THE TOMORROW WAR – Review

OK, folks. Strap yourselves in for another time-travel opus, with all the brain-warping snags that entails. Soldiers from 30 years in the future dramatically appear in 2022, warning of imminent extinction by a horde of alien invaders, requiring the initiation of a draft. Lots of cannon fodder from our now are needed in their then because Humanity is going down in flames. They’ve made this portal that only allows weekly trips between their present and ours for shuttling personnel. That’s supposed to minimize audience speculation about why they’re not using the technology in more sensible ways. Like going back to the initial encounter with enough weapons to prevent the whole disaster. Or fill in your own solutions. That’s what my brain keeps churning during moments of quiet dialog between the massive CGI clashes.

This may be my own nit to pick but time travel as a premise works best in comedy, when the logical quagmires don’t particularly matter. Let Bill and Ted, or Marty and Doc calendar-hop all they wish to give us some grins. But when we’re supposed to take this stuff seriously, it’s hard to suspend and maintain enough disbelief. Accepting a regular ol’ alien invasion or zombie apocalypse is easily doable. Just don’t complicate it with yet another mindless temporal leap into someone else’s fantasy.

As to the action that we’re salivating over, they truly deliver the goods while animating and battling the conquering hordes on an epic scale. The product displayed seems a mashup among STARSHIP TROOPERS, WORLD WAR Z, six SHARKNADOs and the TERMINATOR series. The aliens are huge, bug-like and hard to kill; they breed like crazy and swarm impressively; the measures used to resist them will trigger associations with the aforementioned and other genre films you’ve seen. That includes the trope of one family destined to play a much larger role in saving our species than logic would dictate. Oh. And a bit of messaging about how this all happened.

Watch it for the adrenaline. Turn off your brains, so any mental activity, intended or on autopilot, doesn’t interfere with the visceral. THE TOMORROW WAR releasing exclusively on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, July 2nd.

RATING: 2 out of 4 stars