I was actually pretty excited to finally sit
down and watch The Tomorrow War for two reasons: One, it is a
big budget sci-fi movie starring Hollywood’s fourth favorite Chris (the Pratt
one), and two, it was originally set to release in the theaters before the
pandemic hit and therefore had a pretty decent chance of breaking the
subpar-action-movie-made-exclusively-for-a-streaming-service streak that I am
currently stuck in. I wasn’t expecting art, of course, just a stupid good time
watching Andy Dwyer shoot up some aliens. But it turns out there was a pretty
good reason that Paramount sold the movie to Amazon Prime: It’s, well, not
great. Well-acted and occasionally pretty cool to look at, The Tomorrow
War is also shoddily written, clichéd, and about thirty minutes too
long.
For
a sci-fi action movie, the acting is actually pretty decent and goes a long way
in elevating what otherwise might have been straight crap to acceptably
watchable levels. Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, and Betty
Gilpin all do the best that they can with the middling script, earning their
paychecks well by making silly lines sound natural and plausible (I was not a
fan of the comic relief character, but I don’t want to single him out by name…
wasn’t his fault his lines were dumb). The CGI is also respectable, if not
great-- I was, for some reason, occasionally (and keenly) reminded that I was
watching actors fight things that weren’t really there. Maybe it was the
chaotic alien design, maybe it was the lighting… I don’t know. All I know is that
I was forced to un-suspend my belief once or twice.
This
is, in fact, a big problem the movie has as a whole. As I said, the script is
far from the best and the plot requires characters to do stupid things left and
right just so it can keep moving forward (or backwards. Stupid time travel).
Plot holes are plentiful and gaping, even more so than in other films of this
genre, and there are so many convenient and contrived coincidences that I
wanted to laugh out loud at several points. Need a volcano expert? Well, what
about that random student from earlier in the movie who randomly loves
volcanoes? Need a plane to Russia? Wait… your dad is a pilot, isn’t he? And he
just happens to have a disdain for the government? Oh cool, that’s a lucky break!
Come on, movie… I am only one man, and I only have so much belief that I can
suspend.
And
when The Tomorrow War isn’t giving the middle finger to logic
it wallows in cliché, from an unnecessary amount of slow motion shots (I swear
this movie could have been ten minutes shorter if the director kept the camera
rolling at a normal speed) to tired character archetypes (the gruff and distant
dad, the black best friend/comic relief, the suicidal hardass army guy). None
of it feels terribly original from start to finish, and certain plot points and
even lines can be accurately guessed long in advance. If you read a basic
outline of the very beginning of the film you can probably guess everything
that happens.
Is The
Tomorrow War terrible? Not really, despite all of the things I’ve
griped on. It’s just far from good, which is a darn shame. The streak will have
to be broken another time.
Time.
Get it?
The
Tomorrow War is now available on Amazon Prime.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on July
30th 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment