Critics reviews

So, it’s Edge of Tomorrow meets Interstellar meets Aliens meets Tenet meets Independence Day, with their brains removed. But it’s still tremendous fun, because this thing moves. Let’s face it: If it slowed down, the audience might start asking too many questions. The Tomorrow War is just as stupid as it needs to be.

With his first live-action feature, “The LEGO Batman Movie” director Chris McKay stitches together several overly familiar elements in unremarkable fashion: a bit of time travel, a horde of relentless alien invaders, a rag-tag band coming together to stop them, some unresolved father-son issues and a few misfit sidekicks to provide comic relief. The supposedly original script from writer Zach Dean offers very little that’s innovative or inspired.

[W]ith its crude dialogue (“We are food, and they are hungry”), overexcited score and characters so formulaic they might as well be cereal-box figurines, “The Tomorrow War” is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity. And why not? It worked for “Avatar.”

With his biggest live-action movie yet, McKay pronounces an intriguing savviness with blockbuster scope. He has a touch here that’s a bit of Zack Snyder and a bit of Michael Bay... but with an arguably bigger heart and more macho restraint than either. It’s also impressive how much McKay leans into the ruthless nature of the apocalypse at hand without getting too grim, although it gets awfully close in numerous sobering, chaotic sequences.

Screenwriter Zach Dean may have overestimated humanity’s willingness to band together in the fight against a common foe — even in a film that serves as an increasingly specific metaphor for the role people of today have in preventing the climate crises of tomorrow — but he nails our natural fascination with the paradoxes of time travel plots, and handles the ones in his script with simple grace.

The film seems to go on and on like something by Wagner; but it finally ends, thanks to some vital expertise provided by one of Dan’s high school students, with a plot turn which perhaps owes something to the final act of the classic comedy Galaxy Quest. It all feels like a heavy meal, and the action scenes and the creature effects are very derivative.

[I]t’s a big, blundering, CGI-heavy action sci-fi that works within its genre mould rather than outside it. The Tomorrow War is not entirely without a sense of humour, but as with its noisy, show-offy action sequences, it feels broader, made for the widest audience possible in a way that might inadvertently alienate them.

Ultimately, it’s the movie’s approach to its emotional material that feels most mercenary. Potentially deep wells of poignancy and regret are introduced with screenwriterly deliberateness, only to go untapped in favor of acquiring even more bits and pieces from better spectacles... Still, there’s optimism at the heart of The Tomorrow War: This movie has already been made, does not set up a sequel, and will probably not be made again in the future.

There are unintentionally funny moments in “The Tomorrow War”... but the kitschiest thing about the movie may simply be that it’s such a vacuum cleaner of sci-fi blockbuster tropes: aliens, climate change, going back to the future to tweak the course of humanity, “Interstellar” father-daughter hugs across time. It’s a lot of deluxe pablum you’ve seen before, but all you can eat of it.

To be clear: “The Tomorrow War” isn’t just a dud because of its pseudo-apolitical ideas about both domestic and military service. More immediately, it’s a dud because of its more-covered-than-directed set pieces and a lot of silly-but-deadly-serious dialogue.

Unfortunately, The Tomorrow War isn’t allowed to be the dumb, “just go with it” summer spectacle it should have been, a la Independence Day. Instead, McKay and Dean force it to be a self-aware and “smart” time travel drama, with feelings big enough to crack generational war trauma issues, among lots of things that go “boom!” and “pew, pew, pew.”

The Tomorrow War may lean into its brutish side, but that isn’t to say that it’s without compelling insights... moments may leave you wishing that The Tomorrow War’s thematic terrain weren’t so narrow—that the film weren’t so quick to get to another run-of-the-mill, senses-assaulting battle sequence or some belabored bit of world-building.