M.I.A. Tomorrow Man

It's the anti-Warlock!  Rather than a powerful being from the past visiting present day Los Angeles to destroy humanity, Julian Sands is a powerful being from the future visiting present day Los Angeles to save humanity.  He teams up with a local scientist, played by none other than Giancarlo Esposito, to stop a deadly rocket launch.  That's the story from the nearly forgotten TV movie Tomorrow Man, written by the creator of Sledgehammer! and directed by Chris D'Elia's dad.  ...And we don't need to hold him accountable for his son's behavior after he became an adult, right?  Yeah, let's just try to forget about that dude and keep it moving.

Not to be confused with Corbin Bernsen's 2003 The Tomorrow Man, or Johnathan Lithgow's 2019 The Tomorrow Man, this 1995 Tomorrow Man has a weird tone.  It's got terrible CGI graphics straight out of a 3DO CD-Rom, and generally plays the story straight - a sci-fi thriller about a man on the run from menacing government agent Craig Wasson (Body Double, A Nightmare On Elm St 3) with dramatic score and photography - except characters will occasionally drop wacky, sitcom-style one liners.  Someone falls screaming to their death from a helicopter, then the next lines of dialogue are "you're not gonna leave me like this?" "Well, what'd ya expect, dinner and a movie?"  The plot consists of some seriously cliche material you've seen hundreds of times before (think The Hidden meets Amanda and the Alien), but I gotta say: I had a good time.  I'd buy a special edition of this.

I guess this was a pilot that never got picked up for series, which is maybe a shame or maybe just as well.  I enjoyed this as a one-off, but I don't think we'd need to see weekly episodes of this pair snarking around various small towns and government agencies.  This works as an endearing, low budget film, not a series.  Sands manages to pull a lot of humor and charm out of a pretty thin character, but it already starts to drag in the second half.  It never got to the point where I was bored, but I can only imagine how twenty-one more variations of the same story would be serious overkill.

But being a pilot, unfortunately, means this has never been released on DVD and is generally fairly M.I.A.  Fox did release it on VHS in other parts of the world, however (sometimes under the alternate title Future), and it's easily found online.  It's framed at 4:3, which is surely its OAR TV ratio, but was probably shot on film.  If so, it would surely benefit greatly from an HD restoration.  And even if it was shot on video, it could certainly still look a lot better than it currently does on Youtube[bottom shot above].  That plus a commentary from D'Elia or Alan Spencer would make for a nice little treat from a label like MVD, Kino or even Vinegar Syndrome.  Let's make it happen!