The Tomorrow War (2021)

Plot of The Tomorrow War: Dan Forester, a former special forces guy is a teacher, married with a daughter to whom he is devoted. During the 2022 world cup a group of soldiers land out of a cloud on the football pitch, and the woman in charge announces that 30 years into the future the population is losing a battle with aliens and asks for help. Over time a system is developed where people from the present, who will be dead before the 30 years future arrives, are recruited, given a sort of time portal on their arms and shot into the future for a seven day deployment. Dan and others survive an erroneous deployment which kills most of his group, and he ends up joining a colonel who turns out to be his daughter. Together they fight the aliens and develop a toxin to kill them, until she is killed and Dan returns to the present. In the present day they determine that the aliens are here, but frozen under the icecap. Can they find them and save the world?

Content: No sex or nudity. Drugs or smoking. Just a bit of social drinking. We see Dan being a family man, but later with his adult daughter he finds that in his future he becomes a drunk, divorces and dies in a car crash. The process of sending people to the future takes place, involving then having a sort of metal sleave put on their arms with a count down on, which will drag them back to the present. Dan’s father turns out to be a sort of renegade scientist, who could remove the sleave, but does not. In the future there are a lot of battles with the aliens, which are sort of multi-limb animals with big jaws and the capability of shooting darts into the humans and then eating them. They are called Whitespikes and it is determined that they are planet cleansing entities. In the present a group travel over the snow to find the original space ship.

A View: The cast seemed to have put their hearts into this outing, which made it quite watchable, although as always there is a problem with time travel, when the activities in the present change what happens in the future. It seems to have been overcome in this film by just not bothering with it, so we’ll say no more about it. It is also a bit difficult to accept that a bunch of sort of animals with big jaws and a rudimentary dart firing system could beat the world’s military capability. But for all that, if you are a sci-fi follower probably worth a view.

Fun Fact: If you can’t quite place Dan’s adult daughter in the future, she was Mrs Waterford in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.