Attempt to Grapple with the Paradox of The Tomorrow War's First Trailer

Get ready to roll your eyes, and roll them hard, because the temporal entanglements of this first trailer for Amazon’s The Tomorrow War hint at the would-be action blockbuster’s ability to boggle the mind if you spend even a second thinking about it. Who would have thought that a story about soldiers being plucked from the past to fight a war against aliens in the future would have such opportunity for paradox? As the official synopsis reads:

“The fate of a futuristic war rests upon one man’s abilities to confront the ghosts of his past.” Humanity is losing to an alien invasion, so to fight back, scientists develop a way to draft soldiers from the past to fight the war.

The Tomorrow War at least has an enjoyably eclectic cast, starring Chris Pratt, J. K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, and Yvonne Strahovski as a character from the future who will in no way be revealed as Pratt’s grown-up daughter. Why would you even suggest such a thing? The film was originally intended for theatrical release by Paramount in the winter of last year, but was eventually sold off to Amazon, ‘ala Coming 2 America, thanks to the ongoing pandemic.

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Just looking at the first footage below, you get a feel for The Tomorrow War’s tone as something of a more comedic Edge of Tomorrow, or perhaps “Terminator in reverse,” considering that humanity is looking to soldiers from the past to fight its wars in the future. This of course opens an endless can of paradoxical worms. Why, for instance, are people from the past being thrown into future combat untrained, when they literally have 30 years to prepare for the upcoming alien invasion? Everything about The Tomorrow War feels like a setup for the softest of all soft sci-fi, in which the audience is meant to just shut up and not ask any questions about how any of this is supposed to work.

But hey, go ahead and check out the trailer while you’re here. The Tomorrow War arrives streaming on Amazon Prime Video on July 2, 2021.

Attempt to Grapple with the Paradox of The Tomorrow War‘s First Trailer