- They say there are only 500k humans left alive. Why not just send them all through the time gate back to the past?
These aliens are nothing special. They’re tough, sure, but it’s not like they needed crazy laz0rs to defeat them. 50 cals tear them apart. Bombs tear them apart. Spend the next 30 years stockpiling weapons and have 10 million people in the area they first emerge waiting for them.
This is totally discounting the fact that nobody in the future thought of the fact that maybe the aliens were already there.
Absolutely. I wish the script had been better. Gilpin is criminally underused but 100% game for her scenes. But Pratt and everyone else is game as well.
Yeah, the cast was not the problem. Lazy writing was. The issues you all pointed out above are all due to lazy writing. They could have been easily cleaned up with a bit of effort. I mean for crying out loud… They knew that the aliens came up out of the ice and yet no one considered the possibility that they had been trapped in the ice for a while? And the most egregious one is the whole toxin plot line. It was handled so poorly. Add in that they had 30 years to prepare for the invasion and knew where it began and it made far more sense to gear up and eliminate the beasts that were easily killed with conventional weapons before they had a chance to propagate and over run the world, than try to “save the future” through time warping old people forward.
I guess we shall agree to disagree on this. I am very accepting of genre movies and give them much more leeway than most people here. I don’t think the complains are people being picky. I think they are completely earned based on lazy writing. I think that is the reason why this movie was passed straight to streaming instead of being a theatrical release as originally planned. They knew it was rather flawed.
Not to give this dumb movie any more credit that it’s really due, but I’m pretty sure the idea was to bring the toxin back to the past, mass produce it, and then bring that production back to the future to eradicate them there, thus preventing any sort of paradox (though they didn’t say that as a reason).
I felt sure they were going to at least partially redeem it by having the female come back with them somehow and escape in the past (thus starting the whole problem, since they don’t know where they came from in the first place)- a small paradox, but better than what we got. When that didn’t happen and they went to dig them up, I figured one would get away then. Either could set up for Pratt blaming himself, leaving his family, etc. But no. We get a really stupid happy ending, completely changing the future, etc.
Yes but the thingy goes offline stopping that. However, there are two potential flaws there.
Spoiler
If you send the toxin back to the past to make it (this is probably a fallback from making it in the future, sure), you’re basically already changing the timeline. I mean I just don’t buy that it gets sent back and then everyone in the present is like “wooh, crisis averted, let’s destroy all knowledge of the only thing that saves us from alien invasion in the future, an event we can’t guarantee will play out the same way”. Yeah yeah, you get into all sorts of causality insanity when you start going down this road. But just knowledge of the future can change decision making. No way someone doesn’t hold onto the toxin, just in case. It’s not like we can know what would happen if a time travel paradox actually occurred.
Secondly, there are people going and fighting and being returned and dealing with PTSD. I can’t remember what was said specifically, but the veterans didn’t seem to remember much but were clearly suffering. This is probably something that changes the timeline as well, or somehow plays into the future playing out the way it does. Or waves hands timey wimey shit.
But once things are looking grim - as they are a year into the war, but certainly before then - you’d want to duplicate efforts in the past because it was increasingly likely we were going to lose.
It’s a flaw in the script that we get speculation from two randos - one super smart - that a paradox is why they’re doing what they are doing in the future but nobody bothers to explain that. Of course, they don’t even bother to explain how to combat an alien in a life fire situation until well into the movie either. I mean the one dude who had done three tours doesn’t even do it. WTF.
This was such a stupid movie. I’m generally not very demanding but this had me shouting several times “that’s just stupid”.
The toxin thing was a total McGuffin. The part where they just left the female in the lab because they couldn’t waste the toxin - I was like screaming “then just shoot her in the head, she’s just hanging there immobilised”.
I wonder if stupid movies like this had better scripts before they got filmed because it feels like a team of elementary school kids wrote this one. Is the bar for sci-fi writing this low?
For instance, that first scene. Are they having a Christmas party, a family watch of the ol’ World Cup, or a job interview? Well, why not mush them all together and maximize the character development?
There’s a nod to verisimilitude here, believe it or not. The 2022 World Cup will in fact be held November - December because it’s in Qatar, and you can’t host a world cup in Qatar in the “usual” summer months. There’s a throwaway line in there somewhere later in the movie that confirms the present is 2022.
FIFA is actually worse than this movie, which is why they’re hosting a world cup in Qatar.
To add: the attempt to throw the job interview into this is so weird because the movie only really halfheartedly tries to set up the “Pratt leaves the family, this causes lots of pain” thing.
Heh, this movie made it to get exponentially more stupid as it went along.
Before I looked into the production history of the movie, I already had figured that The Tomorrow War was originally meant to come out in movie theaters, but then got shelved due to the pandemic and eventually picked up by Amazon. Not exactly a sign of confidence by Paramount. (To be fair: The Mitchells vs. The Machines had the same fate, but actually happens to be a great movie.)
On the plus side: production values were better than movies directly produced by Netflix or Amazon.
Other than that: so many questions.
Once the future peeps arrives, all focus seems to be on just drafting people (many of which don’t really seem fit for combat), but not on doing anything to prepare for the arrival of the aliens in their timeline. Like, when the kids in Dan’s class complain about how everything is pointless, it’s not like anyone says “Well, knowing what we know now, we’re doing our best to…”
Yeah, the future peeps don’t want to show anyone what the Whitespikes look like in order to not terrify apparently also includes giving people exactly zero intel on how to fight them. Gotta love the note on the aliens’ vulnurable bits being casually dropped after their first encounter. You’d think the soldiers who are on their third tour would appreciate fighting along people who are somewhat prepared for the occasion. I’m willing to ignore a solid amount of bad writing, but this is ridiculous.
Love the fact that they carried enough explosives to just nuke the alien ship, but decide to go in to go stabby-stabby with toxin up close. Because of course.
Overall, I found the movie forgettable because it didn’t really take advantage of the premise, and most of the plot was rather predictable. It wasn’t terribly bad all the way, because I find terribly bad all the way more engaging than this. Here I just got bored at some point. After the first two action setpieces I checked the timeline and saw that the movie hadn’t even reached halftime yet, and at that point I started ton use the 10s skip function regularly.
