Can’t hardly believe I’m giving this one such a good review… but, darnit, this is the kind of big idea fun pulpy science fiction I like. Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer something smarter and more erudite – but when you get a big loud Hollywood noise-vehicle, you can only hope it’s a fun one that doesn’t fall apart, insult too much of the intelligence, or suffer from such an over-abundance of “we have all the money for all the FX but no idea how to put together an action scene but that doesn’t matter because we have all the money for all the effects”-itus. That’s a real disease in Hollywood. Facts!

The Tomorrow War’s big idea is that soldiers from thirty years in the future appear today and let us know the human race is losing a war against alien invaders in their time. We have to send reinforcements to help win that future war. Before you can say, “Causality be damned” our hero – Chris Pratt – gets sent into the future to fight for humanity.

It’s a Big Idea movie that partially lives in the Stargate camp of sci-fi… introduce a big idea, send people with guns (for the record: I didn’t care much for Stargate the movie). But this is a really fun romp with a big old Summer blockbuster budget, good characters and relationships (especially between Pratt and his daughter), interesting creature design (imagine the creatures from A Quiet Place got busy with the creatures from Edge of Tomorrow), great visual effects, clever visual worldbuilding, and some fun action scenes.

Now, the movie is weirdly paced and doesn’t end where you would think it would end. It’s almost three movies in one, like maybe it’s a movie that contains its own sequel or maybe it was meant to be a limited run tv series (or, you know, a novel).

The first part is the biggest, dumbest part. Not since Starship Troopers have we seen a more near-sighted plan to fight aliens… draft average citizens, give them a week of training, send them to the future, retrieve the survivors in a week. Not too smart… but it’s fun and the big doofy action scenes work, they are exciting, and they look great. Just don’t think about the logistics, the strategy, or why military hardware hasn’t significantly improved in three decades.

But then the movie shifts focus from that reinforcements plot into more of a science-focused plot (which still involves a lot of shooting). And this sequence has a lot of fun with the time travel and causality angle of the story. And we get some very cool world-building around humanity’s last fortress that relies on visuals to tell its narrative. I uttered, “this is so cool” at a couple of these scenes.

And then the movie should have ended… but keeps going. And I suspect fence-sitters will immediately check out and suggest, perhaps not incorrectly, that this movie doesn’t need to be 2hrs 20min long. But it is… and I respect the hell out of whoever decided to give this movie it’s fourth act instead of cutting it off where most big studio movies would have cut it off. It gives us a more complete story that does more with its time travel plot than it would have otherwise had.

So, yeah, I don’t think I’m wrong about this flick but I suspect that a lot of people won’t agree with me. I like a big idea science fiction film and I like good pulp sci-fi and this does a solid job of combining them into something that isn’t as stupid as, say, a Transformers movie. It’s not an Arrival or Annihilation level of smart sci-fi sure… it knows what it is, I know what it is, and it gets to inject some good ideas into the slam bang mix. I was impressed and, more importantly, I enjoyed myself.

Score: 90