In December 2022 soldiers from the future arrive to request help in a war that humanity is losing in the year 2051. An unknown alien threat referred to as the Whitespikes have decimated life on Earth and they need able bodied people from the past to help with the war effort. 

Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), former soldier and current biology teacher is drafted to the war effort and faces a seven day stint fighting in the war of tomorrow. Can he save the future?

I will set my stall out early and say that I really struggled to get any enjoyment from this film. On reflection I think that there were three major flaws that completely stamped out any fun. 

Firstly, I actually think this is a brilliant high concept plot idea handled incredibly badly. So much so that it essentially is a copy of a whole host of different film ideas mashed together. The concept is great. If you imagine time as a river, there are two rafts set thirty years apart moving at a constant speed that scientists have created a wormhole between. Time travel can only happen between those two points meaning you can not simply jump to a specific time and change an action. The future requires soldiers but the criteria for selection must not allow the possibility of paradoxes being created. Whilst the underlying sub plot is about family and how time travel could impact the relationships between it. Add in some action and this should be a fantastic science fiction film. Unfortunately that is not the case. 

The film takes a full forty minutes to set up this story and really fumbles an incredibly unconvincing family drama between Forester and his father played by J.K. Simmons. 

Ultimately the pitch for this film is something like. Let’s take the setting of Edge of Tomorrow, mix with a monster design similar to A Quiet Place, include hopeless battles of swarming aliens just like in Starship Troopers, have an origin story mash up of War Of The Worlds and The Thing and sandwich our middle section action movie with the sort of unconvincing family drama of Taken. And what is so frustrating is the amazing premise they start with is washed away by the fact the end product does not deserve to even rub shoulders with any of the films mentioned. 

On to my second gripe then which is that the film is just incredibly sloppy and poorly made.

The opening is absolutely surreal. An American family home having an incredibly busy Christmas party whilst watch the 2022 Qatar FIFA World Cup. So far so odd. But let’s ignore the time zone difference and point out that it was far more realistic to see soldiers appear from a wormhole on the pitch than it was to watch what this film thinks is a professional football match. Oh and later in the film they explain that the time jump places everyone 5-10 feet above the ground and they need to prepare for a drop. This of course does not happen here. 

Then we see Gordon Brown in a montage of famous politicians reacting to the news. A man who left UK politics six years ago and has not been in power for eleven years. And then the one that baffled me more was that J.K. Simmons father character tells his son that he was a different man after Vietnam and had to leave. This is of course immediately after we see his son’s birth date which was 1982. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the US ended their involvement in 1973. So I will just assume it was really delayed trauma? 

This is all in the first forty minutes of course whilst the film is fumbling the set up and resulting in my good will leaving entirely. So much so that I rewound a scene where Dan is asked to collect 12 blue vials from a lab and he actually picks up a block of 15. This might be petty on my part but is simply an example of how little attention to detail has seemingly been taken. 

Finally then, my third issue. This is an action film with terrible action. A group of people with infinite ammo guns shooting incessantly at CGI monsters with little dynamism or excitement. 

So, that appears to have turned into a bit of a rant and I haven’t even talked about the comic relief character, the asinine final voiceover (the film to that point has no voiceover) or the fact that the final action set piece actually renders the entire plot prior to that pointless. 

Not recommended.