In the Flesh: The Tomorrow War

“Every twenty-six days they retreat into their burrows and go quiet,” says the military instructor from the future to her band of fresh present-day recruits, describing the behaviors of the ravenous aliens called “whitespikes”. “We call it the Sabbath.” That should give you an idea of the kind of minds at work behind The Tomorrow War, directed by Lego Batman impresario Chris McKay and penned by Fast X writer Zach Dean. Chris Pratt stars as Dan Forester, a high school biology teacher whose military career and issues related to his abandonment by his father James (J. K. Simmons) are holding him back from high-paying lab jobs. The film’s premise unfolds with ridiculous speed as visitors from the future somehow convince the present day government to send thousands upon thousands of soldiers hopping across time and space into a world overrun by whitespikes to prevent humanity’s extinction. Still, in the interest of meeting The Tomorrow War where it’s at, let’s set aside that we can’t even get the rich and powerful to stop pointlessly skullfucking us long enough to prevent the entire planet from burning into an uninhabitable cinder -- the whole thing might play anyway if it had any interest in the meat grinder horror of its premise, spending the present's blood by the gallon in a desperate bid to assure the future, but there's nothing to it beyond the simple conceit. We get dots, sure. References to global warming, that kind of thing, but there's no connective tissue, no willingness to make assertions or challenge lazy assumptions.

What we’re left with is a jumpy, inconsistent movie with a black hole of charisma at its center. That it’s agonizingly conservative in its outlook, threading the classic needle of “the higher-ups are fallible and out of touch, the politicians are dishonest crooks, but damn it, we’re soldiers, and there’s a job needs doing” while blasting an airhorn about the importance of fatherhood and the nuclear family in its audience’s face, is just saccharine icing on two hours and fourteen minutes of dry, crumbly cake. The whole thing is paced like a series of Army of One commercials interspersed with clips from rail shooters. Scale, momentum, weight, and depth elude the movie’s effects almost totally when it comes to scenes of mass destruction. The aliens themselves are nicely integrated, but when your two hundred-million-dollar movie has a wormhole effect that can’t stand up to the one they used for Stargate, there are problems.

The film’s only element worth remembering is the whitespikes themselves, up-and-coming creature designer Ken Barthelmy’s (The Empty Man, The Maze Runner) typically raw-headed and disturbing alien predators. Even middling foley on their vocalizations and movement can’t dim their unsettling speed and grace, and their screen presence — somewhere between impala, mantis, and dragon — is a definite innovation in a field plagued by samey, indifferent design. There’s a clear visual reference to Starship Troopers in their morphology, which serves to highlight just how thuddingly stupid and fascistic McKay’s movie really is. The aliens lurk in the ice beneath the border of China and Russia. When they retreat into their nests, that’s called a sabbath. Is it still a dogwhistle if humans can hear it, too? A pity they wasted strong design work on such an absolute fucking turkey of a film.