This movie is an alien invasion\/time travel movie.\u00a0 Wow, that\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n This movie is a highly confusing science fiction story.\u00a0 Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester a retired special forces soldier from Iraq who now works as a high school science teacher.\u00a0 He has a wife Emmy and a young daughter Muri.\u00a0 So far so good.\u00a0 One day while watching soccer\u2019s world cup game on tv they witness the beginning of the future war.\u00a0 In the middle of the field a \u201cwormhole\u201d opens up and a bunch of humans dressed in military attire carrying weapons appear.<\/p>\n They explain that they are from the year 2051 and their world is fighting a war against aliens called the \u201cwhitespikes.\u201d\u00a0 They are about 8-10 feet long, have four running legs two grasping legs and two tentacles that can grab but also shoot \u201cspikes.\u201d\u00a0 And they are always ravenously hungry for human flesh.\u00a0 The aliens appeared in arctic Russia and quickly spread across the world and now the human population has been decimated (total world population down to 500,000) and they are begging people from 2021 to come through a portal and help fight the aliens.<\/p>\n Earth agrees to send its armies into the future but barely twenty percent return alive.\u00a0 After that a draft is employed and all adults (men and women) are eligible.\u00a0 Eventually Dan is drafted and is sent.\u00a0 Enlistment involves surviving one week of combat after which the soldier is automatically returned to the present wherever he is.<\/p>\n Dan goes to the future and is immediately swept up in the \u201crun for your life\u201d action of fighting the whitespikes.\u00a0 Eventually he meets his commanding officer Colonel Muri Forester (played by Yvonne Strahovski), in other words, his daughter now grown up and become a biologist working on a toxin to kill the whitespikes before they finish off what is left of humanity.\u00a0 And with Dan\u2019s help she captures a female whitespike and they synthesize a toxin that will kill all whitepikes injected with it.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s too late.\u00a0 The last human outpost where Muri and Dan are located is overwhelmed by a horde of whitespikes and Dan time jumps with the toxin just as Muri falls to her death in the grips of a whitespike.\u00a0 Dan reaches home and is overwhelmed with grief and anger.\u00a0 Grown-up Muri had told him that back in the \u201cpresent\u201d when Dan had returned from his seven-day assignment he abandoned his wife and daughter and eventually was killed a few years later in an auto accident.<\/p>\n Determined to get the toxin mass produced and sent back to the future Dan reaches out to the government but finds out that the portal is gone.\u00a0 The whitespikes have finished off humanity in the future.\u00a0 There is no place to send the toxin.<\/p>\n But Emmy reasons that it makes more sense to find the whitespikes before they conquered the world and destroy them at the beginning.\u00a0 With a clue from volcanic ash present on a whitespike artifact they figure out that the whitespikes must have been frozen under the ice cap in northern Russia and thawed because of \u201cglobal warming\u201d in 2051 or shortly before.\u00a0 Because of global instability caused by the knowledge that the world would be coming to an end, the US refuses to help Dan go to Russia to find the whitespikes.\u00a0 So, Dan goes to his Vietnam War vet estranged father (played by J. K. Simmons) who happens to have access to a large cargo plane and they mount a small expedition.<\/p>\n They find the alien ship by its magnetic field and use thermite to reach it through the ice.\u00a0 Then they find out that the whitespikes are not the astronauts but rather a bioweapon cargo on a ship that crashed into earth long ago.\u00a0 They use the toxin to kill about half the whitespikes on the ship but another five or six escape.\u00a0 Two of the humans use a C4 explosive to kill the whitespikes in a suicide maneuver.\u00a0 But one female escapes and after an extended chase and fight scene Dan and his father kill the monster.\u00a0 The movie ends with Dan reuniting with Emmy and introducing young Muir to her grandfather.\u00a0 Wow, what a mess!<\/p>\n Okay, what the hell do I say about this crazy mixed up movie?\u00a0 From a science fiction plot perspective, this thing is a turkey.\u00a0 There is no indication of how the 2051 humans in the middle of their existential alien crisis were able to create time travel.\u00a0 And the workings of this time travel also seem goofy.\u00a0 The 2051 people can only go back and forth thirty years.\u00a0 So, they can\u2019t go back five years and search for the whitespikes before they became overwhelmingly numerous and unstoppable.\u00a0 Also, grown-up Muri tells Dan about what he was like after he came back from the future but then Dan followed a completely different course of action when he returned.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Alright the plot is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.\u00a0 But is the movie any good?\u00a0 Well, yeah.\u00a0 Chris Pratt portrays a likeable character and so does Yvonne Strahovski.\u00a0 There is a good family chemistry there and the action sequences although quite a mess aren\u2019t boring.\u00a0 And it isn\u2019t woke.\u00a0 Chris Pratt is allowed to be a white man and the hero of the movie.\u00a0 That\u2019s something to be amazed at in a movie made in 2021.\u00a0 It\u2019s a silly sci-fi action movie.\u00a0 But I kind of liked it.\u00a0 You have to decide if it\u2019s something you want to waste a couple of hours on.<\/p>\n