*No major twists spoiled…

IMDB Synopsis

A man is drafted to fight in a future war where the fate of humanity relies on his ability to confront his past.

“Did you tell it to die?”

Chris Pratt, Time Travel, Aliens, Machine guns shooting, you have all the makings here for a summer blockbuster. With The Tomorrow War, it seems like this is Amazon putting their foot down and trying to make themselves known as a big time studio. Does it work though?

Directed by Chris McKay (Lego Batman Movie) The Tomorrow War gives us elements of The Terminator, Edge of Tomorrow and numerous other Time Traveling war with Aliens type movies. The main premise though is interesting, where there is a war in the future and they send people back 30 years in order to recruit them to help with this future war, or a Tomorrow War (woah). Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester, an Iraq veteran who is a teacher now, but seems ready for the fight when his name is called. We see him get a nice little team up with people like Mary Lynn Rasjkub and Sam Richardson and off they go to the future. They are fighting these creatures called Whitespikes and they seem to just be these unbeatable creatures, until they arent. Forester meets the Colonel (Yvonne Strahovski) of the future unit, and she has been working diligently to discover a poison they can use on the creatures. From then on the story really is about Forester and his team giving the Colonel enough time in order to create something to destroy these monsters.

Overall I think the story is fine, but the execution and pacing are not great. The movie is very long, and has a scene about 1:40 in where you think this is probably the end of the movie. Only to find out that there is 40 more minutes and a whole other storyline (which I won’t go into now). So I think it really just dragged a little which caused the movie to really lose its core.

Stock Watch

Stock Neutral – Chris Pratt

He is still one of the biggest actors in the world, with multiple franchises currently running. This is a much blander version than his previous work, but I still think he has a ridiculously bright future. He can do comedy, action, and drama which is not easy to get all three.

Stock Up – Yvonne Strahovski

Put her in more things, please and thank you Hollywood.

*A couple other tidbits

• I actually really liked the creature design, they were genuinely gross and terrifying.
• Sam Richardson is very funny.
• J.K. Simmons, you kiddin’ me?
• If you have Betty Gilpin your movie you have to give her more to do than this.

For Amazon to continue dipping into the Summer Blockbuster market after Without Remorse is interesting. It seems like we will see a lot more of these from them, I just do hope they give them at least a limited theater run. That way we can see these movies the way they were meant to be seen. The Tomorrow War though is fun and watchable for sure, the story is underwhelming though at the conclusion.

Juice Rating:

*You can find my 2021 Movie Rankings here.

*You can find all of my Movie Ratings here.

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