"Seven days from now, when you are sent into that war, you won't be fighting for your country. You'll be fighting for your world."
This was supposed to be a big summer blockbuster but thanks to the pandemic it ended up dropping on Amazon Prime instead. I suspect the fact that it's not very good was another reason that it never made in to cinemas.
The premise is that aliens known as Whitespikes are invading Earth thirty years in the future and humans of the time are struggling to fight them so they time travel people from 2022 to the future to fight. One such person is Dan (Chris Pratt) a teacher who happens to have been a soldier in a previous life. In the future he meets his daughter, now grown-up, and together they work to defeat the alien threat once and for all.
First of all, it felt like I'd seen this film before. It's just a combination of other sci-fi films, particularly Starship Troopers and Edge of Tomorrow, and everything in the film is derivative of much better stories. Even whitespikes look pretty similar to Edge of Tomorrow's mimics.
The lead character, Dan, is incredibly bland. It feels a bit strange hiring Chris Pratt as a straight action hero. I think he's a perfectly fine actor and is great at the roles where he gets to be funny but the character is just dull and uninspiring here. There's a little comic relief from Sam Richardson which is welcome but disappears all too quickly. There are some other decent performances in the film, especially JK Simmons, but everyone is trying to break free from an uninspiring script.
The concept is a quite silly and doesn't make a huge amount of sense. I'm surprised that no-where does anyone mention a potential paradox of people dying in the future and therefore not having the children that exist in the future. There's an attempt to make this about Dan's connection with his family but it can't decide which relationship it wants to focus on. Initially it's the relationship with his grown-up daughter and then in the third act it becomes the relationship with his estranged father. Both work OK but it felt to me like they needed to stick to focusing on one of the relationships for longer.
The action scenes in the film are the highlight by a country mile with some genuine tension when Dan and his fellow soldiers first arrive in the future and some epic scenes where a base is attacked by whitespikes which visually looks like World War Z. It's odd then that the third act is far smaller in scale with the biggest action happening not too long after the half way point of the film. I didn't hate the climax but it just felt underwhelming compared to what had come before.
OK, so the film is pretty terrible but I really liked watching it. Once I leaned into the absurdity of the concept I was happy to just go with it and enjoy where the film took me. It's script is the biggest problem and everything else is well done within the confines of the script. Somewhere in here there is a genuinely good film and there are brief moments where it reaches the heights of something better but unfortunately they are only a few such moments.
Stupid massive sci-fi which I enjoyed watching even if I came way not thinking a great deal of the film.
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