The Tomorrow War - A terrible movie that I just can't hate

The Tomorrow War is something rare in movie worlds – a film that’s objectively awful on multiple fronts, but where the viewer can’t raise anything more than a mild shrug to it. It’s not so-bad-it’s-boring, neither so-bad-it’s-good, or even just an okay film. It’s a trainwreck, but one where little ideas pop up throughout and tiny moments push it forward to the point where the watcher simply doesn’t have the interest to dissect the film, and simply acknowledges it as “a movie”.

The most expensive movie ever released exclusively to streaming, with a budget of $200 million dollars, The Tomorrow War sees soldiers from the 2050’s travelling back to 2022 to recruit the previous generation of humanity for battling alien invaders. Overrun and with little time left, the only choice (for some reason) is to recruit those who will die before the invasion to prevent paradoxes.

Perhaps the first thing wrong with the movie is the above sentence – that’s not how paradoxes work. If anything is changed from the past, that will have massive butterfly-effect repercussions in the future, to the point where huge numbers of soldiers and weapons will simply disappear, or the aliens may not even invade at all, and the great time-stream continuum will just collapse. Just because they die before the invasion doesn’t mean they can’t do a lot before it.

Time travel in this movie is so bizarre, never really having set rules or respect for timeflow or physics. It’s a McGuffin simply thrown around a bunch of times to find some cool shots regardless of its stupidity (apparently, time travel was invented by a biologist). But thankfully, the movie never draws attention to its own stupidity like a Fast and Furious movie – it just moves and expects the audience to come along with it. That’s why I’m not mad at it – it doesn’t try and poke fun at itself or be anything less than it is.

This attitude of simply being rather than trying to subvert, improve or mock itself extends to the characters and performances. Most of them are stock archetypes, simply standing around without charisma or jokiness, making them neither offensive nor memorable. Leading lady Yvonne Strahovski plays the role of an army colonel with little gusto, and both Sam Richardson and Chris Pratt come off as alternate universe spinoffs of Mark Wahlberg from The Happening. Even the cast’s best member, Edwin Hodge, plays the crazy trophy-obsessed guy trope like a slightly ticked-off milkman.

All of it is, in perspective, poor acting and decision-making, but it ends up in a weird loop where the lack of any distinguishing performance also ensures the lack of any distinctive awfulness. A better filmmaker would add more character and vigor, for certain, but I just can’t hate what happens in The Tomorrow War.

What I definitely can’t hate is the action – there’s a magnificent scale to the scenes of alien fighting, where massive cityscapes open up to reveal thousands of people dropping screaming from the sky, or a whirlpool of monsters rising up from the ocean. It allows for some brilliant visual inventiveness, and in those moments, with the score and the hopelessness of humanity sweeping over the viewer, it’s like stepping into a different film, like reliving the intensity of Days of Future Past.

Outside of the action, however, there’s little to recommend about this film on a technical level. The monster design is great and they are deployed well, but this is a flat looking movie, only buffed slightly by its CGI. It frankly looks like it cost $50 million dollars instead of $200 million, with low-effort lighting, bad sets (an underground cave looks like a cheap theme park attraction), hellishly incoherent editing, and only 2 actors who would really charge anything significant for their performances.

But that’s the odd paradox of The Tomorrow War – I know that its individual components are shit, but I just can’t muster the response inside me. Maybe I’m just tired after all this time in COVID, but the film never retrieved anything more than a sigh from me. It could be the idea of the film’s premise, or the film’s thudding mediocrity, but I just can’t care.

The Tomorrow War gets a D+.

If you have seen this movie, did you experience the same feelings which I had?