快猫短视频

Chris McKay聽

聽Amazon Prime Video

FOOTBALL fans, don鈥檛 you just hate it when yobs invade the pitch? Schoolteacher Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is watching soccer on television with his daughter Muri when heavily armed soldiers fall from the sky, ruining a perfectly good goal.

They have their reasons. Where they are from, 30 years in the future, alien invaders have all but exterminated humanity. They have come to invite volunteers from their past 鈥� our present 鈥� to join the fight. For the first time in history, a TV blares shortly afterwards, all humanity is gathering to face 鈥渁 common enemy鈥�.

Dan is understandably reluctant to be picked up in a rapidly instituted 鈥済lobal draft鈥�. He has a young family to look after, and anyway, he has served his time. A former officer in the US Army, he has been trying to get hired as a medical researcher. He is a gifted scientist, but combat has left him with the 鈥渨rong sort鈥� of leadership experience.

A way to cheat the draft beckons, but having to ask a favour of his estranged dad 鈥� the inimitable J. K. Simmons in full survivalist mode 鈥� proves a pill too bitter for Dan to swallow.

And that is how Dan ends up in the future with a rag-tag band of ill-trained civilians wielding futuristic guns bigger than they are. Their tour of duty only lasts a week, and (spoiler alert), few will survive it, among them Charlie (Sam Richardson), too affable to die, and Dorian (Edwin Hodge), too traumatised for the script to jettison before his heroic moment in the third act, by which time The Tomorrow War has degenerated into a sort of fan mash-up of Ridley Scott鈥檚 Alien and John Carpenter鈥檚 The Thing.

鈥�The Tomorrow War delivers bite-size gobbets of motivation, jeopardy and redemption on cue鈥�

While dodging aliens, Dan runs into his daughter Muri, now a 30-something army commander, and learns what is by now self-evident: the war against the alien White Spikes (they are white; they fire spikes) is already lost. Yet Muri may have something that Dan can take back to his own time to pre-empt the crisis.

The Tomorrow War wears its social message on its sleeve. For 鈥渇uture war鈥�, read 鈥渞unaway climate change鈥� 鈥� the subject of an almost constant barrage of incidental and overheard dialogue for the film鈥檚 first half hour.

Aliens are a way better common enemy than climate change. They are solid, visible and icky, particularly the ones designed for this film. Fresh from work with both Marvel and DC, concept designer Ken Barthelmey cuts loose with critters that are a sort of dog-based, pony-sized flea armed with twin organic bazookas.

The Tomorrow War is like a cuckoo clock: its precision is its point. The script delivers bite-size gobbets of motivation, jeopardy and redemption precisely on cue. (Dad and daughter fall out. Son and dad bond. Dad and daughter鈥� oh, you know how this goes.) The actors have nothing to do beyond standing tall, reacting to the LED wall.

I enjoyed The Tomorrow War. It did, though, leave me wondering exactly what it means that we are making monster movies about the end of the world. I wouldn鈥檛 say it is a bad thing, necessarily, but it is an odd thing.

And while we may like to think that we can meet an invisible, slow, inexorable existential challenge, 30 years in our future, White Spikes may be more our level.