There were some requests to open a thread to discuss The Tomorrow War currently available on Amazon Prime to keep the streaming thread from getting cluttered. I don't know much about the movie, but I wrote a bunch of notes while I was watching it and it might as well all go here. The Tomorrow War plot makes basically no sense at all, but I think the movie is one of those production disasters where its written, rewritten, edited, reshot, etc and you just end up with a mess. There is a bunch of stuff in it that seems like it may have been a more "Christian themed" movie. Its got a couple things that seem to point at major plot twists or something that just never materialize in the movie. For instance there's a pretty heavy pro-life anti abortion thing going on that doesn't really go anywhere. Some of the promotional posters made me think that the portal through time was an actual "God did it" miracle. It looks a lot like a half face/eye in the sky in some promo stuff. I'm wondering if the movie was originally much more heavily Christian and then they went back in and made it more centrist/left leaning with the environmental themes and just sort of patched it all together. I jotted things I noticed as I was watching and a bunch of generally weird stuff: Spoilers Ahoy
Well that was a hell of a lot more words than I thought I had while I was watching it but whatever. As far as production values go the movies fine. SFX, acting, etc seems pretty normal. The writing and editing though are just bottom of the barrel and its no wonder Amazon was able to pick this up cheap and dump it straight to streaming.
|
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 01:18 |
|
|
# ? Jun 3, 2024 22:41 |
|
Just started it and this movie is so dumb in the first 15 minutes lmfao I mean Brazil in the World Cup final in 2022?! Cmon man that’s ridiculous!
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 02:49 |
|
I didn't pick up on all the Christian elements when I watched it (possibly because this movie was a confusing mess of poo poo) but now that you point them out yeah there certainly are a lot of them. I agree this was prob some other movie rewritten into whatever the hell it currently is. Maybe they snagged Pratt with its initial religious themes and rewrote it after he signed on? My guess is someone read the original, threw it in the trash and just said "redo this but try to steal at least one thing from every popular sci-fi movie from the last 50 years. Make the monsters starship troopers bugs, who hang you from the ceiling like the Predator, but also they act like Aliens aliens and come from the Thing spaceship which is actually a spacejockey ship!" It is extremely impressive how literally Nothing in this movie makes sense. Not a single loving thing. Its one of those phenomena where you just need to know more about how this thing happened. Theres plenty of white noise bad sci-fi trash on Amazon/netflix/whatever but this one is truly special in how bizarrely bad its story is.
banned from Starbucks fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jul 8, 2021 |
# ? Jul 8, 2021 07:12 |
|
I kinda liked the aliens in the movie. I stopped watching after they caught the Queen because I realized it was the alphas from Edge of Tomorrow again and just ended up throwing that on. That is one of the best sci fi movies of the decade.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 09:08 |
|
I knew this movie would be exceptionally dumb when they decided to send civilians without training or gear to the future to fight a war. Still watched the whole thing and regret every minute. But hey! JK Simmons!
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 09:22 |
|
CelticPredator posted:I kinda liked the aliens in the movie. I stopped watching after they caught the Queen because I realized it was the alphas from Edge of Tomorrow again and just ended up throwing that on. Yeah, the best thing I can say about this movie is that it got me to watch Edge of Tomorrow again, which owns. In fairness, it's difficult to make things make sense in any movie involving time travel. There'll always be some sort of "why didn't they just...?" scenario that contradicts what happens in the movie. But this one doesn't even attempt to have anything make sense in the broadest strokes. Let's say we accept that the time-travel technology is a one-off fluke and they can't really change or adapt it in any way. Even then, the whole scheme makes no drat sense. They somehow got the present-day world to agree to conscript their populace into a meatgrinder of a war that hardly anybody survives, and yet the present day does exactly gently caress else to support the war effort. They got to "throw untrained civilians into a meatgrinder as light infantry" and then just threw their hands up and left it at that. The future, too, didn't seem to have gotten beyond "send dudes in to shoot them with lovely guns and I guess maybe biological warfare", either, despite having been embroiled in a global war for survival for some time. Edge of Tomorrow, on the other hand, very succinctly shows us a scenario where the entire world was put on a war footing through the scale of the invasion and the whole thing with the exosuits. You can absolutely buy that this is humanity trying its absolute hardest to win, which in turn sells the Mimics as a genuine threat when they still crush them. Meanwhile in Tomorrow War it looks like humanity was faced with the equivalent of oversized wild animals, shrugged its shoulders, and just kinda rolled over to die because the plot says so.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 10:42 |
|
They should have just time traveled back to 1939 and convinced Hitler to send the German army to the future to fight the monsters. Bam you just stopped ww2, fascism and saved the world.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 11:06 |
|
banned from Starbucks posted:They should have just time traveled back to 1939 and convinced Hitler to send the German army to the future to fight the monsters. Bam you just stopped ww2, fascism and saved the world.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 13:14 |
|
CelticPredator posted:I kinda liked the aliens in the movie. I stopped watching after they caught the Queen because I realized it was the alphas from Edge of Tomorrow again and just ended up throwing that on. This is one of the best sci fi movies of the decade as well The aliens were cool I thought, the acting was terrible, script was terrible. It's kind of made better if you just accept that Chris Pratt is meant to be an incredibly dumb character and that's why he repeatedly risks leaving his current daughter without a father in order to save his future daughter that he barely even knows. The last ~30 minutes of the movie seems like somebody forgot to proofread the script.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 18:48 |
|
Starks posted:The last ~30 minutes of the movie seems like somebody forgot to proofread the script. The entire movie pretty much feels like that, to me. There are some interesting ideas, which they explore (or refuse to) in the most boring or incomplete ways possible, and I wish they'd done like a dozen more passes of the script to lock down the point of this movie. The Bad Dad theme in particular is frustratingly halfway there. Was Chris Pratt supposed to look like a bad dad in the beginning? Because he seemed mostly-attentive but justifiably frustrated by a bad job interview. He hulks out on a garbage can, apologizes to no one, then goes in to be cute with his kid. "Learn to value fatherhood" barely works as an arc when it seems like Chris Pratt already does...and his tension with Future-Daughter is predicated entirely on stuff his character hasn't done yet, so the whole emotional core of it feels inert. Everything about the time travel mechanics and military strategy is nonsense, too, though. Nobody in the past knows anything about the enemy? They tell no one before sending them through time? I actually liked the idea that they're kind of bad at using time travel, and gently caress up and kill people in the process. But there's no transparency at all about their mission? The alien toxin is this important MacGuffin, and almost nobody seems to know or care about its development or production, in the future or the past. People know Chris Pratt's daughter is some important figure in the future, and yet none of them want to listen to him when he gives a pretty plausible warning that the aliens are already on Earth? Then there's all the normal pedantic time travel poo poo. Everyone they send to the future is already dead there. This is necessary...to avoid paradoxes, I guess? But isn't it a paradox when someone who's supposed to die of cancer in 2026 actually dies in 2021 because of future bugs? If they're concerned about paradoxes, I guess there is no multiverse. So, Chris Pratt went to the future when Future-Daughter was a child and had this experience and still turned into a dick? Does she remember when Dad got sent through time or not?
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 22:11 |
|
It felt like they were setting up the Arrival twist (Arrival Spoiler) that Pratt indeed leaves his daughter, despite the protestations he would never, because like Jeremy Renners character he can't stand knowing ahead of time how she dies. But, like this entire goddamn movie its not connected to anything.
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 22:38 |
|
The dumb thing about the idea of only sending people who aren't alive in the future to the future is that 99.99% of the world's population is dead so that shouldn't exactly be an issue. Also start of the movie "In 11 months all of humanity will be dead" cut to "12 months later"
|
# ? Jul 8, 2021 22:43 |
|
Xealot posted:If they're concerned about paradoxes, I guess there is no multiverse. So, Chris Pratt went to the future when Future-Daughter was a child and had this experience and still turned into a dick? Does she remember when Dad got sent through time or not? The daughter's entire plan depends on creating a new timeline, and she would seem to be in a position to know whether that's possible, given either she remembers her father travelling into a future war when she was a kid or not.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 01:00 |
|
This was basically on par with Independence Day , for me. Massive plot conveniences, various over the top characters, poo poo explodes. They set up to play on the emotional moment Pratt’s character goes through with his daughter, but then they just don’t? Abandoning ideas was a common theme throughout the film, but taken as ID4: 2021 yeah alright.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 01:51 |
|
The movie's tone is all over the place. You have PTSD guys coming back from the future war but also wacky reaction shots to support vehicles being taken out by the aliens. Chris Pratt watches his future daughter die and then has a comedic volcano discussion with a student. Edit: Also Chris Pratt is told that the aliens can smell human blood from like a mile away and this information is not used at all until the very end of the movie where a character who wasn't told this makes use of it.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 02:05 |
|
I was pretty confused by the cruise ship , but I’ll be honest I was not watching super intently by then. Watching his daughter die was the moment in this movie for me . I’d be devastated myself , and given the maybe finality of the situation it was intense enough for me. The movie then decided not to bother with any of the foreshadowing on what this could cause whatsoever , and became wacky fun again. I don’t understand how they can blow this poo poo so bad.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 13:21 |
|
The tone of this movie is wild, yeah. The entire last act becomes a trash Michael Bay movie, where a crew of flippant badass blue-collar types bootstrap their way through a jaunty mission to save the world. But 3 minutes earlier, it was a grim nightmare experience where humanity loses the war, and the protagonist learns he abandoned his daughter just before watching her die. The Future War is a terrifying hell on Earth that leaves broken people in its wake. But hell yeah, boys! Let's get-er-done and go cowboy on these aliens! Woo! Mostly, JK Simmons makes no sense to me in this movie. Who is he? Who is this larger-than-life character? He feels like the villain from Avatar or like Jesse Ventura from Predator thrown into a story that doesn't in any way have that kind of energy.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 19:27 |
|
The last act of the movie and the entirety of the J.K. Simmons character feel tacked on and I wouldn't be surprised if they were reshoots to give it a more upbeat ending. If you end it shortly after the daughter's sacrifice, with Chris Pratt and others dedicating themselves to averting that future with decades of hard work, you get something more appropriate to the climate change metaphor, but less obviously triumphant. Instead, a little quick violence straightforwardly saves the day and we get to see a family reunite with old wounds mended, all problems solved.
|
# ? Jul 9, 2021 21:44 |
|
He could very well have not been in the movie, he appears for a minute to do … nothing for no reason. Later he appears in front of part of what looks like a personal aircraft, and uses his teleporting ability to put them in a cargo plane. That’s what he does I guess.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 00:57 |
|
This is 100% the kind of movie where the behind the scenes of how it happened is going to be more interesting than the actual movie. It feels frankensteined together out of at least two unrelated scripts, some executive producer interference (Pratt has EP credit) and a reshoot.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 01:00 |
|
I'm half an hour into this slop and it's so dumb it hurts
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:00 |
|
are there any good movies please I just want one
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:07 |
|
I can’t believe Pratt abandoned his wife and daughter to marry the Terminator’s daughter
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:08 |
|
We all know what the R in R Force stands for, we just don’t use that word anymore. Glad I read people making GBS threads on this and saying not to question or think about it in any way as it made it OK enjoyable due to that. Can’t disagree with anything in the OP though.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:29 |
|
Honestly, all this dumbassed poo poo that people are reporting makes the film seem way more interesting than if it were just blandly competent.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:37 |
|
This movie would have been better if he boned his future-daughter. That would have been a real curveball.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 05:06 |
|
I think the biggest problem this movie has is that it violates the number one inviolable role of time travel movies. The time travel logic is not internally consistent. As for the rest, it's just a bloated allegory that really doesn't make any sense. My question that I don't think there's a satisfactory answer for is how old is JK Simmons character supposed to be and how old is Chris Pratt's character? JK Simmons backstory is that he's came back from Vietnam all hosed up and abandoned his family. Chris Pratt fought in Iraq and is presumably around 40 in 2022. He abandoned his daughter when she was 12 I think she said.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 06:22 |
|
I think the time travel is straightforward terminator 2 rules (past can be changed, it’s fine), except for some reason everyone on the planet is too dumb to realise it. It’s either that or implied to be avengers: endgame rules (past can be changed, but it makes a seperate timeline) but then that raises questions why one timeline is enthusiastically throwing people into another timelines meatgrinder war. massive spider fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jul 10, 2021 |
# ? Jul 10, 2021 08:42 |
|
There are two distinct kinds of time travel in the movie. The first appearance of people during the world cup is genuine time travel and splits the timeline. Everything else is teleporting between those two timelines. The machine never again sends anything into its own past because those world cup soldiers were never in its own past. We never see the machine send anything back at all after that. We only see people shuttling from Pratts timeline to Strahovskys timeline, where the former is no longer the past of the latter. The only real constant in time travel movies is that it makes no sense, but this is one of the less bad ones I think. Mostly because it doesn't get cute with bootstrap paradoxes and have things happen acausally.
|
# ? Jul 10, 2021 13:25 |
|
We just watched this and god drat what a script. It really does feel fundamentally busted and unfinished/heavily messed with. There's way too many scenes of person asks or brings up perfectly reasonable question but they're told to shut up or it's dismissed as a comedy beat or that they'll find out later. We're still LOLing at how no one thought to tell anyone that the aliens are only vulnerable to damage in the belly or neck until well into the movie and no one spreads this information around but it doesn't matter because how vulnerable the aliens are to gunfire and where changes in every scene and sometimes in the same scene, it's crazy. And then at the end Chris Pratt and Libertarian J Jonah Jameson are able to just, like brawl with one I'm glad we're not the only ones who noticed the strong Christian Movie vibes from this. Also the aliens and the terminology/situation, they're described as a ravaging horde that just destroys our children and the don't have any government or real religion all they do is breed and consume but they do observe the sabbath, fortunately future Miranda Lawson and Starlord have a few conversations about devising a solution to this in the form of a toxin. I'm surprised they had it work via injection instead of gas. How in the gently caress was the part about them stopping to rest every six days and them deciding to call that the sabbath even get into the finished movie, holy poo poo. To add to that, the movie as someone mentioned earlier has this sort of pro-life vibe going on, and this notion of how like, we just have to be worshipping the gun and at war all the time with a bad guy otherwise society would cease to function, war can unite us. Also yeah saving children is the most important thing ever pro-life, unless its aliens in which case they have a straight abortion-esque moment of them using the toxin on suspended aliens at the end and killing the queen to stop them from breeding Like...what the gently caress was the point of anything in this poo poo Anyway weirdly the actual time travel and rules behind that were completely fine! I mean yeah it's time travel so of course it won't make sense under heavy scrutiny but time travel was shenanigans were the absolute least of the movie's problems. Like there's multiple points like that scene in Blade III where you can tell they wrote themselves into a corner so they just have all the principle characters run away from each other so the movie can continue. The Tomorrow War has several points where Pratt/folks with him are in an absolute you are going to die scene and it just, like, cuts to them elsewhere and safe. Also the aliens have those rules where they're basically invincible and hyper-fast and can climb walls and there's billions of them except when a main character needs to do something then there's magically just one or two aliens and you can go toe to toe with them. You can sort of see what was re-shot and what wasn't, like there's two instances where we see the aliens' victims are desiccated and strung up upside down sort of like in Predator, this never gets acknowledged except for characters observing that they found some dead folks and in every other instance where they kill someone it's more of an animalistic thrashing around like a lion or something. Also Chris Pratt's Iraq War veteran character...uh...okay bear with me here... So the movie opens with typical, like boohoo I'm a veteran no one will hire me for a real job I'm stuck as a high school teacher in this comfortable suburb full of friends and family that loves me but DOES IT REALLY MATTER IN THE FACE OF THE TOMORROW WAR? DOES ANYTHING MATTER? But then the movie's climax is that they sneak into another country to find hidden weapons of mass destruction thanks to Pratt's military training, like literally theu find a knockoff derelict from alien and say in dialogue that the aliens are planet clearing weapons. He and the prepper criminal Vuetnane vet dad get to "really win this time" by having an enemy they can carte blanche kill and by actually finding weapons of mass destruction Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jul 11, 2021 |
# ? Jul 11, 2021 23:19 |
|
Good lord I hated this movie. It's like they couldn't decide what kind of movie they wanted to make and hoped Pratt could carry it (he couldn't)
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 05:45 |
|
This thing was a garbage heap and I hope that Chris Pratt stops being a thing
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 11:18 |
|
Am I crazy for thinking both the 'female alien' scenes were really uncomfortable? Like clearly it was just supposed to be a generic alien queen monster, but every single thing in this movie felt like a twist that never came and both fights went from it just being a rampaging monster to being visibly intelligent and scared and not fighting anymore, and both times they attacked it while it was not doing anything, and the whole movie was "we must fight to make our species and family survive" then cut to them specifically torturing a woman to kill it's species and family while it's shackled up/sleeping. Like this movie set up like ten trillion twists that never happened, but then the only twist was the aliens did not intentionally invade. which makes them even less evil. like it really felt like they were setting up SOME twist.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 12:20 |
|
(I legitimately laughed at "why is that guy wearing a chef's hat". That was legitimately the only good part of the movie)
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 12:37 |
|
To win this war we need to kill the WOMEN and the CHILDREN, they live in a wicker basket tribe volcano house, or are being human trafficked, I'm an IRAQ vet teamed up with a VIETNAM vet, there is absolutely zero twist or commentary of any sort here. We shackle one up and torture one to make chemical weapons, which do not matter in the slightest as we blow them up with bombs and then fist fight and maim them.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 13:37 |
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:To win this war we need to kill the WOMEN and the CHILDREN, they live in a wicker basket tribe volcano house, or are being human trafficked, I'm an IRAQ vet teamed up with a VIETNAM vet, there is absolutely zero twist or commentary of any sort here. We shackle one up and torture one to make chemical weapons, which do not matter in the slightest as we blow them up with bombs and then fist fight and maim them. Also they observe the Sabbath.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 13:58 |
|
Neo Rasa posted:Also they observe the Sabbath. 6 day war
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 14:08 |
|
massive spider posted:I think the time travel is straightforward terminator 2 rules (past can be changed, it’s fine), except for some reason everyone on the planet is too dumb to realise it. Yeah, that's my problem. You have to make some pretty big assumptions about how the time travel must work in order for the basic plot of the movie to make any sense. But then all those assumptions must be unequivocally wrong in order for the ending to make any sense.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 15:08 |
|
Thinking about it, as far as time travel shenanigans go I think Assassin 33 A.D. handled its time travel stuff better than this movie.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 15:58 |
|
|
# ? Jun 3, 2024 22:41 |
|
Was the time travel itself bad? It felt straightforward enough. They had to fight the war in the future because the invincible aliens appeared by the millions suddenly in russia making an impossible overwhelming victory inevitable. But years later the final scientists were drawing close to a super weapon that could end the war and needed soldiers to keep humanity going to get to that point. To end the war in the future. (and to send it back to end the war in the past before it started) Like as a plan it all falls apart because the aliens are really very easy to fight, the super weapon sucks, and even a literal child can immediately figure out they didn't teleport from space, they just slowly bred a giant army in russia after global warming released them. Like those twists all come way too easy, but on the initial premise fighting the way they did made sense time travel rules wise.
|
# ? Jul 12, 2021 17:07 |