THE TOMORROW WAR
THE TOMORROW WAR I Chris Pratt heads to the future to fight off alien invaders in a huge-scale sci-fi original.
Chris Pratt fights for the future in a time-travel sci-fi.
How do you do some big movie like this, and do something that’s different or unexpected, and kind of outside the playbook of how everyone else does things?” ponders director Chris McKay. He’s telling Teasers about The Tomorrow War, his first live-action feature after an auspicious career in animation directing The Lego Batman Movie and Robot Chicken.
McKay hasn’t gone easy on himself for his first big foray into live-action. The Tomorrow War is an ambitious, genre-straddling sci-fi with a killer concept: in the present day, timetravelling soldiers from the future arrive seeking help in a war against an alien species that’s taking place 30 years from now. With humanity on the
verge of extinction in the face of an unstoppable threat, the visitors from 2051 arrive to draft new recruits in a last-ditch bid for survival.
One of those called to future action is Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a military veteran turned high-school teacher. A family man disillusioned with his lot, Dan’s background makes him a more suitable candidate than most to participate (the standards for conscription ain’t high).
“I love genre, and I love character stories,” says McKay. “I love stories about people. So my dream had always been to try to find something where those things could coexist in a way that was organic to the story, and not like something that was tacked on, like, ‘OK, we need the emotional thing, so we need to have this happen here...’”
An everyman hero was a key ingredient to making sure the film would deliver heart – on top of the thrills and scares the genre demands
– and Pratt was attached to the project before McKay came aboard. “That idea of making a genre movie that could also be an emotional story, a character story – that’s what Chris was game for,” recalls McKay. “He really wanted to do something like that.”
Compared to the Guardians Of The Galaxy and Jurassic World movies, this is a slightly different register for Pratt. “We worked together on The Lego Movie,” says McKay (who was an editor and animation supervisor on that block-buster). “He is obviously very funny, but he’s also very real. And he’s very vulnerable. He can credibly play a soldier, and he can credibly play a teacher. He’s got that everyman quality that you want for a movie like this.”
Given the speed at which the project came together – Pratt’s window to shoot was limited – McKay had to quickly oversee revisions on the script, to nail the tonal balance he sought. “Movies like this can take themselves very seriously, and that can be a real drag sometimes,” says McKay. “I knew I needed situational-based humour and moments of levity, and to have a broader tonal palette. I love Children Of Men, but not everything can be that. Not everything should be that.” In many ways, The Tomorrow War is a throwback to the days of standalone blockbusters with big ideas, charismatic leads and event-movie scale.
Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck, The Handmaid’s Tale) plays Romeo Command, a military leader from 2051. “I was in grade 3 when Independence Day came out,” the Australian actor tells Teasers. “Seeing that in the cinema, and how exciting that movie was back then, and how exhilarating it was to watch… that was kind of the feeling I had when making this movie. That little girl inside of me was activated again.” Strahovski also praises McKay’s unexpected attention to developing character despite the action environment. “Even though it’s an action film, with what’s going on, there was a really great sort of emotional story in there,” she says.
But for all the talk of character, when The Tomorrow War does lean into the sci-fi action, it goes hard. And the formidable threat they’re facing will stretch the scariness quotient for what’s ultimately a family-friendly entertainment. “[I wanted it to be] pushing the envelope with what you could do in a PG-13 movie,” explains McKay. “And obviously you also have to dodge the landmines of looking too much like Alien or looking too much like Predator. There are three or four high-watermarks for alien design, and then everything else!”
Of the creature design, McKay explains, “I wanted them to look ancient. I wanted them to look hungry: bony, skeletal…. I wanted them to look weird, where you’re a little bit repulsed but a little bit fascinated by them.” Barely glimpsed in the trailer, the extraterrestrial invaders are nightmarish creations (courtesy of visual-effects company Weta). The end result is an enemy that’s “relentless”, says McKay: “You could shoot pieces of them off, and they would still keep coming. It’s that feeling of a nightmare where it’s just like, ‘This thing is coming at me. It won’t stop.’ I wanted to feel that.”
Of course, Alien and Aliens are mentioned as touchstones, with Bill Paxton’s “Game over, man!” rant particularly resonating with McKay’s aim to send everyday ‘blue-collar’ folk into an extraterrestrial battle they can’t comprehend. McKay namechecks too many other reference points to list here, but one surprising classic sticks out: The Tomorrow War might just be the only film to have drawn inspiration from Aliens and It’s A Wonderful Life.
“That was exciting to me, to be able to do that, to sort of prove the thesis that I’d always had, that you can have a genre movie that’s also an emotional story,” smiles McKay. “And that’s what we set out to do.” MM
ETA | 2 JULY / THE TOMORROW WAR STREAMS ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO THIS SUMMER.
‘THERE WAS A REALLY GREAT SORT OF EMOTIONAL STORY IN THERE’ YVONNE STRAHOVSKI