didn’t want to suggest that we’ve found the enemy and it is us, they just accidently suggest it. Maybe they’re not even aware of this.
None of the plot points seem to be thought through. It’s just a stupid hodgepodge of sci-fi tropes pasted together like an adolescents sparkly collage. Dan can’t be a brilliant scientist in this story because Zach Dean isn’t smart enough to write that character. It’s not a given that a character can only be as smart as the author, but often times it is the case.