Chris Pratt brings warmth and charisma to "The Tomorrow War," Amazon Prime's very violent celebration of 4th of July weekend. It's a cocktail of various other movies, most of them better, or at least benefitting from nostalgia, retelling so many familiar elements as one loud, long, and bombastic extravaganza that throws everything it can think of at the screen and hopes something sticks. Whether or not anything sticks depends on if you have any suspension of disbelief or alcohol on hand.
Pratt plays Dan, a former solider turned teacher drafted into a future war with a deadly alien race, where us humans are dying, a lot, and in very unpleasant ways. Take for example when we first see the battlefield in Miami Florida. "You'll drop five to ten feet from the air" claims a lieutenant as we see a batch of fresh recruits being briefed about the situation. But a computer glitch interrupts the loosely defined mechanics of time-travel, and the soldiers are dropped from hundreds of feet in the air, and we watch bodies crash to their doom against the edge of buildings: this is before we see any creature-on-person action!
When the space beasts do come into play, they have all the usual sci-fi trappings, depicted as organized but brainless, who's sole mission in life is to protect the "queen" and to eat. They don't think, and they're not afraid to die, but to the film's credit, they at least don't look that much like the Xenomorph.
Now look, I'm all for a good monster movie. Actually, it doesn't have to be any good, just show me the good stuff, you know blood and the likes, and although the PG-13 rating here doesn't allow for the camera to dwell on such gore, it does tackle some surprisingly heavy issues, like divorce, fate, and the horrors of war.
That last one is the most interesting thing here; the occasionally witty script from Zach Dean and a fun performances from Sam Richardson as Charlie and J.K. Simmons as Dan's dad poke holes at the plot's center of military pride. It unfortunately steers clear of satire, but its presence give "The Tomorrow War" an off-kilter sense of humor that elevates it from what could have been an excessively stylized exercise in how to spend millions of dollars on special effects (I'm looking at you, "Army of the Dead"). In fact, the whole endeavor feels more like something closer to the work of Roland Emmerich, like a long-lost bastard-child of 1996's "Independence Day," with "The Thing," "Aliens," "Starship Troopers," "Back to the Future," and oh so many others thrown in for a little color.
To its credit, the action is kinetic and easy to see, and Chris Pratt continues to look good onscreen. And the pacing strings you up and down; I counted no less than three times where I thought "OK this is the end," only for more to happen.
Not to its credit however, all this includes a lot of dumb things, like how the film partly takes place in 2022 but looks exactly like 2021. Why bother? Here's another one: a point is made to show that no single army anymore but all the nation's combined, so then why does everyone speak English? Let's keep going... why do all the soldiers have weapons that barely pierce the enemy's skin? Why can a character bring back things to the past, to change the future, without creating some sort of paradox? These are questions the film doesn't answer but it never even bothers to ask, instead settling for a bunch of things that explode "real good." And on my paltry home-theater set up, I can confirm that yes, they did explode real good.
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