CULTURE
By Sister Rose Pacatte, FSP
Sister Rose Pacatte, FSP
about
FILMS
THE MEANING OF LIFE Waking Life (2001) Into the Wild (2007) Gravity (2013) Three Colors: Blue (1993) Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
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I
n 2022, Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), a former Green Beret and current biology teacher, gets a job at a distinguished science research laboratory. As he watches the World Cup with his 9-year-old daughter, Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and wife, Emmy (Betty Gilpin), a catastrophic event occurs. Soldiers from 2055 arrive to draft soldiers for a global war against alien “Whitespikes” that is due to begin in 2048. His deployment is for seven days but it will seem much longer. Emmy wants Dan to seek out his estranged father, James (J.K. Simmons), a mechanical engineer who fought in Vietnam, and ask him to remove the tracking band on his arm. Instead, Dan reports for basic training. Using a wormhole called a “jumplink,” the new soldiers, after a minimum of training, arrive in the future amid a battle over Miami. The world is about to collapse unless something can be done. Colonel Muri Forester (Yvonne Strahovski), Dan’s grown daughter, is a field commander who eventually creates a toxin that will kill the female aliens, thus eliminating the Whitespikes. Dan returns to the present, where his team realizes that the aliens did not invade recently but during a millennial explosion around 1000 CE. They were buried and then frozen under a Russian glacier, which is now melting due to global warming. The Tomorrow War is a boring sci-fi war drama, written by Zach Dean and directed by Chris McKay. It suffers from inane dialogue and a superficial story driven by explosions and aliens that reminded me of the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. The father-daughter relationship was supposed to provide the emotional quotient, but it was awkward and trite. The theme of global war is concerning because it normalizes conflict for the sake of conflict. Though I was happy to see the theme of climate change making its way into action movies, this is the kind of film that makes you beg for better stories and screenwriters.
Not yet rated, PG-13 • Violence, some language, gore.
42 • September 2021 | StAnthonyMessenger.org
CRUELLA: COURTESY OF WALT DISNEY STUDIOS/EPK.TV.COM; LAND: COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE
Sister Rose’s FAVORITE
THE TOMORROW WAR
LEFT: COURTESY SISTER ROSE PACATTE, FSP/MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS; THE TOMORROW WAR: AMAZON STUDIOS/EPK.TV.COM
Sister Rose is a Daughter of St. Paul and the founding director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies. She has been the awardwinning film columnist for St. Anthony Messenger since 2003 and is the author of several books on Scripture and film, as well as media literacy education.
