Age of Tomorrow

Creativity is subjective.

You can ask any creative type what their sources of inspiration are and they'll have a short list to present to you, but as interview questions go this is always going to seem kinda dumb to the creative themself. From their perspective their work is entirely composed of the things that inspire them, with what they're probably hoping is an interesting take courtesy their own creativity. It's a subjective art, compiling the things that inspire us into something hopefully new, but I think that inside every creative is going to feel like if you actually consumed our work with any level of real attention, you'd already know what our inspiration was. Like how personally, if you wanted to interview me about my comic, I'd expect you to ask why I was inspired by Firefly, Schlock Mercenary, and Calvin and Hobbes, because to my eye A Starfarer's Guide to Freelancing is pretty obviously inspired by all of those.

Perhaps we all want confirmation that we've evolved our inspiration in meaningful ways, but we're all aware that our creative works are a subjective combination of what inspired us to start creating in the first place. Acknowledging that just helps us feel like you have, in fact, consumed what we made.

So perhaps it would be complementary to observe that Age of Tomorrow is clearly paying homage to Armageddon, Independence Day, Predator, and The Avengers. But that's not what it feels like it's doing. No, what it feels like it's doing is ripping off Armageddon, Independence Day, Predator, and The Avengers (and let's add The Edge of Tomorrow, with the understanding that this film was written before anything other than the name Edge of Tomorrow had been revealed). Ostensibly this is done in the name of parody, creating a fake blockbuster to mock the tropes of all of the above-named films.

Which is a thing that can be done well. Scary Movie did a pretty good job of parodying an entire genre. Space Balls does a great job of parodying a specific franchise. Parody can be a straight up comic interpretation of source material, such as Airplane's treatment of the disaster movie genre, or more serious, where a good portion of the humor depends on your familiarity with the source material, such as Galaxy Quest's treatment of Star Trek.

Trouble with calling this a parody, though, is that Age of Tomorrow is a terrible film written by metaphorical monkeys (though that may be selling the actual monkeys short). It doesn't feel self-aware or intelligent enough to be an actual parody, and instead comes off as a bad fan-film created by artless buffoons who obviously didn't understand why any of the films they were trying to rip off were entertaining.

Parody, by its very nature, is inherently comedic. Good or bad natured ribbing toward an existing product that uses the tropes of that product to inspire laughs. Anyone defending Age of Tomorrow's terribleness with "but it's a parody" reveals themselves as fundamentally incapable of offering valid critique on entertainment. I'd go ahead and include the producers, writers, and director of Age of Tomorrow in that list. These people fundamentally misunderstand parody, blockbusters, and the very nature of entertainment itself.

A parody must comment on its source material. It must have something to say. If you're just doing the exact thing your source material does but worse, that's not parody, that bad imitation. If you want to parody the Fast and Furious movies, you can't just film a generic bald dude grumbling about family while he blows NOS through the engine of an 80's Mustang (because you couldn't afford a good muscle car) and shifts ever upward on his million-gear transmission. While that would pretty obviously be a rip-off of Fast and Furious, it wouldn't be anything else besides that. Just a bad rip-off.

So how would you make it a parody? If you want to comment on how absurd it is that these movies are still pretending to be about family, you can have the bald guy say the word "family" at the end of literally every sentence. Have him talk about how a random stranger is family. How his car is family. Have him scream in agony at losing a family member when his black t-shirt gets ripped off. Or say you want to comment on how absurd it is that main characters in that franchise are functionally immortal? Have the bald guy wreck the mustang, flip it onto its roof, and then open the door and step out unscathed. Then have the car explode behind him, wrapping him in billowing flames, which he emerges from in slow motion. Then have a totally unrelated truck slam into him from off screen, and after flying through the air he bounces off several trees and smashes into the windshield of another car. And then he stands up and grumbles something about how that windshield was family. That over-the-top commentary on these tropes is how you make a parody.

You also need to make your parody entertaining. You can't just stick any random bald dude into this car for your F&F parody, you're going to need to find somebody with reasonably large shoulders, a thick neck, who can convincingly do a low, inaudible growl for hours on end, and WHO CAN ACT. The audience will probably be willing to forgive some shortcuts in quality given the nature of your film as a parody. You don't need to literally hire Vin Diesel. But if the person on screen is literally painful to watch, they will not be forgiving. While you're at it, remember to shoot your action coherently. Remember, it doesn't have to look good, it just has to look deliberate. If everything in your movie looks like a mistake, well, you've parodied wrong haven't you?

Age of Tomorrow, unfortunately, didn't get any of these things right. It comes off as a bad rip-off of a half-dozen better movies, and it is not, of itself, actually amusing. What could they have done to make this an effective parody? I can think of a few things. First off, hire actors that can act. There were a few in here that were just awful to watch, and it genuinely made me sad for the people that had to work with them who could actually, you know... act.

Second, it wouldn't be a bad idea to embrace the lack of budget. Like clearly you only had enough money for the one hallway and two rooms on the alien planet. That's absolutely fine. But instead of just recycling them over and over again and pretending we're going to buy it, have one of the characters comment on how repetitive the building is. Have somebody insist they must be going in circles. Then literally have them walk past the same obvious landmark a few times. That's how you make fun of terrible repetitive sci-fi sets without making it look like you just have terrible repetitive sci-fi sets.

And what if you want to parody an iconic moment from another film, like the speech from the end of Independence Day? Maybe don't just have somebody deliver a worse version of that speech to a room of about 30 bored extras. Maybe have the speech devolve into something about crepes toward the end. Maybe have the room of extras be weirdly diverse, throw an old lady in a bathrobe in there or something. Have the camera get progressively closer to the speaker until it inexplicably winds up inside their mouth and gets swallowed. Something like that.

There are literally hundreds of better ways to parody the films this film wants to pretend it's parodying, but I don't have the time to cover all of them. Suffice it to say Age of Tomorrow doesn't successfully parody anything except, perhaps, the design of the Blue Origin spacecraft. And considering when this was released, that was definitely unintentional. Claiming that this was a parody or a comedy strikes me as the same sort of revisionist idiocy that made the creator of Manos: The Hands of Fate claim he'd meant to make a comedy the entire time after his supposed dramatic horror film was literally groaned off the screen at the premier.

The closest Age of Tomorrow got to "funny" was when the end made it look like they wanted to make a sequel.