Let's start with the name.
Many people are somewhat confused about the title of "The Tomorrow War" (2021), after all, there are too many science fiction films involving "Tomorrow". Whether it's the sci-fi movie "Tomorrowland" (2015), the sci-fi drama "Legends of Tomorrow" (2016), and many more sci-fi films and television works, all with the word "tomorrow", we can pull out a long list; if we play a little more banter, even the English name of the 1986 Hong Kong gangster film "The True Colors of Heroes" can be translated as "A Better" (A Better). Tomorrow）。 Of course, what really confuses the audience is "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014), the similarities between the two films are indeed quite a lot - both are science fiction films, both involve time factors, and both are stories of alien invaders blatantly attacking the children of my earth to stubbornly resist the death of a battle.
However, after the release of "Tomorrow's War", the feedback received seems to be unsatisfactory, slightly exaggerated, and even described as a wave of bad reviews. However, the author does not have a simple negative attitude towards "Tomorrow's War", which we will analyze in detail below.
Not counting the exciting scenes that started first, "Tomorrow's Battle" began with a football game. After the sudden smoke, heavily armed fighters appeared on the sports field. These uninvited guests, please do not panic, and inform them that they are not hostile, because they are the future human beings, that is, "your descendants".
They came because extraterrestrial life would invade Earth in the future. Not a long future, just a few decades away. However, human beings were gradually defeated and insufficient troops, so they came to their predecessors for help, hoping that the "era" could send reinforcements.
So in the "era" began a wide range of conscription mobilization, just to the head of the protagonist Foster. Although Foster is a veteran, he is now a middle school teacher with a wife and daughter, and does not want to go to the soup. But in the end he went, and alongside him were veterans who had fought several times, as well as researchers with no battlefield experience.
A 140-minute film that doesn't officially debut until a third of the way through —not strictly speaking, aliens, but alien monsters. Speaking of which, you may wish to like it: compared to some other science fiction films in which alien monsters attack Earth, the monster image of this film is still worthy of this big investment.
After a deadly battle, Foster led the squad to complete the initial task. After retreating to safety, Foster talked to a female officer and discovered that the officer, also surnamed Foster, was his own daughter!
Father and daughter meet on the battlefield, and the two have mixed feelings. The daughter told her father that the only way to completely defeat the alien monster was to extract a special substance from the female monster, and then produce a toxin to destroy all the monsters. However, alien monsters protect female monsters, and a series of actions such as capture, extraction, and pharmaceutical are even more difficult.
After another deadly battle, Foster finally got the materials he needed. But the daughter told him that in his own time, he was no longer able to mass-produce this toxin, and he needed his father to bring it back to the past...
For the sake of the future of mankind, for the sake of his daughter's future, Foster resolutely returned to his own time and tried to produce toxins in large quantities. At the same time, he also discovered the source of the alien monsters, and led a group of comrades deep into the Arctic, where the first batch of monster embryos were frozen (according to the film's explanation, perhaps the livestock transported by the aliens were left behind in the Earth region). Foster et al. injected the toxin into the embryo and eventually blew up the monster's lair.
Unexpectedly, a monster escaped...
The first thing to explain is that although both involve time themes, "Edge of Tomorrow" and "Tomorrow's War" are still far apart - the former is a flashback jump, the latter is a time-of-flight time span; the purpose of the former is to show the entanglement of this time loop, and the latter's time travel is just a means of movement. Time science fiction has also been subdivided into many genres, not all of which belong to the same model. The audience feels similar, in fact, they all use the military scenes of real war. It is worth mentioning that what Foster did in "Tomorrow's War" is far less heroic and tearful than Cage in "Edge of Tomorrow".
One of the important reasons for the verbal criticism is that the details are not different, but this may be debatable. For example, the logical flaws about time travel - in fact, the time theme of science fiction can not be logically complete, after all, this is the most difficult field of science fiction literature to justify itself, and most works can only shyly go around in the face of rigorous time logic, so "Tomorrow's War" may not be so bad at this point. On the other hand, the image of the alien monster in it is rarely careful and meticulous in recent years, at least from this point of view, so much silver has not been adrift.
Another reason why the audience does not buy it is probably a non-film factor. For this film, everyone's expectations are obviously a little too high, after all, the momentum of such a big battle is a so-called 200 million US dollar investment, and the final product presented is not enough, and people will naturally talk about it.
In fact, this problem also depends on how to say it. Compared with Hollywood's science fiction films in the past one or two decades, it is not easy to reach this level. Although there are also such masterpieces as "Mechanical Ji", "Annihilation", "Interstellar", and "The Martian", most science fiction films are still not satisfactory. The theme of "fighting aliens to liberate all mankind" that applies to the earth war model is difficult to flow and put in place in the narrative, and the coordination and unity of reality and science fiction are difficult to grasp. Similarly, science fiction films such as "The Last Colony", "Human Office", "Elysium Space" are equally tiresome, the fight and kill in the context of the wasteland or quasi-wasteland, the extreme fear of disaster and doomsday, and mixed with various politically correct concepts: class antagonism, hell and heaven... The novelty of the past has already created the aesthetic fatigue of the audience under repeated bombardment, which makes people really uninterested. By contrast, Tomorrow's War is not useless. In the face of hollywood, a classmate who is not perfect but has changed this time, the author has a mentality of "just having a little progress, don't hit children or should be encouraged".
At the end of the day, cinema still has to be patient in telling a story, which seems to be the ability that Hollywood has been increasingly lacking in recent years (especially compared to the 1990s). The high-tech production cannot replace the traditional storytelling, and the dazzling scenes must also touch the soul of the audience to be meaningful. Analogy with "Ready Player One", an almost pure entertainment science fiction film, there is no avant-garde and novel idea, but with the ingenuity of veteran Spielberg, it can make the bland and old creative tricks renovated, and the story is still flowing.
Therefore, the fundamental problem of "Tomorrow's War" is that it still does not tell a good story, although it has piled up various eye-catching favorable factors, but there is no wonderful and tense story line running through it, and these superior materials are tantamount to a bunch of inferior sand without a leader. In contrast, "Edge of Tomorrow" is a tense and interlocking plot, chasing changes along a main line from beginning to end, playing with skills while not forgetting the original intention.
Perhaps in the eyes of the makers of "Tomorrow's War", since science fiction is inherently exciting, plus war, time, extraterrestrial life, and family and affection... Aren't these eye-catching factors enough to excite the audience?
No, not really.
We know that grabbing a bunch of exquisite organs and gathering them on a face doesn't necessarily create a real beauty. Overall coordination is also indispensable compared to many details. Let's take a ready-made example of science fiction – Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel that came out in 1818.
In this story, scientist Frankenstein believes that the reason why people die is often because of organ death, so as long as you find those healthy organs to piece together, and then inject energy, can you not create a living life? So he went to the morgue to find a beautiful nose, ears, arms and thighs, and it turned out that these high-quality organs were actually a strange and ugly monster, which actually frightened Frankenstein himself. Then all the trouble arises...
It is true of making people, and it is also true of filmmaking. Not quite, but more or less.
(Note: Galaxy, a famous science fiction writer, has authored more than 20 long-form science fiction "Broken Magnetic Marks", hundreds of short and medium-length science fiction "Poly-Iron Casting Errors", and more than 20 science fiction works such as "Dead Knots in Time and Space". He has won many awards such as the "Five One Project" Award, the Song Qingling Award, the Bingxin Award, the National Excellent Science Popularization Works Award, and the Galaxy Award of the Central Propaganda Department. ）