Amazon Prime has dropped the full trailer for its new, original sci-fi action-thriller, "The Tomorrow War" that premieres globally on July 2.
In the trailer, we're in the summer of 2022 — just 12 months from now — during the thrilling Qatar World Cup final, watching a tense game as Brazil are playing (what looks like) Argentina and it's 3-all, with about 90 seconds or so left. When suddenly, in front of the 80,000-seat Lusail Stadium, a time portal opens on the pitch. With the whole world watching, a team of soldiers from the future emerges from a cloud of sparks and smoke and announce to everyone on Earth that in just 30 years from now, mankind is facing utter annihilation.
"We are fighting a war, 30 years in the future," the leader of these soldiers explains to the puzzled population of our planet. "Our enemy is not human. We need you to fight," she says. "In 11 month's time, all human beings in the future will be wiped from the face of the Earth, unless you help us."
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The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is a high school teacher and family man Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist (the curiously named Romeo Command) and his estranged father, Slade, in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.
Thankfully though, Pratt's character was formally Army special-forces-something-or-other before becoming a ninth-grade educator at the T. Woodrow Wilson high school. So, you know, there's that.
Weirdly though, other people who are also recruited don't seem to have any military background, which begs the question, why aren't the Navy SEALs, the Special Air Service or the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group gathered and transported forward in time? Let's hope there's a believable reason.
Joining Pratt is Yvonne Strahovski, who has appeared in "The Handmaiden's Tale," "Dexter" and "The Predator" among others and JK Simmons, who has certainly seen a thing or two, appearing in both the DC and the Marvel universe, "La La Land" and the vastly underrated "Counterpart."
There's a montage of action — much more than we saw in the teaser and it appears that Dan has to wear some kind of permanently attached device covering his entire left forearm in order to be able to time jump. Plus, we get a bit more of a look, albeit only a brief one, at the actual aliens that are wrecking havoc in the year 2051. They appear to be a cross between a mimic from "Edge of Tomorrow" and possibly a xenomorph from "Aliens," so standard extraterrestrial exterminators then.
In other sci-fi/Amazon-related news, it's been almost impossible to escape hearing that Jeff Bezos has bought out MGM studios, for $8.75 billion. (That's actually more than Disney paid for both Marvel and Lucasfilm.)
Not only does that now give Amazon big-screen franchises like James Bond and Rocky, but more importantly — to us anyway — is that it also includes epic, undervalued sci-fi properties like "Stargate," "Robocop" and "Buckaroo Banzai." Bezos saved "The Expanse" already, will he be willing to invest in quality reboots of these too?
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