BEFORE: From one perspective, it might have made sense to follow up "The Harder They Fall" with "Concrete Cowboy", another film with Idris Elba where people ride horses - and we will get there, only that's about 14 films from now. Instead from Westerns I've moved on to sci-fi, from cloning dinosaurs to tonight's film about time-travel and fighting aliens. Yeah, it's a sci-fi weekend and documentaries are totally in the rear-view, it feels good. Time travel movies are always welcome here at the Movie Year, but I'm sure I'll find a few nits to pick.
Chris Pratt carries over from "Jurassic World Dominion".
THE PLOT: A family man is drafted to fight in a future war where the fate of humanity relies on his ability to confront the past.
AFTER: Standard SPOILER ALERT for this film, which is just over a year old, but is only screening on AmazonPrime and never got a theatrical release. So if you haven't seen it yet, please turn back now.
OK, so there are a few reasons why I know that time travel will never exist in the real world - the first is that nobody has come into our past from the future to fix things, at least that we know of. If time travel gets invented in, say, 2052, wouldn't you think somebody would have come back in time and delivered us the COVID vaccine early and prevented all those deaths? Or negated the Holocaust or any other tragedies from over the years? (I know, maybe they tried to and made things even worse, or they changed time, realized their mistake and put it back? Nah, the simplest answer is that the people in the future are just as stuck in time as we are.)
Another reason I know time travel won't ever exist is that movies keep getting it wrong, or at least wrong-ish, for something that doesn't exist. There were movies made in the 1910's about men landing on the moon, and there you go, it's got to be a dream before it can be real, but if the movies keep showing time travel working like this, or failing to work at all, the time-space engineers are either going to blow us all up, or realize how hopeless the endeavor is because that's the way it plays out in the screenplays, usually. The people going back to kill Hitler accidentally kill the wrong baby, or the people going back to save JFK realize that THEY have become Lee Harvey Oswald, and that's not the way things work, now, is it?
As we all know from reading science-fiction, the worst thing you can do when time-traveling in fiction is creating a paradox, like accidentally sleeping with your own grandmother and thus becoming your own grandfather. That's not so bad, it's a closed time-loop, and gametes are going to do what they do, it's just a bit icky. Even worse is killing your grandfather and thus erasing yourself, because then you don't get born, so you can't come back and kill your grandfather, even though that's what you did. This is just a closed double-loop, I don't think the whole universe is really going to reboot as a result, but still, it's probably best avoided.
The time-travelers seen in "The Tomorrow War" are all relatively young, and they come back to 2021 to recruit soldiers, who are mostly on the older side. The theory is that you can't, or shouldn't, jump within your own life-span, to eliminate the possibility of bumping into yourself, or worse, accidentally killing yourself. So they take older soldiers back with them to 2051, to a time when they're most likely dead - if not dead from old age, then dead from being eaten by hungry aliens. Wait a minute, there are hungry aliens?
This plot point doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the more you think about it, honestly, the worse it gets, across the board. "We're from the future, and we need you to come with us, thirty years into the future, and help us fight off an alien invasion. Don't worry, you won't bump into yourself because you're not alive in the future, you'll die in 2030, if you manage to survive a week fighting our war for us." Umm, wait a second, what was that about me dying in 8 years? And instead of living another 8 years, you want me to come fight a war and die tomorrow? Sure, why not, I guess I'm all in. NO, screw that, if I've got 8 more years to live, then bugger off and leave me alone, I'm going to live the most fantastic 8 years I possibly can!
The issue here becomes, is the future set in stone, or can it be changed? And the answer, of course, is YES. In order to make this 30-year time jump, the scientists describe time as being a river, and the time machines are like two rafts on the river, 30 years apart. They're both moving forward at the same rate, and they just found a way to jump from one raft to another. Umm, sure, got it, that sounds scientific enough, let's go. NO, wait, seriously, time is a river, and we can't change the direction or the speed? That's not time travel, that's some kind of wormhole or something, but we're ALREADY traveling through time, all of us, with no control of the direction or the speed, that's just called LIFE. Why not travel back in time and put soldiers in suspended animation so they're ready to fight in 2052? Wouldn't that be easier than putting everybody through the excessive strain of time travel, having their bodies' molecules be torn apart and re-assembled (hopefully) on the other side?
And for that matter, these travelers can't just come back to 2022 from 2052 and expect not to change things - by their very presence, they've altered the timeline. Just by saying "we're from the future, time travel exists, and aliens are invading Earth in 2052", they've changed history. Then they TAKE some of the humans from 2022 and rocket them into the future, with VERY little training, and some of them die? How does THAT not damage the timestream? Those people were supposed to live longer, maybe have more kids, or accomplish things or invent things that could be very useful against the aliens, and now they'll never have a chance to do that, because you took them to the future and made them fight aliens until they were dead.
Look, I get it, it's 2052 and there are only about 500,000 humans left, but so what? How is that your grandfather's problem, that they should have to come and fight YOUR war for you, against the aliens. Suck it up, buttercup, if you didn't want to be an alien's lunch you should have done something about it before things got out of hand. Do they not have nuclear weapons in the future, or something even better? Can't you pull a "War of the Worlds" and just give the aliens a virus or something? Nah, let's reach back into the past to get some more humans who don't understand the technology of 2052, that'll fix things! That's some bullshit. For a minute I thought maybe they were sending humans from 2022 to 2052 just to feed the aliens, so they could skate themselves. Or maybe they thought by feeding a bunch of fatty Americans from 2022 to the aliens they could give the invaders heart disease, clog their arteries until they just collapsed.
No, I'm supposed to take this seriously, that the best defense the humans of 2052 had was to invent time-travel, then reach back into the past for help. Look, if they really wanted to take down the aliens, why not just get a message sent back to 2022 about when and where the alien invasion was going to take place, and then we'd have like 27 years to prepare, we could invent better weapons, build a shield around the planet, stop eating so many fatty foods, something like that. Wouldn't that make more sense? Ah, but the movie has an answer for that, it turns out that nobody from the future really knows when the aliens landed, by the time anybody knew about the takeover, it had been going on for some time, and there was nothing to do but get eaten, THEN invent time-travel, THEN recruit soldiers from the past. Umm, sure.
To make matters worse, they still haven't gotten all the bugs out of this time-travel thing - Dan Forester's platoon appears in the year 2052 about a mile over the city of Miami, and the majority of them fall to their deaths - welcome to the future, bitches, sorry you lost that extra 8 years you could have had if you'd just stayed in the past. (This is another point I've always made about the impossibility of time-travel movies, they treat the Earth as if it's a fixed point in space, but it's not, the earth is always traveling around the sun, which is traveling around the galaxy, which is traveling around the universe. If you make a time-jump you're also making a space-jump, because the Earth is never in the same location, and if you're off by a few seconds, you're off by 100 kilometers or more, and you're floating in the void of space. But I can't tell if this is the point the movie is trying to make here or not.)
A few of the soldiers from the past manage to land in rooftop pools on top of skyscrapers, so the squad is still intact, it's just a lot smaller. Aww, I guess a bunch of aliens are going to go hungry that night, too bad. After some stalking around town, the would-be soldiers finally encounter the aliens, who don't look anything like the demogorgons in "Stranger Things". Just kidding, of course they do, only nastier.
But back to my point about there being better ways to battle these aliens than just throwing a bunch of non-soldier soldiers from 30 years in the past at them. For one thing, Dan learns an awful lot about them during his week in the future, thanks to a military science officer who, what a shocker, is somebody that he knew very well in 2022, and now she's all growed up. In both the future and the present, Dan seems to have an uncanny ability to get to know EXACTLY the right people with the exact right knowledge and skills to give him the information he needs at any given moment. And what a coincidence, one of those people is his estranged father, who's got military skills, pilot skills, hunting skills, all the skills one might need to hunt and kill a creature, while tugging on the audience's heartstrings with the prospect of a reunion with his estranged son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. (I'm not crying, just got something in my eye...)
The mission in the future is a complete failure, the aliens are just that hungry and vicious. And the time-travel device gets destroyed, but still somehow manages to return all the soldiers who didn't die to 2022, that also seems a bit too convenient. But the gate is closed, one of the "rafts" on the river sank, so no more time-travel. But there's still some hope, if Dan can use that skill of talking to exactly the right people and assembling exactly the right team, including his father, two members of the 2022 time-traveling squad and I think one of the soldiers from 2052, plus one of his high-school science students, and somehow solve the puzzle of the aliens, namely when and where they appear on the planet, and how they maybe can be stopped. It's a plan that's beyond ridiculous, but also somehow just crazy enough to work.
But then we're back to questioning the nature of time, because if Dan uses the knowledge and resources he got in the future and takes out the aliens in the present, then he's changed the timeline, hasn't he? And now we've got ourselves a big paradox, because if he defeats the aliens in the present, then the aliens don't invade in the future - and if they don't invade in the future, then the soldiers from the future don't need to invent time travel and come back to 2022 for soldiers, and if they don't do THAT, then Dan doesn't get recruited, doesn't go to the future, and then he doesn't learn how to defeat the aliens in the present, so he doesn't, and we're back where we started. That's another double-loop with parallel timelines that's going to keep going around and never resolving itself OR there's a simpler answer, which is that time-travel is impossible, will never be invented, and this is all just speculative fiction that I'm over-thinking.
I thought of another NITPICK POINT about halfway through, which was that these aliens seemed to brutal and vicious to have somehow invented space travel, like these creatures just seemed to exist to eat and destroy, how the hell did they pilot a spaceship across the cosmos? But the film eventually answers this question, you just have to wait a really long time to learn the answer.
Good news, they restore the timeline where all of humanity instead dies from climate change, overpopulation and the Earth running out of resources. Wait, how is that good news?
Also starring Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "The Predator"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Betty Gilpin (last seen in "The Hunt"), Sam Richardson (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Jasmine Matthews, Edwin Hodge (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (last seen in "Black Widow"), Keith Powers (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Mary Lynn Rajskub (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Mike Mitchell (last seen in "Other People"), Jared Shaw, Alexis Louder (last seen in "Harriet"), Rose Bianco (last seen in "Greenland"), Seychelle Gabriel, Alan Trong, Chibuikem Uche, David Maldonado (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Kasandra Bandfield, Michelle Rivera, Kiley Casciano Davis, Matthew Cornwell (last seen in "Are You Here"), Patrick Y. Malone, Clark Sarullo, Ashlyn Moore, Patrick Fleming, Terrence J. Smith, Felisha Terrell, Gissette Valentin, Eric Graise, Zachary James Rukavina, Angel Giuffria, Seth Schenall, Piper Collins (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Joshua Israel.
RATING: 6 out of 10 hourly sedatives
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