Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is an Iraq War vet and high-school science teacher struggling to find a better job for himself in the present of 2022. He is disillusioned and only his daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera) believes in his bigger dreams beyond the classroom. A startling announcement in the midst of a televised World Cup match sets the tone of the movie.
The soccer game is interrupted when a strike force from the future arrives through a portal and tells us humanity is on the verge of being wiped out 30 years from now after an alien invasion. They need our help to stop it, which involves the future population of 500,000 surviving humans being to travel into the future and help fight the alien invaders. Thus the war for tomorrow begins.
Within a year, the world’s armies have been depleted and a global draft has been instituted. Those chosen are sent into the future for seven-day periods; the survivors are then sent back, most of them with horrifying stories about what they saw and experienced.
Dan’s wife (Betty Gilpin) is a therapist who works with the traumatised survivors of The Tomorrow War. When Dan is called up, she urges him to avoid the draft — she knows what horrors await him on the other side of the century — and speak to his estranged father (JK Simmons).
He learns he’s going to die in seven years as he’s fitted with the armband do-hickey that will transport him to the future for his week-long tour of duty. Among the other soldiers in his troop are the tech nerd Charlie (Sam Richardson) and the weirdo Norah (Mary Lynn Rajskub).
The imminent death of humanity three decades into the future has sapped the spirit of the present: Riots break out, protests flare-up over the fact that we are fighting and dying in a war that hasn’t even started yet.
At the head of what remains of humanity’s forces in the future is Colonel Forester (Yvonne Strahovski), who we soon learn is, Dan’s daughter Muri. Muri has organised this project to reach into the past and has sought the youthful spirit of her dad out after all these years, to help her with humanity’s last stand against the White Spikes before all hope is lost forever.
The White Spikes are genuinely terrifying beasts — ghostly, tentacular, giant insectoids with beak-like mouths filled with fangs, who swarm like supersonic zombie flies. They scamper and gnash, have tentacles that strangle and slash, and make a staccato growl.
The anticipation of what 2050 will look like is built up nicely, and once Dan gets there, The Tomorrow War becomes a breakneck action movie as he and his untrained, unprepared crew are tossed into the midst of a battle that’s basically already been lost.
The alien battles are intense, including a truly fantastic swarming of a human stronghold in the future, and a final ‘boss battle’ with Pratt and a queen alien that’s some of the best-choreographed action scenes between a human and a 20-foot tall computer-generated alien. The Tomorrow War starts off weird and slow but ultimately, is worth the journey by the end.
Director: Chris McKay Starring: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, JK Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge