[IMDB]
there is a special place in hell reserved for people who make time travel movies that are not about time travel. it is wedged in between the heresy and anger levels in kind of a cul de sac? the turnoff is easy to miss. if you see flaming crypts, you have gone too far.
for the life of me, i cannot see why they bothered with the time travel aspect. there were some things which were supposed to be related, but they either did not go anywhere or were so buried in drek that you would have had to stop rolling your eyes to see them. for example, the hero starts with damaged relationships with both his father and his (future) kid. then he fixes them! yay symmetry! he fails to catch his (future) daughter, but he does (kind of) catch his father! yay more symmetry! the first, second, and third acts were all sort of awkward and ugly! give it up for symmetry!
lest you think that i am criticizing the directing rather than the writing, let me just say that the writing has issues, too. to wit, spend just A GODDAMN MINUTE thinking about time travel and realize that if you have non-trivial time travel at your disposal, as our heroes do, then all your problems are solved because you already know what is going to happen long before it happens. you know where all the aliens are going to show up first? great, put all the guns there. or better, you know how to make a time machine, but it only joins two equidistant points in time? no problem. take your knowledge of how to build a time machine back into the past and BUILD ANOTHER ONE YOU IDIOT. you have all the time you need to figure out this alien thing, and since it is an extinction-level event, maybe let some of the billions of people from the past work on it, too, instead of just throwing them into the meat grinder. operational security is useless if you are all dead.
let me say a little more about time travel. say you have a time machine which you can use to communicate to someone, perhaps yourself, 1 day in the past. and say you have a problem you want to solve. well the first thing you do is to communicate the problem to your past self. now your past self has 1 day to work on solving the problem. you may not find the solution, but now you have the results of 1 day of working on it that you can communicate to yourself in the past. on the second iteration, past you starts with a 1 day head start and can bring it up to 2 days worth of work. et cetera. after enough iterations, you have a solution. this is why so many time travel stories have the future self communicating a solution rather than a problem to either past selves. the exceptions are cases where no solution is possible, eg, because the enemy also has time travel at their disposal, or where the film is exploring that initial iterative part, before the solution is found. think groundhog day.
the handling of time travel was so sloppy, i am not going to bother dinging them for a lack of consideration of issues like temporal stability. you know what, i am not even going to get into it here, maybe when i review predestination.
the tomorrow war gets one meat grinder. by the way, you can tell that nobody invents a form of time travel which is widely usable because movies like the tomorrow war exist.
