PRATT ON ‘TOMORROW WAR’: NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT
Chris Pratt’s new movie focuses on a futuristic fight against alien adversaries, but it was the human element that hooked him.
“The Tomorrow War” stars Pratt as former soldier Dan Forester, who travels to the year 2051 to salvage the future for his daughter, joining humanity’s losing battle against bloodthirsty invaders.
“If you could take the dramatic throughline of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and set it to the action and adventure of the biggest blockbuster alien war movie you could imagine, that’s really what it is,” Pratt told the Daily News.
“It’s a story of relationships. We focus heavily on the dynamic between a parent and child. Dan is the son to a father, and also the father to a daughter. We get to fully explore that. We study the themes that are really relevant to anyone my age who has young children, or even older children. … Those types of stories are not the stories you would probably expect to see when you’re talking about aliens and time travel and war.”
Dan’s emotional journey begins when desperate soldiers from the future interrupt the present to warn that an alien race called White Spikes had taken over Earth.
“The Tomorrow War,” out Friday on Amazon Prime Video, marks the latest high-profile action role for Pratt, who leads Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies and the “Jurassic World” franchise.
Pratt, 42, loved the script, and was on board when the Skydance production studio assured him the film would be created on an epic scale.
“They wanted to make this a great, big movie the type of budget that typically you only see for a ‘Jurassic’ movie or a ‘Guardians’ kind of a movie. … I loved that it was original,” Pratt said. “I loved the character. I loved that it was really unexpected, that it was emotional.”
Pratt also served as an executive producer, while Chris Mckay directed with both working together to build Pratt’s character, the creatures and an apocalyptic world.
“The entire movie is told through Chris’ character Dan’s point of view, so you get to sort of see the world how he sees it, and let the world kind of build with Chris going through each of these circumstances,” Mckay said.
“To think about the movie in that way, to see it through his eyes, you get to personalize and immerse the audience in his experience, and that, to me, is the best kind of filmmaking.”
Although lifelike animation is featured throughout “The Tomorrow War,” Pratt and Mckay relished shooting on physical sets.
One memorable sequence involves them grappling with frigid temperatures and powerful winds on a glacier in Iceland.
“The sun rises and sets,” Pratt recalled. “There’s no in between, so it’s a golden hour that lasts about four hours. … I’m looking at the light behind Mckay as it was just getting too dark to shoot, and he’s like, ‘This is what I got into this for.’ … This is ‘Indiana Jones.’ This is them going to Petra to shoot. This is ‘Star Wars.’ We’re traveling, we’re globe-trotting, to capture amazing sequences that you cannot create on a stage.”
Mckay, 47, said he frequently followed Pratt’s vision for the film.
“He’s a movie star,” Mckay said. “It’s wish fulfillment. People want to aspire to be like Chris’ attitude, and also Chris challenges himself in every single thing that he does. He works really hard, and that’s something that I respect a lot.”
For Pratt, “The Tomorrow War” offered an opportunity to captivate viewers with its action and enamor them with its heart.
“The idea is to really capture the world with a story,” Pratt said.
He added, “That’s the intention with a film like this. … We want to cast a very wide net in terms of the people who would love this story.”