The Tomorrow War: a loud alien-war film with one real idea

The Tomorrow War is a 2021 alien-invasion movie with a clean, brutal premise: soldiers from thirty years in the future arrive in the present to recruit help, because humanity is losing. It is big, sincere and not remotely interested in whether its time travel holds up, and it has one genuinely good emotional idea holding the middle together.

The idea behind it

Most invasion films begin with the aliens arriving. This one begins with the survivors coming back. During a live broadcast, a group of soldiers appears from the year 2051 with a message: the war against an alien species is going badly, reinforcements are running out, and the only untapped resource left is the past. Nations begin a global draft, pulling ordinary people out of the present and dropping them into a future battlefield for a fixed rotation.

That single reversal is what makes the film worth an evening. It turns the usual structure inside out: the audience already knows how the war ends, and the tension comes from watching people being told about a catastrophe they will not live to see and cannot avoid. The draft itself is the horror. Ordinary teachers, cooks and office workers are handed rifles, sent forward, and told to survive seven days.

The second idea is smaller and better, and it is the reason the film has any staying power at all. Dan Forester, the lead, is a man who wanted more than he got: a former military officer who now teaches high school science and is quietly disappointed with his own life. The war gives him a purpose, and the film is honest enough to admit that this is not a good thing. The father-daughter thread that runs through the middle is the part that lands, and it lands because the film takes it seriously instead of using it as a punctuation mark between action scenes.

The story, spoiler-light

Dan Forester is a biology teacher with a wife, a young daughter and a rejected application to a research programme. He is also a former special forces soldier, which is the film’s convenient way of making a schoolteacher useful once the draft arrives. When his number comes up, he is sent forward with a mixed group of draftees to a future that is wet, dark and running out of everything.

The aliens are called Whitespikes, and they are one of the better creature designs in recent mainstream science fiction: fast, spined, and dangerous in numbers rather than as individuals. The film is not shy about the scale of the loss. Casualty rates for draftees are appalling, and the movie lets that land rather than softening it.

In the future Dan meets Colonel Muri Forester, who runs the research programme trying to find a way to kill the species, and he is eventually sent back to the present with a problem that cannot be solved in the present. That sends him to his estranged father, played by J.K. Simmons, for the film’s best and least expected stretch. I am going to leave the mechanics there. The plot turns on a couple of pieces of information that the film reveals at its own pace, and they are better unspoiled.

What can be said plainly is that the film is much more interested in the people than in the science. The future is not explored, the species is not explained, and the logistics of a global time-travel draft are waved through without much fuss. It is a war film that happens to involve time travel, rather than a science fiction film that happens to involve a war, and it is happier for it.

What makes it science fiction

Technically, the science fiction here is thin. The time travel is a device rather than a subject. Nobody in the film spends long on paradoxes, the rules are never defined, and the ending depends on the audience not asking a fairly obvious question about causality. If that bothers you, it will bother you a lot.

What the film does have is a genuine science fictional situation: a generation told, in advance, exactly how and roughly when it will lose. That is a premise that belongs to the genre, and the film uses it well in its first act. It is also, quietly, a film about climate-scale dread dressed up as an alien war, which is why the draft scenes land harder than the battle scenes.

Where it sits in the genre is close to military science fiction, in the same broad family as Edge of Tomorrow. Both take a soldier, a time mechanism and an unwinnable war and use them as a delivery system for an emotional story. The Tomorrow War is the looser, louder and less disciplined of the two.

Who should watch it, and who should skip it

• Watch it if you want a large, straightforward alien-war film with a real budget behind it.
• Watch it if you liked Edge of Tomorrow and want something in the same register, even if it is a step down.
• Watch it if the father-daughter story appeals. That is the film’s strongest material and it is played straight.
• Skip it if you want airtight time-travel logic. It does not have any, and it does not pretend to.
• Skip it if two hours and eighteen minutes of running, shouting and shooting sounds like a chore. The middle act is long, and the film knows it.

Where to watch it

The Tomorrow War was produced for cinemas and sold to Amazon Studios during the pandemic, so it went straight to streaming. It is available on Amazon Prime Video and is included with a Prime membership, which makes it an easy one to try without committing to a rental.

There is no Amazon book link for this one, because it is a film rather than a novel, and we only add affiliate links where a real product exists to recommend. A film tie-in novelisation does exist, but recommending it would be padding the page rather than helping you.

The verdict

The Tomorrow War is a good bad movie that is trying to be a good one, and it mostly works. Its premise is genuinely strong, its creature design is better than it needed to be, and its emotional core is played with a sincerity that mainstream science fiction often avoids. Against that, the time travel is nonsense, the middle act sags, and the ending resolves with a shrug.

Watch it for the scale and for the relationship between Dan and his father. Do not watch it expecting the next Edge of Tomorrow or a film that respects its own rules. If you accept it as a Saturday-night alien-war film with one real idea, it delivers more than it has any right to.

Frequently asked questions

Is The Tomorrow War a book adaptation?

No. It is an original screenplay by Zach Dean, directed by Chris McKay. There is a film tie-in novelisation, but the film came first.

Do I need to have seen anything else first?

No. It is a standalone film with no franchise around it.

How long is it, and where can I watch it?

Two hours and eighteen minutes. It is on Amazon Prime Video and is included with a Prime membership.

Does the time travel make sense?

Not really, and the film is not concerned about it. Treat the mechanism as a device to get soldiers into the future and the story works fine. Try to reason about causality and it falls apart quickly.