It is never good news when a phalanx of armed, balaclava-wearing dudes falls from the sky in the middle of a World Cup soccer game.

“We are you 30 years in the future,” their leader announces to the stunned crowd. “You are our last hope.” Heeding the call is a high school biology teacher named Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Dan has a doting wife (Betty Gilpin), an adoring young daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and — because action heroes rarely embark on wholesale slaughter without some unhealed psychological hurt — the requisite estranged father (JK Simmons).

Dan also believes that his life has a special purpose, and so does The Tomorrow War, Chris McKay’s time-travel spectacle in which cliches rain as fast and as furiously as bullets. In 2051, an alien civilisation is in the process of gobbling up humanity, requiring a worldwide draft of present-day citizens who will “jump” into the future to join the war effort.

This process — which resembles the Rapture, except the destination is hell instead of heaven — dumps the terrified conscripts on a post-apocalyptic Miami beach. From there, Dan and a handful of confreres (including an amusing Sam Richardson and Mary Lynn Rajskub) battle a welter of special effects to reach an undersea laboratory where a military scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) is developing an alien-fighting toxin.

Sucking ideas from across the sci-fi spectrum — Alien, Edge of Tomorrow, Starship Troopers, Jumper, I could go on — Zach Dean’s screenplay grows more ludicrous by the minute. People are launched into the mayhem without basic training (Richardson’s character can’t even load a gun). And when saving the world requires the assistance of a volcanologist, the sole option is a 12-year-old boy. (Dean does deserve credit, though, for a plot that both hints at global warming and insists scientists will be our salvation.)

As for the extraterrestrials, we’re almost an hour in before we see one: Bleached, tentacled and maximally toothy, they’re so exhaustingly aggressive it’s a relief to learn that, like the Creator, they’re only active for six days a week. That’s about as long as this 140-minute assault feels, with 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.

'The Tomorrow War Streams on Amazon Prime Video.

Jeannette Catsoulis c.2021 The New York Times Company



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