THE TOMORROW WAR on Amazon Prime
The really crazy thing about Chris McKay's THE TOMORROW WAR is that the mission insisted on drafting Chris Pratt and not his character's wife, played by Betty Gilpin.
Haven't they seen her in GLOW and THE HUNT? Betty would have kicked those alien white spike's butts.
It's hokum, of course, and derivative, with acts one and two coming from EDGE OF TOMORROW, the under-rated BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, and the no-longer-weird satire of STARSHIP TROOPERS, with its third act being stolen from the alien-saucer-beneath-the-polar-icecap of THE X-FILES MOVIE, which was derived from John Carpenter's THE THING, which was based on, etc.
Nothing in it is original, yet I love alien bug-hunt movies and this I felt was almost good enough. If I ignore the story-slips and daft behaviour of its characters, none of whom would have survived the situations in which they found themselves.
Pratt plays a scientist who isn't particularly smart because he never considers the narrative paradoxes the story can't help but throw up; paradoxes and loopholes which are there in plain sight to viewers and would help him deal with the situation at hand... which is to fight a war thirty years in the future, where he might meet members of his own family who have grown older in that time. He just plain ignores the timewarp possibilities, not stopping to work out how they might be useful in saving the world.
Nice support from Yvonne Strahovski (always great) and the redoubtable JK Simmons, who, if he'd had better support from Pratt and the screenplay, would have levered the great undeveloped cliché of his role into a worthwhile character.
Watching the film on tv somehow made it okay; watching it in a cinema may have made it feel more insulting.
I worry about Chris Pratt... with the cancel culture gunning for him, and the hollowness of this performance... has he run his course? I hope not. I would have liked to have seen his Andy from PARKS & REC sitting down with the MST3K guys to watch this movie and comment aloud on it.