The Tomorrow War: A Tuna Santa Movie **Spoilers**

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > The Tomorrow War: A Tuna Santa Movie **Spoilers**

Sedgr: Sep 16, 2007; Neat!

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

Christmas party opening scene for seemingly no reason.
Daughter name: Muri. I assume her full name is Amurica. Or Muriel. Or Mary.
Pratt doesn't pay attention to his family for Science Job reasons. He doesn't get the job anyways and we don't even really know what he was applying for. This makes him sad. That's what he gets for trusting science.
We must travel to the future to protect our sons/daughters/grandchildren (many who haven't been born yet). The Pro-Life vibes are strong.
Anti-war protestors are commonplace, but the movie pretty much just glosses over them, framing them as obviously wrong.
Pratt is subjected to a medical procedure he doesn't really understand and has no control over, while the mostly uncaring doctors and nurses ram him through the system.
Somehow no one in the present seems to know anything about what's going on, and the people from the future specifically don't tell them. To the point that we have survivors shown who have returned to the past and they don't tell anyone I guess because of the trauma? The White Spikes (the aliens) are specifically said to make clicking noises.
Pratt and family consider breaking the law to avoid the draft, going to visit his extremely prepper/survivalist father for help. Pratt chooses not to break the law and accept his fate/gods plan.
Bizarre training montage. We are told 50% of military were unsuitable for time travel but no one explains why. Pratt is some kinda special forces commando high school teacher or whatever because of course he is.
They lampshade how loving strange it is but the clothing thing is still baffling? Why do they send civilians through time wearing suit and ties and chefs hat and poo poo? What? Why are they not better outfitted? WTF is going on in this movie?
They talk pretty specifically about R force and D force but its unclear to me why. Hmmm why would you split people into two groups and label some of them R and some of them D. Pratt is on team R aka "Research" force but this doesn't really seem to mean anything or change anything. D is probably Development or Defense or something but I don't think its mentioned.
Dude in the red shirt has apparently done multiple tours in the future, fighting the aliens, even bringing back one of their claws. No one bothers to ask him about anything I guess. Same with red shirts friends who all die like...red shirts.
We get introduced to the idea of time travel paradoxes, I guess you can't be alive in both times, but it never really comes up? Seems like an attempt to plug giant plot holes but this movie is nothing but plot holes really. Like most time travel movies it stops making any sense if you think about it. Actually this one stops making sense well before that. A couple obvious holes get squashed with technobabble but its still just a mess of nonsense that raises more questions than it answers.
Once a week the aliens disappear for a day. We call it the Sabbath.
The future is so scary we can't tell anyone about it because then they couldn't fill the hangar to send people through time. Except earlier we are told the arm band can find you anywhere on earth, and that if you run your spouse or adult children will be drafted to replace you.
Why are we sending untrained civilians at all? Supposedly everyone in the future is dead. <500,000 survivors. Fifty percent of the military aren't eligible for some reason so we have half the earths military we could send don't we? Even with the "only alive in one or the other timeline" caveat. Why only a few thousand a week? Hell why are aliens that are stuck on the ground and susceptible to small arms even a threat really? Wild animals are not a real threat to the actual military even if they are big/strong/fast.
Frankly the whole "Drop" sequence into the future feels like its meant to be them dropping into Hell. Not metaphorically, I mean actual Hell. I feel like this may have been the point where a major twist happens for the original version or something. The future isn't under attack by aliens but rather hell/demons/rapture and this got changed to the aliens instead. Would explain some of the reason they can't tell anyone in the past what they are really fighting.
The white spikes are described as clicking earlier by the survivors in their group therapy but the sound they make is actually just wild animal roars.
Pratts own daughter asks him his name and sees in his file he's a soldier. I guess after a few years you forget what your parents look and sound like. And their name.
Plan to save their only research center and the last chance to stop the aliens apparently involves bombing the city and blowing up the research center to protect it from wild animals.
Why do the spikes seem to leave scorch marks? If these are bone/biological that's kinda odd.
Red shirt takes a souvenir from a dead White Spike they find. Why? Unknown. He already has one. Did he lose it?
WTF is going on with the research team they were trying to save? This attack was enough to constitute an emergency insertion earlier, but the research team is hanging in this weird bio umbilical cord area and are all desiccated and zombified looking?
We go from save the researches that seem to have been dead for awhile, to save the researchers research data and some samples that never come up again. Despite the fact that the attack seems to have mostly ended at this point we are in a race against time because they are going to bomb the area anyway.
We finally get a full White Spike reveal where they sound like gorillas now.
Bullets do gently caress all to the aliens, unless they do, in which case untrained civilians actually take some of them down. These things overran the entire worlds military supposedly.
I doubt its coincidence that the White Spikes basically kill people by combination of crucifixion and torn apart by lions.
Help arrives in Humvees from...somewhere. Immediately killed by White Spikes. Untrained civilians once again kill several aliens.
The White Spikes now sound like Raptors from Jurassic Park. Barking and yelping sounds. Seeming to communicate like the Raptors as well.
Regular people nobly sacrifice themselves to accomplish nothing while most everyone dies, including the fat guy that Pratt tries to get people to stop to save.
Why is this entire city on fire? Humans lost this war awhile ago right? Hence the time travel plan? So is the city mostly empty or is it full of survivors who are under attack. Nothing makes sense.
Rather than show us anything they just cut to Pratt waking up somewhere else and presumably safe. At a military base in the Dominican Republic. Some of these helicopters would have been nice when Pratt needed rescue about 7 seconds ago screen time.
Red shirt has Cancer but fails to explain why he takes the alien claws. Its a reminder that he has cancer and will die, but why take more than one then?
Pratt gets pulled off the front line thanks to nepotism. His team gets redeployed because untrained civilian ground troops need to be fed into the woodchipper constantly I guess?
Pratt doesn't recognize his own daughter grown up and in fact has to work it out from them sharing the same last name. Pratts character may actually be mentally handicapped.
Oh and she's a military leader, and the head researcher, making her the head of R-Force, which makes her basically the leader of the world, because of course she is. And she hates Pratts guts.
Pratt hopes he was proud of his daughter for doing so well and going to MIT for her doctorate but didn't he die like 7 years after she was a little kid in the beginning? High school teacher Pratt can't do the math or like a million other things in this movie nothing lines up right. She later confirms Pratt died when she was 16.
Daughter reveals that the war is lost and she brought him through time for a reason but can't tell him till the proper time. Why? She can't see the future, and changing the past seems to have just never occurred to anyone or it wouldn't help their timeline anyway so why hide information important enough that you pull a person from the past while saying its not for sentimental reasons. Bad writing is the reason.
The Queen is bigger and more dangerous. Like every scifi alien queen ever.
Suddenly here at the middle of the movie they start talking about a toxin and how it kills the males and not the females but they don't know why. They've cleared out an area with the toxin and found all the males dead and the queen still alive. Toxin probably would have been useful in protecting the research building attacked by an entirely male swarm of animals that they dropped bombs on instead.
Now the last hope is capturing the female queen. So they can learn their biology to kill them. The queen that's much more rare than the males that we just finished saying die to the toxin we already have.
We fly over half sunk battleships and I wonder how exactly animals that shoot little bone spikes and run on the ground at people managed to get onboard a battleship and sink it. White Spikes are seen killing wild animals because they are everywhere now, not like before when they wiped out the human race.
The spikes landed in Russia three years ago avoiding detection and radar. The wild animal creatures. Daughter describes them as wild animals that want nothing. We are food. But I guess they overran and killed most people on earth because they breed pretty fast with the very rare queen.
Pratt for some reason brings up his future death and then avoids actually finding out how it happens.
We arrive at the place to capture the queen where she lives underground in a wicker basket hut or something? The leader of the free world repels down into the chamber to personally be involved in the capture of a bigger badder version of a wild animal we've seen murder most people in the movie up to now. She is accompanied by her Dad that she hates but brought to the future for a nebulous reason.
That's about the half way point through this mess.
Basically everybody dies. Special Forces Dad saves Leader of the World Daughter because of course he does.
The Queen makes generic monster screamy noises.
The aliens can kinda fly/glide now I guess. A single helicopter rotor takes out a half dozen of the aliens in less than a second.
The aliens murder everyone, but are now also made of tissue paper. Pratt and Daughter escape via humvee while the queen is hauled away by other choppers. The scene just kind of ends with hundreds of White Spikes chasing them. Apparently no one involved in production wants to actually see how Pratt escapes?
They drive to a nearby beach where the Spikes don't chase them anymore. Why? Don't know. They just don't. It's in fact so safe now they stop, get out of the humvee and Daughter launches a flare so someone can come get them. Guess they would have forgot about their lead researcher or assumed she was dead but hey we're well past anything in this movie making sense anymore.
On the beach where they should be running away we get the teary eyed reveal of how Pratt died and why his daughter hates him. He and her Mom separated when she was 12 and then Pratt died in a car accident a few years later. He also never seemed happy with his life. What a monster.
We are introduced to a new location, and the time travel device, in a giant fortified multi seawall area that seems to be taking in survivors on cruise ships and protected by more battleships. The last line of defense against something roughly as dangerous as a meth addicted polar bear.
Interestingly the time device makes a clicking/crackling sound. It is only shown at a distance a couple times and nothing about it is explained.
The queen can be sedated to the point that Head Researcher and Leader of the World Daughter can hang out in the same room with it and take samples while it naps. It bothers me somewhat that apparently all this takes is a large dose of Hydromorphone. Just wait till they give it some Fentanyl.
The monster stinks apparently and is in fact still dangerous according to Daughter. So she crawls around next to it while her clueless Dad from the past asks technobabble biology questions.
Science Montage! Pratt seems to do essentially nothing.
Did Miami fund this movie or something? City from earlier was Miami. Now Pratt wants to know if the Miami Dolphins ever won the super bowl and the spread. Which couldn't possibly happen in his own timeline anymore. I guess its just idle chit chat but it would only make sense if this movie was an entirely different movie. Probably a better movie. It would pretty much have to be.
Daughter mentions a "solution" if they get the toxin. Once again she tells no one what it might actually be because of mysterious reasons.
More cryptic "everything is almost complete" talk, this time from some rando soldier?
Pratt basically prays to his daughter. I know you brought me here for a reason. I have some purpose. Please tell me how I'm going to help you.
Big reveal, plan is to take the toxin back and manufacture it in the past to save the future. Except not by changing the past because no one brings it up. Take it, make it, bring it back to the future. And not the other toxin that already works. The new special toxin. And Pratt has to do it. For reasons. And it doesn't matter because she also reveals that they've already lost, so really its to save the alternate timeline? I guess its an alternate timeline now? That can't have the same people in it, so we can't save the future people, unless they didn't exist in the past like the people doing the training. Except we can send some because we showed that already. Wait what? My head hurts.
For some reason no one else wants to take the toxin back in time according to Daughter. Reason unclear.
The Queen sees Pratt holding a vial of toxin and freaks out. Why the Queen knows what this is or how or why or really anything is not explained.
The aliens hear the Queen somehow? And then attack the seawall somehow? Setting off mines that were also there protecting the wall apparently. The military is powerless to stop them. I guess the aliens swim real good but didn't bother attacking the place previously.
Pratt has become the mission and must be protected at all cost because they didn't send any toxin back previously. They tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
The last military outpost, manned by the last humans, begins an evacuation though no one mentions where they are going. It doesn't matter to the plot because once Pratt jumps we'll never see the result.
Aliens free the Queen. She chases Pratt and Daughter who are going to a helicopter that seems useless since if the time thing gets destroyed he's stuck in the future with them anyway.
Pratt and Daughter murk aliens left and right. If only the world had had more ex special forces high school teachers they could have killed the aliens before it got out of hand.
Everything is on fire and everything explodes. Once again I feel like this was meant to be Hell.
Daughter gets spiked, confesses her sins, admits she loves her Dad, and sacrifices herself to save the rest of humanity. If it's unclear at this point Daughter = Jesus.
Pratt dives after his daughter into a mass of aliens that will absolutely kill them both because he's the dumbest man in the world. Time travel saves him because of course it does.
Time travel is ruined and Pratt has the toxin in the past but somehow no one can think of any reason this might be helpful. Pratt even gets to keep the toxin its so worthless now.
Now its time for some heavy handed PTSD returning from war scenes while we setup the last act? Acts? Jesus there's like 45 mins left still.
The scene where Pratt tells his wife what happened is so strange. Its setup like she's supposed to be shocked by his revelations, but this is a world where transport between the future and past is real. Aliens are real. Nothing he says should come across as crazy in that world.
And somehow Pratt is stuck as the only person in the world that can actually fix the future or save this future or whatever but no one seems to give a poo poo? In fact they try to block him. And his wife comes up with the genius idea the aliens didn't land but were already there. No one else in the whole world up to 30 years in the future considered that the aliens that just suddenly appeared may not have landed but been around already.
We drift off into a small plotline where the actual problem was climate change. Probably why those polar bear monsters were so angry.
We also round up a few of the bit players from earlier in the movie to make them seem like there was a reason for them to be in the movie. This includes a weird scene where Pratt, Red Shirt, and Jump Friend suddenly teleport into Pratts classroom from earlier to ask the weird kid who knows about volcanoes some volcano questions. Not scifi teleport mind you. I mean the scene just suddenly starts with them there. A horrible, cringe, exposition dump to kick off the last action sequences.
The scene after makes no sense either with the government refusing to help Pratt even though he has the toxin and they just don't want to? I guess it forces him to reunite with his prepper weirdo Dad who might as well not be in the movie. JK Simmons is great though.
Once again Pratt tells his Dad about the aliens and its played like its some sort of revelation. When you have time travel alien shenanigan's on the evening news this is comically dumb.
More misplaced comedy moments occur to break up the dumb.
Rather than searching from the air, they search by snowmobile. This is better because reasons. Those reasons may be because someone involved in production wanted to go snowmobiling in the mountains. Featureless white nothingness is also nice and cheap.
Still almost 30min to go.
They blow up the glacier, to get to the ship, which isn't revealed by the explosion. Later on they will blow up the ship which was apparently always an option rendering the toxin and all the time travel totally meaningless.
Pratt acts shocked when they find the alien ship that they went and specifically blew up a glacier to find, based on information he obtained in the future where he fought the aliens from this exact ship. He in fact goes so far as to announce to the group that now they have proof. Pratts character is so dumb he passes out after forgetting to breathe for a few minutes.
The group decides to handle the aliens themselves. Since the world militaries have been shown to be significantly less effective than random morons at this point its probably the right choice to be honest.
Inside the ship they find a small replica of the Space Jockey ship from Alien. Including Space Jockey. Since its obvious at this point the White Spikes aren't intelligent enough to pilot a spaceship its pointed out directly that this different new alien must have crashed. A powerful revelation for anyone that slept through the movie to this point and just woke up.
The "Abortion" scene. Pratt as science man, attempts to give the aliens an abortion killing them in utero with giant needles filled with green toxin. I thought for sure this was going to wake up the aliens and that was going to be the time loop. Pratt attempts the abortion, waking the aliens, leading to the destruction of humanity. Oh Hubris! If only we had followed Gods plan then science wouldn't have destroyed us all!
The final action scenes are just a baffling mess. White Spikes are back to being tissue paper and lose in hand to hand combat with humans now. More noble sacrifices and reversal of fortunes abound. Pratt and his Dad each attempt to nobly sacrifice themselves for the other at least twice. Possibly more.
Pratt kills the Queen, the most powerful of the aliens that wiped out the human race in the future, by punching it.
Happy Alternate Timeline Ending.

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

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# ? May 6, 2024 04:32

The REAL Goobusters: Apr 25, 2008

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

banned from Starbucks: Jul 18, 2004

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

CelticPredator: Oct 11, 2013; 🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

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

gallilee: Jul 24, 2001; Imagine when you're about to get your dick sucked by the alien from aliens and she's like "ahaha guess i gotta bring out my little mouth for this one"

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

Perestroika: Apr 8, 2010

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.

That is one of the best sci fi movies of the decade.

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

banned from Starbucks: Jul 18, 2004

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

Gorn Myson: Aug 8, 2007

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.

Hitler finally gets the redemption arc we've all been craving.

# ? Jul 8, 2021 13:14

Starks: Sep 24, 2006

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.

That is one of the best sci fi movies of the decade.

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

Xealot: Nov 25, 2002; Showdown in the Galaxy Era.

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

massive spider: Dec 6, 2006

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

muscles like this!: Jan 17, 2005

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

Sir Kodiak: May 14, 2007

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

Partycat: Oct 25, 2004

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

muscles like this!: Jan 17, 2005

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

Partycat: Oct 25, 2004

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

Xealot: Nov 25, 2002; Showdown in the Galaxy Era.

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

Sir Kodiak: May 14, 2007

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

Partycat: Oct 25, 2004

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

massive spider: Dec 6, 2006

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

Ramrod Hotshot: May 30, 2003

I'm half an hour into this slop and it's so dumb it hurts

# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:00

Ramrod Hotshot: May 30, 2003

are there any good movies please I just want one

# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:07

Democratic Pirate: Feb 17, 2010

I can�t believe Pratt abandoned his wife and daughter to marry the Terminator�s daughter

# ? Jul 10, 2021 04:08

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

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

SuperMechagodzilla: Jun 9, 2007; NEWT REBORN

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

Caesar Saladin: Aug 15, 2004

This movie would have been better if he boned his future-daughter. That would have been a real curveball.

# ? Jul 10, 2021 05:06

Simplex: Jun 29, 2003

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

massive spider: Dec 6, 2006

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

Ravel: Dec 23, 2009; There's no story

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

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

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

Inzombiac: Mar 19, 2007; PARTY ALL NIGHT

EAT BRAINS ALL DAY

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

Professor Shark: May 22, 2012

This thing was a garbage heap and I hope that Chris Pratt stops being a thing

# ? Jul 12, 2021 11:18

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

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

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

(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

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

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

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

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. :wtc:

# ? Jul 12, 2021 13:58

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

Neo Rasa posted:

Also they observe the Sabbath.

6 day war

# ? Jul 12, 2021 14:08

Simplex: Jun 29, 2003

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.

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.

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

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

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

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# ? May 6, 2024 04:32

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

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

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > The Tomorrow War: A Tuna Santa Movie **Spoilers**

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