Metacritic reviews

Blockbuster movies are often as loud and action-based as The Tomorrow War, but they’re rarely as diverse in tone or so delightfully wild when it comes to in-your-face entertainment.

McKay, director of The Lego Movie, is most at home in humor, and The Tomorrow War can be funny. It’s less adept at some of the operatic notes it tries to strike, but, well, aliens can be tricky.

The first hour of The Tomorrow War is really quite dumb fun. The second half pumps the brakes on the wacky sci-fi and just goes in for gross-out action.

The Tomorrow War is an earnest effort to bring something new to the time-travel action genre, but this movie is a 2021 vehicle made of parts from the 2010s and the 1990s and 1980s.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when blockbusters of this scale weren’t afraid to make strong choices, especially the ones about how we’re all going to die if we don’t.

The film has lots of effects and action and loads of Chris Pratt. What it needs more of is heart.

It all feels like a heavy meal, and the action scenes and the creature effects are very derivative.

Despite its wild premise — Chris Pratt goes to the future to fight aliens! — and considerable talent, The Tomorrow War is mostly just bloated blockbuster business as usual.

While The Tomorrow War isn’t exactly good, it is often promising enough to convince you that at some point, it will reward your time and patience.

Unfortunately, The Tomorrow War isn’t allowed to be the dumb, “just go with it” summer spectacle it should have been, a la Independence Day. Instead, McKay and Dean force it to be a self-aware and “smart” time travel drama, with feelings big enough to crack generational war trauma issues, among lots of things that go “boom!” and “pew, pew, pew.”