Review of The Tomorrow War (2021) by Akilax — 04 Jul 2021

I only recommend watching this movie an a second screen while playing some games on the other. Don't worry, you won't miss anything.

The main problem I had with this movie is that it isn't consistent in how it treats its own world and that ruined the experience for me. If that is a deal breaker for you as well, don't touch this movie.

I am fine with the logical problems time travel stories pose and I was expecting a shallow action flick, which is certainly what I got. At the very least, characters in a movie need to react in consistence with themselves and their world though, for us to believe their emotions. I felt like this was not the case at all.

The enemies in this movie get initially presented as very powerful killers, almost impervious to small arms fire and therefore a single enemy poses a serious threat to an entire squad. Only moments later the number of enemies multiplies and while this should mean the end of the movie from a consistent POV, the rules just change. And not in a way that can be cognitively grasped. The threat level just changes, to make scenes work.

This dynamic gets WAY WORSE during the rest of the movie, when suddenly single shots from small arms fire outright kill the same enemies (the problem wasn't the aiming). It makes no sense at all and the movie just pushes forward throwing in stuff that either contradicts things that happened before or just never gets explained.

When you get to the end, a serious decision is made for how to tackle a mission that is so outright idiotic that you can only laugh, when the movie wants you to think that this is a well thought out decision that demands a lot of the protagonists. It's just stupid. Wasted acting potential on a horrible script.