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WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Tomorrow War, now available on Amazon Prime.
The Tomorrow War combines the time-traveling special operation of Tenet with the seemingly unstoppable alien invasion of A Quiet Place. It’s not the first movie in which a military force uses time travel to fight aliens, and because of the long sci-fi film history that precedes it, it was bound to face some scrutiny in how it handles those oft-touched upon subjects. For most of its runtime, The Tomorrow War punches above its weight class, especially in its treatment of time travel, but it fails to land a knockout blow with its obvious twist and absurd resolution.
The film begins in 2022 as a battalion from the future — 2051 to be exact — emerges from a portal in the middle of the World Cup. They bring devastating news that creatures called White Spikes have all but wiped out Earth’s human population and need recruits from the past to keep the fight going. The present responds by implementing a mandatory international draft that becomes almost immediately unpopular as 70-80 percent of the enlisted die on those future battlefields. Pratt’s discontent soldier-turned-science teacher, Dan, is drafted, and the odds are he won’t return to his loving wife and daughter, Muri.
The Tomorrow War isn’t original in its plot or monster design, and it isn’t trying to be as lofty in its ideas and themes as films like Arrival or Annihilation. Still, it features some of the most plausible explanations and uses of time travel in movies, at least in the first hour. When a draftee asks the future soldiers why they haven’t just jumped around to prevent the war in the first place, they scoff at the question. Time travel “doesn’t work that way;” it’s still an emerging science in 2051. “Jump Links” that will take people back and forth between two points on a timeline are incredibly difficult to establish. They were lucky to create just the one, and they’d still be experimenting with lab rats if not for the “extinction-level event.”
During their brief training, Dan and a researcher named Charlie realize that most of the trainees are roughly in their 40s, while all the trainers are in their 20s. Charlie deduces that this is by design, to prevent paradoxes. The forces from the future only want recruits who are destined to die before 2051 so they don’t encounter another version of themselves. Similarly, the operatives who are sent back were all born after 2022, so they don’t meet themselves as children.
However, there’s a bit of a plot hole in that if more than 99 percent of the world’s population has been killed by the White Spikes between 2048 and 2051, just about everyone from 2022 would be eligible. But as PG-13 crowd-pleasing action premises go, it passes the test of suspension of disbelief. The more interesting concept at work, though, is that of uncertainty. Since the science of time travel is still “rudimentary,” even the best minds can’t understand the implications of paradoxes.
Future scientists use the metaphor of two rafts floating down a river to illustrate this point — time is the river, always flowing in one direction, and 2022 and 2051 are the rafts. The Tomorrow War’s time travel device is also markedly more realistic than most. It’s not a phone booth or a cool car, but an enormous piece of governmental infrastructure that’s difficult to defend. The Jump Link itself was a last resort, so the goal seems to be to save the human race while doing as little temporal damage as possible. All of this checks out and makes for a compelling and entertaining take on the genre, at least until a predictable twist is revealed.
The colonel who’s been running Dan’s mission turns out to be adult Muri. She specifically recruited her father to send him back to 2022 with the toxin, as there are too many White Spikes to overcome in her apocalyptic present. She even dies getting the last vial into his hands before he’s zapped back to 2022 upon completion of his week of service. At this point, the movie stops worrying about paradoxes to focus on family and sets up the over-the-top final act.
Muri not only admits she’s Dan’s daughter, but after a short-lived effort not to compromise him, she provides details about the life he hasn’t lived yet. He returns to 2022, knowing his fate and having witnessed his child’s death, but motivated to make different choices as a father and to save the world to save her by any means. Theoretically, every choice Dan makes from then on could change the world’s trajectories, creating infinite alternate futures.
The big change to the timeline is Dan’s implementation of Muri’s plan, just not as she imagined. When humans succumb to the White Spikes in 2051, the Jump Link goes offline, humanity correctly assumes the war was lost, and Dan can no longer return to the future. Instead, he and Charlie — with the help of a student who just happens to be obsessed with volcanos — discover that the White Spikes actually landed in one about a thousand years earlier.
They use the toxins and some explosives to destroy that first spacecraft full of hostile aliens, presumably saving the future but also changing it in yet-to-be-seen ways. Then again, even if things had played out differently, there would still be legions of veterans of the Tomorrow War whose lives would be forever changed. So, despite its moments of intriguing promise, maybe it’s best to think of The Tomorrow War simply as what it is: a summer movie that cares more about being fun than smart.
Starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Sam Richardson, Betty Gilpin, J.K. Simmons and Edwin Hodge, The Tomorrow War is now available on Amazon Prime.
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