The Tomorrow War (2021)

[Mittengirl]

On 7/5/2021 at 5:28 PM, Lilac2000 said:

lso, was the sound not great for anyone else? Action scenes seemed super loud but dialogue scenes seemed very quiet.

I think I spent as much time trying to figure out how to turn on the closed captions as I spent watching the movie.  (I never did figure it out.)  It seems to middle-aged me that there are many shows/movies that have the same issue - loud music/sound effects, quiet dialogue.

 

 

[MaggieG]

The movie wasn't bad but there were a few things that bothered me. One, I thought the whole civilian draft thing was stupid. So you send civilians, most who have no weapons training into the future to kill aliens without telling them it's aliens.  Most will die. And not that many aliens will die so it seemed pointless. Why weren't they figuring out long term solutions instead of just sending people to the future with a gun hoping they would take it out an alien?

I also thought Dan promising to come back and save Muri was dumb. No Dan, if you take the toxin back to your present and use it to prevent all of this then you will be saving her because this future will never happen. He jumped after her into an abyss full of aliens (he didn't know he would get pulled into the time jump then) when he knew that future was basically lost. I guess I'll chalk it up to a father's love and he wasn't thinking clearly but come on. She died for you to go back with that toxin. Save her (and all of us) by doing that.

Edited July 19, 2021 by MaggieG

[DoctorAtomic]

I thought Dan knew he was going to jump and was trying to take her with him. Not smart either, but a little better than just taking a swan dive with the queen. 

I could have sworn he looked at his wrist while she was hanging there. 

[blackwing]

2 hours ago, MaggieG said:

The movie wasn't bad but there were a few things that bothered me. One, I thought the whole civilian draft thing was stupid. So you send civilians, most who have no weapons training into the future to kill aliens without telling them it's aliens.  Most will die. And not that many aliens will die so it seemed pointless. Why weren't they figuring out long term solutions instead of just sending people to the future with a gun hoping they would take it out an alien?

I also thought Dan promising to come back and save Muri was dumb. No Dan, if you take the toxin back to your present and use it to prevent all of this then you will be saving her because this future will never happen. He jumped after her into an abyss full of aliens (he didn't know he would get pulled into the time jump then) when he knew that future was basically lost. I guess I'll chalk it up to a father's love and he wasn't thinking clearly but come on. She died for you to go back with that toxin. Save her (and all of us) by doing that.

 

20 minutes ago, DoctorAtomic said:

I thought Dan knew he was going to jump and was trying to take her with him. Not smart either, but a little better than just taking a swan dive with the queen. 

I could have sworn he looked at his wrist while she was hanging there. 

I thought they were forced to resort to a civilian draft because they basically were running out of people to fight.  They had to take people of a certain age (looks like 40+) who were dead in the future to avoid any possibility of meeting themselves.  They were trying to train people to fight but at some point it was more about just having huge numbers of soldiers in the hopes that at least a few would make it to the lab to get the vials they needed.

I too thought that he leaped off to try and take Muri with him... but that seems like a very poor plan, even if he were able to reach her, he could be bringing back one of the aliens as well.  In the end I do think it was a bit instinctual, he wanted to save his daughter at all cost, he didn't care how ridiculously hopeless it was.

[DoctorAtomic]

1 hour ago, blackwing said:

I too thought that he leaped off to try and take Muri with him... but that seems like a very poor plan, even if he were able to reach her, he could be bringing back one of the aliens as well.  In the end I do think it was a bit instinctual, he wanted to save his daughter at all cost, he didn't care how ridiculously hopeless it was.

Oh, I'm not giving him any credit for long term strategy. I do think 'he didn't know he'd jump then' is not correct because they showed him checking the arm band frequently over the movie, and it was zoomed enough for the viewer to see how much time was left. They said, before the initial jump, that if the person was alive when time was up, that they'd automatically jump. 

I don't necessarily think it would have been 'bad' to yank her back to 2021. She invented the toxin and basically ran the war. They could have kept her locked up in the Pentagon while they figured out how to find the ship, etc. The President who dissed Dan et al., from going to Russia might have been more amenable to throw resources behind the mission with her there. 

[Zonk]

This was kinda fun to watch, but stuuuupid on so many levels.

- those guns were super uneffective. Maybe at least give them some explosive ammo.

- why not send mainly drones? You could mass produce them here and they could make nearly unbreachable perimiters in the future.

- you lose 70% of soldiers in a 7 day rythm and spend one million dollars on each of their families. Yeah, any country would be bankrupt in weeks.

- did they really only think of taking some blood from a female at the end of the war?

- they developed a toxin that needs to be injected? What the hell is that supposed to be good for? You can just as well stick a granade in their maws. A toxin that doesn't effect creatures from earth and can be sprayed from a plane, now that would have been something.

- for that matter, why didn't they stick a granade in the female on the oil rig? Might have scattered the males. Made no sense.

- Maybe you shouldn't do your experiments on a female where your time bridge is, if you know that the males will come looking for her...

- why did that toxin have to be developed in the future? Send samples back to the past.

- does the future change or not? It wasn't clear. If it does, wouldn't it have been better to develop new technologies and try to find the source of the white spiked before they become a problem? Wouldn't that have been a good idea reagardless, because otherwise humanity in this timeline is fucked in 30 years?

- why would there be that tell-tale vulcanic ash on the claw?

- How did they ever find that spaceship? Nothing would have narrowed it down and russia is fucking big.

- why would all the whitespikes wake up when they were there and not before? Just because some others screamed a bit. The life support for them still seemed to work and so I'd have to assume the containment did, too? Could they just break out during flight and murder the alien pilot, whenever they please?

- why does it matter if the toxin kills females? If the toxin isn't crap and can be sprayed, it doesn't really matter. Kill all the males, then drop a bomb in the nest. The females never leave those. Rince, repeat until you have all of them. Those nests were pretty big. You should be able to find them easily with satelity imaging. If the toxin is crap and needs to be injected, why would you need it in the first place?

- I was dubious at the beginning that all the world governments would commit this many resources for some future people. I mean we can't even stop climate change for the future people and that would be a hell of a lot cheaper, without sending people into a war. But okay, that's the world they established. But then when they had the origin of the white spikes and a toxin from the future leader herself, they couldn't get any government resources to produce the toxin and go clear out that spaceship? Buh humbug! You can't have it both ways. You can't have the governments of the world do everything in their power to fight that war and then have them do nothing in the end.

- But lets take the last point as a given. Why was it so important to find the ship right now? They knew they had decades until the white spikes emerged. Take your time to produce a tanker full of toxin, wait till the riots have cleared up. Get some government assitance. Do it right. No, instead they are going in with a ragtag group of dummies and risk accellerating the timeline in a time where the world is busy with civil unrest. Real smart, these guys.

 

There is probably even stuff I missed. It was jsut sooooo much dumb.

 

On 7/15/2021 at 8:39 PM, DoctorAtomic said:

I would figure that if they're going with a sequel, they're going to mess around with time travel questions. It doesn't look like they're going with a closed time loop a la Terminator, so there's still a future where the whitespikes have overrun the planet. The queen may or may not have died when Dan jumped too. Similarly Muri. We only saw them plunge into the water. If the queen isn't dead in the future though, that's going to be a tough road for them.

There isn't just one queen. Females are a lot more rare, but there are still a bunch. Of course with that in mind it makes no sense that thousands of whitespikes swam an ocean to rescue this one female, but whatever.

On 7/19/2021 at 7:15 PM, DoctorAtomic said:

I don't necessarily think it would have been 'bad' to yank her back to 2021. She invented the toxin and basically ran the war. They could have kept her locked up in the Pentagon while they figured out how to find the ship, etc.

She was alive in 2021 though. They established that you couldn't be alive twice at the same time. They never quite explained what would happen, but presumably it would be bad.

Edited February 13, 2022 by Zonk