Action at the expense of story
Channel: Ander Perez
Date: 2021-10-06

The problems in The Tomorrow War are similar to those in the later seasons of Game of Thrones. What could have been a great story about character interaction, politics, and world affairs, is secondary to action. A lot of stuff just starts to happen without reason. Humanity goes through asinine changes with the only explanation being a narrated news story cliche. Why should I care about people in the future more than the people in the present? That’s what the film should explain. Instead, chaos. Inevitably, too much happens in too little time. 

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Time travel movies get a bad reputation. Back to the Future set an impossibly high standard: entertaining and easy to grasp. Since then, every movie using time travel as a story element has been subject to endless comparison; Back to the Future established a set of rules that every other movie must follow or else be met with confusion. Two elements must be clear: the rules and the plot. If the rules make sense, then the plot uses them to its advantage. Time travel — or any science fiction for that matter — needs to serve the story, if not it comes across as gimmicky.
 
When I’m watching Godzilla, I want to see monsters the size of skyscrapers, towering over humanity wreaking havoc, not the girl from stranger things crying and yelling. I don’t remember any of the characters aside from the monsters, and frankly, I don’t care to. The spectacle is the story. But when I watch The Tomorrow War, I want the opposite. There’s nothing specific that audiences immediately gravitate toward. Since the monsters are generic, the story needs to be the spectacle. I want to see humanity struggling with the idea of fighting a monster that doesn’t exist in the present: the political fallout, the decision making, the struggles that come from fighting something based on belief. How do legislators across the globe justify fighting a war in the “future?” All it takes is a soccer match half time show to convince every government to team up and send 90% of our population into the future to a war we haven’t seen? Unfortunately, what I would consider the most intriguing part of the story, is turned into a news montage that lasts the span of a minute. The plot of the movie loses all effect, and the result is a generic action movie. 
 
The Tomorrow War is perfectly summarized in its opening sequence. Pratt and a group of soldiers falling out of the sky onto the rooftop pool of a building in a burning city. It immediately throws all the movie has to offer at the audience. This introduction hurts the rest of the movie because it takes time away from introducing us to the characters in favor of introducing us to the action. It lessens the pay-off of every other time travel situation and desensitizes the action. The shock factor only lasts so long, since the rest of the movie is basically the introduction for two long hours. Revealing a pivotal part of the action immediately is like telling the audience that the kid from the Sixth Sense can see ghosts in the first five minutes of the film.  
 
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