Chris Pratt journeys to the future to take on aliens in a war to save humanity from extinction. Sound good? It isn’t.

The film starts with Pratt living a normal life with his wife and daughter when soldiers from the future arrive asking for help to stop a war with an alien race that is currently raging 30 years in the future. Pratt, an ex-soldier turned science teacher, is enlisted to fight in the future. Joining a ragtag bunch of civilian soldiers he travels to the future where things proceed to go very wrong.

After a less than successful rescue mission Pratt meets a hard ass military colonel who turns out to be his grown up daughter. After capturing one of the aliens the pair try to build a relationship in a series of awkward and overwrought dialogues. Then an attack on the human base leads to even more chaos and some emotional scenes that carry about as much weight as Pratt’s attempts at humour which fall flat on almost every occasion.

The film is full of over the top action and dramatic gunfights with aliens that far outmatch the humans that are for some reason still only equipped with assualt rifles. It is these inconsistencies that drag down the entire film. In the future they have mastered time travel yet still need to capture an alien with ropes? They use standard assault rifles and jeeps that look from our modern times with apparently no advancements at all in 30 years? These are just some of the more glaring  errors that fill the entire movie and ruin any kind of consistency with the setting.

The action set pieces are designed to carry the film and try to gloss over the mistakes. While the animation is good almost all of the action is jumpy and unoriginal, taking pieces from various other films without ever doing anything new. None of it feels worthwhile and there is just no really need to care for anyone at all. The main attempts at emotion with Pratt and his daughter are undermined by the fact he can just jump back to his past daughter who is safe and well.

In short, despite the cast and promise this film really fails in almost all departments. The characters are weak, the actors poor compared to what we know they can do and plot is riddled with more holes than any of the aliens ever are.