The Corporate Propaganda of the Film ‘The Tomorrow War’
Image; Photo by Chuanchai Pundej on Unsplash
The slick sci-fi romp The Tomorrow War hits all the beats of a major Hollywood action film. With a budget of $200 million, the special effects and set pieces are impressive, though not particularly memorable. Chris Pratt, who earned his action bona fides in the Guardians of The Galaxy franchise and the Jurassic World reboot, manages to be a charming lead who propels the viewer through a dying Earth. It’s a bloated movie, filled with premises that are not particularly well-developed, but if you can turn your brain off for its first hour or so, it manages to be a tolerable ride.
However, underneath all this bluster is an insidious message about how governments would be unable to stop a planet-wide disaster. The proposed solution in the film instead appears to be a combination of rugged individualism and corporate benevolence — a weird irony given that just 100 companies are contributing to 71% of our species total carbon emissions.
The parallels to climate change in this movie are not subtle. Yet, since The Tomorrow War is being syndicated by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet (one that is contributing mightily to climate change), we should forcefully question this story’s message — one that appears to be a pretty intense bout of corporatist propaganda.
The premise of The Tomorrow War is that the planet is dying —in this reality, it’s because an alien presence known as the whitespikes has invaded the future and consumed almost all life. A desperate humanity figures out how to establish a wormhole to the past and convinces all the world's governments to send military forces to the future to replenish the frontlines. It’s this past where our main protagonist Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), finds himself in, as he is hurriedly sent into the future to fight evil aliens.
Much has been written about the inconsistencies in how both time travel and military strategy work in this movie. Yes, none of this makes sense. The act of sending troops to the future completely destroys humanity's ability to prepare against the whitespikes in the present (or past), but we are going to sidestep conversations on plotholes and instead focus on the problematic philosophical elements underpinning this film.
The Tomorrow War is an obvious metaphor for climate change. We see a sense of hopelessness in the air as people lament a future that is all but doomed. Early on, there is a scene where Dan, who's a teacher in his civilian life, is instructing a group of students in a classroom. He can’t get them to focus on anything. They are too despondent, thinking about the future they believe to be already lost. “What’s the point?… School, grades, college — it’s all bullshit,” says one student. “Yeah. We’ve seen the new number projections. We lose, period. The aliens kill us all,” chimes in another.
This very well could have been an actual classroom in the present day talking about carbon emissions rather than survival projections. Our current reality is very dire, and it’s also hard to process. The movie is clearly tapping into this widespread existential dread over the fate of our current planet when it comes to climate change. There is also not subtly a slideshow about climate change in the background as Dan is having this conversation.
Unlike in our world, however, in the movie, the governments of Earth were able to unite over their common threat (i.e., the Whitespikes), and they failed anyway. They could not figure out how to stop these aliens from destroying humanity in the future and are now throwing bodies at the problem in the hopes of stalling the inevitable. When we look at Dan’s present, the United States government has resorted to authoritarian measures to keep the draft going. Dan is informed that his spouse or dependent will take his place if he does not report for duty.
The government, however, does not have a solution that does anything meaningful with these bodies — in fact, the draft is portrayed as utterly incompetent. Soldiers are not trained, often thrown into battle with their civilian clothes still on. Their coordinators are all young twenty-somethings (apparently to avoid time paradoxes) whose leadership is so inept it falls apart under basic questioning. There is one hilarious scene where someone asks why they aren’t given pictures of their alien enemies, and the response (because it would demoralize people) ends up demoralizing all the recruits in the room.
“Look at all the Government will have us sacrifice to avert disaster,” the film seems to scream out, “and it will do us very little good.”
This movie is very clearly anti-government. Multiple characters possess a thorough distrust of governmental authority, including Dan’s father, James Forester (J.K. Simmons). “You have a master's degree in engineering and a general disdain for the US government,” Dan says of his father near the very beginning of the film, describing why the latter helps draft dodgers escape the clutches of the authoritarian US government.
There is a scene near the end where the main characters have figured out a plan to stop the aliens (more on this later), and they briefly consider letting the governments of the world in on the plan, only very it to be dismissed with a shrug. “Absolutely, go tell the UN,” remarks James, “and they can talk about it until we are all dead.” “Yeah,” agrees Charlie, a character we talk about in further detail below. “I hate to agree with conspiracy Santa, but if we get the governments of the world involved, it could turn into a nightmare.” The detest for government action in this scene is so visceral that it borders on a Randian monologue. The viewer is supposed to think that the very idea of involving the “government” is laughable.
Corporate actors are conversely portrayed very positively. The film's comic relief is played by a man named Charlie (Sam Richardson), the director of R&D of a geothermal energy company called Wallace Technology. He describes his company as “the Amazon of earth sciences.” Comic relief characters are supposed to be likable, and Sam Richardson does play Charlie with energetic flair — though the jokes do not always land. It's telling that the most corporatist character in the film is not only insanely likable but someone, as we shall soon learn, whose technical expertise allows him to help locate where the aliens initially landed.
There is also the main character himself — a biology teacher aspiring to be something greater. We start the film with Dan giving an interview for a job. “I found my passion in the Army Research Lab, I used my GI Bill…to go to Cal State, and I’m currently teaching high school biology,” he tells an interviewer over the phone. He is giving this interview while bringing beers to a holiday party, showing the viewer that he is an (overstretched) hustler. His voice deflates when he says “high school biology,” indicating that he looks down on this more public position. A more aware movie might have Dan come to terms with how toxic his worldview is, but as the movie progresses, it's clear we are meant to think of him as someone who is down on his luck and working towards something greater. In this case, saving humanity from aliens.
In the same classroom scene, Dan gives a passionate monologue to his depressed students about how to solve the alien threat (or really any problem) is through the spirit of innovation — a corporate buzzword that is often used synonymously with making products through the marketplace. “If there is one thing the world needs right now, it’s scientists. We cannot stop innovating. That’s how you solve a problem. Science is important.” However, in the film, we don’t see “science” — a globalized institution that involves hundreds, if not thousands of different people coming together to find the truth — but rather a ragtag group of individuals. It’s a corporatized version of science this movie promotes — stripped of its more communal ideals.
This brings us back to stopping the alien threat. The solution to halting the whitespikes is not a coordinated, collectivized approach from the people of the world. Instead, our leads bootstrap an end to the alien menace. Like a group of programmers founding a startup, Dan brings his smart friends and students together, and they brainstorm where to find the location of the alien threat before it arrives on Earth. Dan has learned vital information from the future — and rather than figure out how to get the governments of the world on board (they're just way too difficult)— he works on it privately.
Dan and his friends learn that the whitespikes are in a crashed alien cargo ship in Russia. They are buried underneath ice, which will melt by 2050 due to global warming and unleash them onto the world. We already know Dan refuses to inform the government of this information, which is frustrating even within the film's logic. The whitespikes breed so quickly that one mistake could unleash them onto a severely depleted Earth thirty years earlier than originally expected.
It would be a disaster, but the movie is not interested in taking its premise seriously but instead promoting the rugged individualism seen as the cornerstone of corporate ideology. “I feel like this is my opportunity to give [my daughter] and give this world a second chance,” monologues Dan before heading to the alien spaceship, somehow managing to make the fate of the world all about him. Like Steve Jobs and other tech visionaries before him, this is about what one man can do for the world. The film paints one person’s selfish call for redemption into a hero’s journey.
We should be skeptical of a movie that pushes business-friendly bootstrapping to solve a global problem (like climate change) because it has not been particularly effective in our timeline.
This is not the first time a movie has promoted such an ideology. The Tomorrow War joins a long list of films that depict government agencies or the government itself as an efficient or evil entity that must be defeated through the forces of rugged individualism (see the EPA in Ghostbusters, the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter, etc.). Amazon was not even the original distributor. It was originally scheduled for release in theaters by Paramount Pictures, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened, and the company pulled it, leaving Amazon to pick up Paramount's sloppy seconds.
The context of this movie is still frustrating, though, especially when being promoted by a company such as Amazon that stands to benefit from trying to convince humanity to trust in its authority over the governments that can regulate it. When it comes to the existential threat of climate change, we don’t need more self-deluded men and businesses thinking that they alone can save the world (that’s what got us into this mess). We need to build narratives that foster genuine cooperation and trust among the members of our species.
Until then, a The Tomorrow War sequel is already in production. We are looking at an age of propaganda where megacorporations realize that the second-best thing to saving the world is convincing everyone else that you can.