A month ago, we saw a teaser for Chris Pratt’s new movie, The Tomorrow War, and Lainey got hung up on whether or not the music sounds like “O Canada”. (She also threw in a barb that Americans wouldn’t recognize it because we don’t know “O Canada”, but come on, it’s not like we know all the words to “The Star Spangled Banner”, either.) Now, there is a full trailer for The Tomorrow War and, yeah, discussing what the trailer music sounds like is a good way to spend our time because holy hell, this movie looks DUMB. Pratt says things like, “I’m just trying to save my daughter. If I have to save the world to save her, then I’ll do it.” As a mission statement for a plot, it’s an A+ because you literally need no other words to describe this movie. But as a thing a real human being would say out loud? No. Also, Pratt is not without his onscreen talents, but saying clunker lines like this and making them sound passably plausible is not one of them. The worse the writing, the worse his acting, because he just cannot make lines like this land. Comparatively, Betty Gilpin makes “70% of draftees don’t come back” sound urgent, like a Real Problem For Real Humans. The takeaway is that Betty Gilpin should probably be the star of the movie.
The idea is that Pratt has to go to the future and fight aliens because the human race is on the brink of extinction after an invasion. I mean, sure. That might as well be a movie. Although, if I’m going to watch a movie about a future war against aliens co-starring Sam Richardson, I’d MUCH rather it be Scrooge vs. Skeletrex and the Bonies. Also, this is a real thought that I have had, please go on this journey with me: Are confirmations that UFOs are real going to make alien invasion movies less popular? Now that the US government has admitted (several times, actually) that there is some unexplainable stuff going on in the atmosphere, and if you make the leap that these atmospheric objects are extraterrestrial, then that means that of all speculative fiction about aliens, Douglas Adams came the closest to what’s going on. Aliens aren’t coming here to invade and conquer, they’re coming here to f-cking cow-tip and knock over mailboxes. It sort of sucks the dramatic tension out of alien invasion movies. Far from extraterrestrial hordes seeking our resources, we’re being ding-dong-ditched by, like, juvenile delinquents from Zargulon 6. What I’m saying is, The Tomorrow War looks so f-cking dumb that twice now we have done literally anything possible to not talk about it.
