The Tomorrow War (2021)

Amazon spent roughly two hundred million dollars to send Chris Pratt into the year 2051, where humanity is losing a war against spike-launching aliens, and the result is a sturdy, joyless piece of military science fiction assembled from parts the genre has been recycling since 1996. The premise is clever: draftees from the present are pulled forward seven days at a time, and the ones selected are people who, in the future's timeline, already died. That is a good idea. The film does not do much with it beyond staging loud, gray battle sequences in a drowned Miami.

The climate mechanism deserves a note. Global warming melts the polar ice cap, and the ice cap was holding the aliens. It is a plot device, stated once and then set aside, not a sermon. Nobody lectures us about our carbon footprint, and the melting ice serves narrative convenience instead of moral instruction. In 2021, that restraint counts for something.

The cast is diverse in the unremarked manner that action ensembles have been diverse for decades. Edwin Hodge, Sam Richardson, Jasmine Mathews and Keith Powers fill out the draftee squad capably, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for their presence. Yvonne Strahovski's Colonel Muri Forester commands what remains of the species, and her authority is framed through a father-daughter reconciliation, not a thesis about women in power. There is no romance, no speechifying, no agenda at all. The finished product has no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to be big and loud, and it is. The emotional engine is a man repairing things with his own father so he can be a better father to his daughter, a sentiment as old as storytelling and twice as safe. Nothing here would have raised an eyebrow in 2010. The film has no argument to make, which is not the same as having something to say, though it does make for a frictionless two hours.