“The Tomorrow War” on Amazon: shooting against climate change. – Culture


During the soccer World Cup in Qatar at the end of 2022, a colorful vortex will open over the square and release a group of heavily armed fighters. No, not an attack, a cry for help. In the future the earth will be overrun by nasty predator aliens and slowly the soldiers are running out, whether you can send reinforcements from the past? Fortunately, time travel has already been invented in this future, so things can start right away and Chris Pratt’s muscle pack has to compete for alien slicing. Pratt plays a biology teacher with a lot of combat experience, a character that can only be found in films. Although it doesn’t really matter about biology, because Pratt only has to explain very briefly in high school what carbon dioxide is and otherwise, above all, point guns in the right direction. If he succeeds, we can reveal that much.

The slightly fascist sci-fi subgenre of “Military Science Fiction”, to which “The Tomorrow War” can be counted, is actually a single excuse for Gun Porn, that is, the unrestrained demonstration of military equipment under the slightly slipped fig leaf of a fantastic story . So it could have been good. But screenwriter Zach Dean and director Chris McKay, who has already proven his skills with “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Batman Movie 2”, did not want to make a genre escapism film, but wanted to make a serious comment on the present . That’s why actor Chris Pratt is not allowed to do what he does best, namely be funny. This is a very serious life and death film.

The hero is a bio teacher at a school named after a racist president

Because that’s all, and the film screams that in your face at every opportunity: a metaphor for climate change! Because people from the past have to save the future. Checked? The aliens are the climate and the people … yes, admittedly, it doesn’t quite work out, if only because climate change is man-made and the aliens are just there, but it’s clear what is meant. The crazy cool basic idea: what if you could just shoot climate change?

Because the fights against the gruesomely beautifully animated, but in the end simply stolen from “Alien” aliens are pretty boring, the viewer has a lot of time to think about whether this is actually a conservative film. Why is Pratt’s character teaching again at Woodrow Wilson High School, where the US has just agreed that Wilson was once US President, but unfortunately also a tough racist?

There were no climate change deniers at work here, but the aliens are supposed to be killed with a poison en masse later on and isn’t this search for a miracle weapon against climate change also a confused, arch-conservative idea? Probably the film remains deliberately vague so as not to scare off any audience too much. In the end everyone can read in what they want, and in order to be able to write something interesting about this work, you have to spoil a bit hard at the end, so don’t read any more who takes this film seriously:

Ultimately, it turns out that the aliens did not actually land fresh on Earth, but were frozen in the Siberian permafrost and thawed by climate change. So, to a certain extent, climate change is to blame for climate change. So the whole group around Chris Pratt is traveling back in time (or present, whatever) to prevent the frozen aliens from waking up in the first place. Smart idea to stop climate change, i.e. the aliens, before it even starts. Only in this film that doesn’t happen by stopping the melting of the ice, no, the aliens are simply poisoned, blown up, shot and beaten up. In the end, the alien invasion is stopped – and the glacier is melting anyway. Mission accomplished. Or?

The Tomorrow War, USA 2021 – Director: Chris McKay. Book: Zach Dean. Camera: Larry Fong. With: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, JK Simmons. Amazon, 138 minutes.

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