The Tomorrow World: I Want that Old Thing Back.

Whether or not we want to recognize it, in recent years the blockbuster has floundered majorly, as some have remarked its in its flop era. In the past 10 years cinemas have struggled to find the kind of long lasting, I monumental blockbusters that people reminisce, spin their wheels about, and discuss ad nauseum on Twitter and elsewhere amongst fervent cinephiles and your average moviegoers. That hasn't stopped Hollywood from trying, but that effort has been for naught. To be real blockbusters aren't easy, making a really good one or a great one is one of the most difficult tasks in cinema, especially when they exist in this weird space of being far too depended upon, and thought of, and being treated as a lesser form of art ( check most greatest lists and very few exist there). Most of these films could rather crudely placed into one of three categories late bloomers like “Edge of Tomorrow” where they missed the mark but were 10 times better than what people thought they might turn out going in, or Missed connections like in the case of Mad Max: Fury Road which was loved from jump but under performed, or the instantly beloved and box office behemoth ( (probably the most difficult) like Jurassic Park…but the largest chunk of the last ten or so years of blockbusters are films like The Tomorrow War. It's become a little chic today to be dismissive of or refuse to acknowledge that what's happening in Hollywood doesn’t have to happen, that audiences deserve and can ask for better. I have fun with The Fast and the Furious films, but when it’s your era's defining Franchise and quite possibly and arguably its best, I say that’s not a great thing and it’s worth talking about or discussing. The F&F movies may be incoherent, noisy, messy, and plain dumb, but they are memorable, (in pieces) and they dont have movie stars, but they do have fantastically ridiculous and amazing set pieces, a growing self awareness, they evolve, and they have a very deep roster of extremely likeable people in their roles. They are memorably silly movies that attact the likes of Hollywood's best (Theron and Dame Helen Mirren ) because they want in on the good times, but films like the Tomorrow War are representative of the look and of the type of most of the blockbusters we’re getting today. Which looks like what happens when the mothers and fathers of blockbuster filmmaking are the F&F films and Marvel, and you can’t recreate even what they have. Large over produced, over marketed, (sometimes under marketed) under developed buzzards feeding off the flesh of the carcasses of IP's and better films from other eras. Massive marketing usually insures just enough returns on the Box office that we get eight more but they are films that people forget about (pardon the pun) tomorrow.

In recent years we've been “treated” major tentpoles like the ones pictured above, Angel has Fallen, Detective Pikachu, Captain Marvel, Mortal Kombat, WW84, Skyscraper, The Mortal Engines, Those Maze Runner movies, “The” Predator, The Dark Tower, two different but kinda same Justice Leagues, at least two more Pirates movies than should have been, Geostorm, The 5th Wave, San Andreas, Self less, Tonorrowland, The Intern, two more Terminators( Genesys , Dark Fate ) Pan (a peter pan movie) Peabody and Mr Sherman, two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies no one asked for, another Night at the Museum offering, a Robocop remake, several not very good Disney live action remakes of their own animated classics, A third, though technically second dumb and dumber, two transformers movies ( age of extinction, bumblebee) A Jack Ryan reboot, and of course our latest The Tomorrow War. What makes it so dreary is that The Tomorrow War is somewhat an original concept, not an IP or a comic movie or a Disney reenactment of a Disney movie, but like all but a very select few which everyone knows - none hit major marks, their cultural impact is at next to, or around zero and most are most importantly not very good. The Tonorrow War is fine, it has an interesting concept it sometimes cashes in on, it has some chuckles, some decent action sequences, a dash of emotional heft, and JK Simmons, but you’re not taking anything away from this film, you’re not gonna rehash its finer points over and over with your friends after, and you’re not turning back around and watching it again.

Sometimes it's harder to peg down what actually makes a film forgettable, but in the Tomorrow Wars case it's extremely noticeable and through its mistakes points out SOME of what make some of the other films also feel forgettable. The Pratt/Chris McKay ( Lego movies) vehicle's special effects are glossy but they have no impetus, no vision other than to be cool it seems, now Im sure there was some functional aspect the creators behind them thought over but Alas that is the effect they have, and being dreadfully honest they're not even that cool. There is nothing in here as inventive as blowing up the White House in more importantly the way in which the White House was blown up in Roland Emmerich's classic dedication to bombastic disaster films ID4. Missing are the minds, the heart, and the craft that went into the work of Ray Harryhausen or all of The folks at industrial light and magic. People are being sucked into the air and thrown through time and I had a greater sense of wonder just watching Marty Mclfy drive through it. Beyond The Tomorrow War, every once in a while you get a well constructed scene like those we've seen in the Wick movies, the stunts that were composed in George Miller's 4th entry in the mad Max series, the speeders in return of the jedi, ( which is almost solely a feat of sound design) the chase sequence in “Terminator 2 judgment day”, and then subsequently the special effects used in the making of the T-1000. It's not that they don't happen at all, it's that the frequency in which we see them is moving at a slower click. Good special effects are a combination of practicality, functionality, innovation, and creativity. Harryhausen effects work to this day because he treated his monsters like actors and approached their functionality around personality. Innovation around animatronics and special effects and real dedicated thought about where and when to use which made the magic of Juraasic Park possible. I don’t know that the folks behind the tomorrow war didn't do that, I just know It's not a good thing when the goofy explanation of the jump through time exceeds the spectacle of the actual look of the jump. Tentpole films featuring monsters or Aliens have gotten less and less inventive or exciting in their design, you can tangibly feel the gaping void left in the world by the passing of brilliant minds like the H.R. Geiger's, Brian Froud's, Rick Baker's, and the Stan Winston's of the world. The Predator, the Alien, the Kracken, anything in the “Dark Crystal” “Neverending Story”, and “Labyrinth”and the T-1000 are memorable and unforgettable creatures, Aliens, and robots, and its not the nostalgia talking, you knew when you first saw them when you first saw them that you were seeing something truly fantastic, something that would leave an indelible stain on your mind and your imagination. It's been quite some time since I can recall seeing a creature on screen that brought that similar sense of dread and awe and wonder on screen as even seeing the 33’ King Kong or the two headed monster in Willow. The Tomorrow War's monsters make similar noises as we've seen in many other films, bearing alien creatures that run around real fast and they have tentacles that move them around and shoot darts, but like…why? None of it seems ingenious, it seems very ordinary, very seen it all before. And a lot of that is due to the ideas that propelled the other monsters forward from the ideas of how they might work in how their systems work in how they are composed connected directly to how they esthetically look to us. Once again in films like the tomorrow war it's as seems to be a look it's not pushed to the brink of the capacity for wonder.

We're missing movie stars. A recent piece was published at the Ringer based off of, and out of the much better musings of people like Angelica Jade Bastien that spoke to the recent loss of the action star, it clumsily talks about the aesthetics of action stars and movie stardom, but it like most people didn't really understand the depth and nuances of movie stardom. As Miss Bastien once pondered in regards to a certain tweet “Do you know what movie stars are?” So too do I. Folks should read Christina Newland's “She Found it at the Movies”, in astonishingly brilliant personal essays from Christina herself, Lauren Vevers, Izzy Alcott, Pamela Hutchinson, and of course the great Sheila O'Malley we find the personal “Those Blue Eyed Boys", “Searching for Marlene Dietrich in Berlin" “I didn't want Lauren Bacall, I Wanted to Be Her”, “Death Cults and Matinee Idols", and “Teenage Girls Know Something Don't" we find divine expressions of the abilities, the sheer power, the sensuality, and devastating magnetism of the Movie Star without really being about them. A few great pieces to read instead of that Ringer piece are “Eyes So Deep There’s No Bottom” by Sheila O'Malley where she writes us into an exceptional understanding of the seemingly inexplicable, by explaining the inexplicable; “Beneath the beauty there is a … pit of unknowability. He is almost entirely opaque. His eyes are light and icy-blue, and yet they give an impression of pitch-black-ness. He communes with something inside of him: disappointment? Anger? Loss? Disillusionment? The eyes tell no tales. Ever. The mystery remains intact. Always. This is what makes him a great movie star. On the level of Dietrich. Or Cary Grant. Two other insanely gorgeous almost otherworldly creatures who managed to be both transparent and entirely mysterious at the same time. Persona as strip-tease, where the ultimate reveal STILL withholds something essential”. And two by Angelica Jade Bastien ; “God, Brad Pitt is so Good at This" and “The Acrobatic Grace of Cary Grant”. Barely mentioning the word movie star she in so many ways and so many words outlines alot of the conditions and particulars of movie stars/dom and their significance. In the grace of Cary Grant she writes: “But Grant wasn’t an immediately formed star. Few are. It takes time to feel out the persona you’re destined to project on-screen. Paired with Mae West in the 1933 sexual comedies She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, we meet a Cary Grant who has yet to live up to the legends that soon attach to his name. He’s handsome, undeniably. He wears clothes with a marked understanding of their power. But there’s no dimension, no depth. He fails to capture the imagination here. Part of the problem is how his role functions.” I would extend out from the words of these two amazing minds and say that a vital factor in the loss of the action stars or any star is directly related to function, what are you here to do, why are you doing it, how are you doing it, and what in? The loss of the blockbuster is directly related to the loss of any true movie star. The movie star and the vehicles they inhabit are inextricable, a car is nothing without an engine and engine nothing without a car. As Miss Bastien points out Cary Grant does not become Cary Grant until The Awful Truth. Harrison Ford is in both “American Graffiti”, and “The Conversation” before he is in Star Wars, and that is his coming out party, but hes still not thee HARRISON Ford until Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ford like Grant has that sesne of being amazed with himself and it is on indy that this becomes affirmed, also like Cary though less graceful and more rough he has a physicality, an understandimg of his body that showed itself in a myriad of ways that helped make him a star, rght down to being able to take a Punch, and its all on display on Indiana Jones. From his reaction to a snake in the plane to the infamous gun vs sword, to his fight with the German boxer. Raiders of the Lost Ark as a vehicle is has a helluva frame, a spectacularly silly story with just enough believability and a pinch of historical thrust to make it an actual B movie even though that’s not what it is. A roller coaster ride with the right people behind it, doing all the right things adding great cinematography, wit and pace, costuming and music and shots you’ll never forget. Add in its first-rate top-notch supporting cast and you’ve got one of the greatest films of all time, but you don’t have to aim that high, how about Predator, or Road House even? The almost total lack of imaginative and indellible vehicles that connect with an actor who had a quality singular to seemingly just them, married with a sense of craft and thoughtful self understanding has left us with a bunch of mid to sometimes great actors that can get the job done and move the story along but never transcend it, And most of the time the story rarely transcends them. In an era like this we get suggestions from critics like Brandon Streussing that B movie stars like Scott Adkins get whole vehicles, in this void, why not? He’s more interesting than Pratt, and he has action star bonafides. At the least we might get something as fun as Adkins hero Jean Claude Van Damme gave us in John Woo's “Hard Target” and Tsui Hark's “Double Team" that is a great leap forward from 90 percent of what we see today, but make no mistake here Scott Adkins Michael Jai White are somewhere between good actors, “Hmm” they're not great, and they're definitely not movie stars, that is far more difficult and yet still necessary. A world devoid of actual movie stardom has made people forget MOVIE STARS, trivialize their impact, reduce them to Stallone and Schwarzenegger only. It has folks suggesting Steven Yuen, and Daniel Kaluuya are movie stars..They..are…not. Bette Davis was a movie star, Joan Crawford, Vivian Leigh, Toshiro Mifune, Joe Shoshido, Alain Delon,Cary Grant, James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Nicholson, Jackie Chan, Gong Li, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, they’re all movie stars. One should never fix ones mouth to say (something like I just recently heard ) that they're not missed. They're not some unnecessary waste byproduct of cinema. They're not gloss or icing on the cake. They’re directly linked to the best eras of movies we’ve ever had, and they undeniably make cinema better. They cement a good or great writers lines into the hall of fame. Pin the blue ribbon on a great shot, they make us wanna be them, and want them, part (not all) of the sexless-ness in movies is due to their absence. You can’t just stick any ol body in there and say “Tadaaa", and Chris Pratt and The “Tomorrow War" are a prime example. To be clear here, there are very few lines I could think of in the tomorrow war where Chris Pratt completely fumbled the ball, or where I was in complete and total disbelief of anything he was saying, but I was never drawn in, never entranced, never blown away, never shocked, never surprised at anything Pratt did, in anyway Pratt moved, at anything Pratt said. He seemed to eat some lines, and then simply say the others in a way that he understands or percieves them - which is acting- but that understanding is obviously VERY limited. As an actor Pratt is a walking chuckle, that uncommitted laugh only slightly aware of it’s own mediocrity, it offers some relief, but a chuckle is rarely remembered, it’s not a real laugh, it has none of the magic a real hearty laugh has. Pratt has no magic, no real revelations about himself we can see. We have none of that sort of wry smile that we'd see from Harrison Ford the Indiana Jones, and subsequently the way he very self awarely used it and subverted it in later movies like Witness or What Lies Beneath. None of that purposelful but poetic still waters coolness Keanu had in Point Break or the potent intention that we got out of his co-movie star Patrick Swayze. None of the impenetrable swagger of Will Smith or for that matter not quite movie star but yeah kinda - Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Theres no way Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones with Chris Pratt as the lead, that’s mistaking the fact that Indiana Jones sells some jokes with his being a joke, and Pratt as anybody's professor is just that…a joke. Pratt's vehicles have engines but no frame, their just a multitude of parts and sounds more lawnmower than car. He’s not particularly interesting, and when hes not making you laugh hes downright boring. So we are left to the story and this story, the Tomorrow War story is too concerned with moving along to the next big set piece to really take the time to connect us to any of these people. Recently Vulture’s Matthew Zoeller Seitz mused on Twitter about the importance of these sort of small players background players that made movies like “Midnight Run” or “Casablanca”, I would add Kurosawa's “High and Low”, or “Speed” Which placed fantastic players like Glenn Plummer, Alan Ruck and Joe Morton illuminated the road as the stars Keanu and right there in movie Sandra Bullock drove it into movie history. As side pieces to an ongoing story when you have people that talented in play, in the background, chances are you got a better chance at a great film of any kind and definitely a great blockbuster. The Tomorrow War has none of this. So we are left with even a player like JK Simmons to watch Simmons fumble around in the dark trying to make something out of a father and son relationship that the movie is as disintrested in holding up Chris Pratt's character is and everything else, including a Father daughter connection or even chemistry is the void.

I'm not asking Hollywood to recreate play by play, piece for piece the exact old magic of yesteryear, I’m asking it to make new magic. I'm not trying to ask Hollywood to make the same kinds of blockbusters with the same kinds of action heroes, or movie stars, but I am saying that you should be creating the new type and that type should bring about emotions, strong ones. That power and indelibility like John Wick or a Mad Max shouldn’t only come around every three or four years. In 1991, we as movie goes had Termimator 2, ( one of the GOATS), Backdraft, Silence of the Lambs, Hook, The Addams Family, Home Alone, Beauty and the Beast, and Thelma and Louise. 1993 ; Jurassic Park, The Nightmare before Christmas, The Firm, Tombstone, The Fugitive, Hard Target, Groundhog Day, and Hocus Pocus. 1997; Face Off, I Know What you Did Last Summer, The Fifth Element, The Lost World, George of the Jungle, and of course Titanic. A hierarchy to these films to be sure, they’re not all the greatest fills of all time,, but they are films that still getbtalled about today, and they are each 110 times more memorable than something like The Tomorrow War. I don't have the hubris to think that in a piece or even given all the time in the world that I alone can come up with anything nearing the answers to move Hollywood into a new era of blockbuster classics, but I do think there are few details that would be worth paying more attention to in order to start moving in the right direction, starting..Tomorrow..Pun intended.