Headscratchers / The Tomorrow War

• The only way we see the Whitespike-killing poison being used is by injection at melee range. If you get that close to a Whitespike, why not just use a high caliber gun? Heck at the end most of Whitespikes get killed by good-ol' fashioned explosives, because it turns out giving injections to aggressive biomurdermachines who want to rip your face off is a bit of a hurdle. Actually, if they had just dumped explosives into the ships, ran out and detonated them none of them would have died.
  • Before Dan Forester goes to the future, the world isn't entirely convinced that everyone is doomed. When he comes back to 2022, the time link has just broken and now everybody, including the governments, are convinced nothing can be done. Future!Muri probably intends them to find the point of origin and kill them there before they're a threat. So a) her plan is to have factories and past scientists figure out a better way with the presumed 28 years they have and b) even if that wasn't her intention, an official strike force could have eliminated all the whitespikes at once without waking them up, thus there being functionally no threat. But the point really is that they could have aerosolized it or something.

• Similarly, why does everyone act like losing the link to the future means they've lost the war? Of course it's upsetting, since now the soldiers from the future are stranded away from their home and any surviving loved ones, but they all seem to think it means they're just flat-out boned—when, as mentioned above, they have both the toxin and plenty of time to figure out how to make more. Heck, they have the chance to do exactly what they end up doing, which is end the war before it even starts. Yet even our hero doesn't think of that and falls into despair before his wife nudges him with the idea the whitespikes might already be here (which it also makes no sense for no one else to have thought of).
  • From the news reports it seems like even before the link was severed the world's governments were on the brink of collapse. The kids in the classroom comment how nothing matters because everyone knows humanity is doomed. At the end when they talk to the Secretary of Defense he makes a side comment that the USA might not even exist by the end of the year.

• Why would anyone, from any timeline, think that you can avoid temporal paradoxes if you have no chance of meeting yourself because you don't exist 30 years ago / from now? It's implied that this is why the draftees must have died before the war and why the future soldiers are all young, but paradoxes are absolutely inevitable despite this policy, and indeed the end of the movie constitutes its own grandfather paradox - with the Whitespikes wiped out, there never will be a future war, ergo there will never be a need to travel back and recruit soldiers to fight it, ergo past humanity will never hear about the threat from the future, ergo they will never wipe out the Whitespikes, ergo there will be a future war, and around and around we go. They don't even hazard at a Basil Exposition^note "I suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself!"or a Sarah Connor^note "God, a person could go crazy thinking about this." line to tell the audience not to worry too much about it...
  • The film seems to use "alternate realities" timelines. So Future!Muri's timeline is doomed but hopefully they can create a new one. It is unclear if the "avoiding paradoxes" was something they were actually concerned about due to it being untested technology or if it was just another lie or political compromise. We aren't shown other nations recruitment efforts so maybe that was just something US politicians decided completely independent of actual science.
• Why would people show up to fight in a war wearing business attire and chef outfits? They had 24 hours to tend to their affairs before showing up.
  • The unfortunate actual answer to this question is because this is a horribly-written movie. Why would they only send the soldiers forward with small arms? Why would they fail to give them even the most rudimentary levels of training? Why would they refuse to provide any tactile information at all? When a war has reached the point of sending barely-armed civilians in the general direction of the enemy, it was already lost a very long time ago.
  • Questionable writing decisions aside I think it was hanging a comedic lampshade on the fact that these are horribly unprepared civilians. The reason only sending them with small arms is because it is implied that all the major military equipment was already sent forward and this is the easiest way to send meat into the grinder. We don't know how early operations went but at this point it is clear the Future is just sending cannon fodder as either a meat shield or a distraction to buy time to develop the toxin.
• It's stated that the family of every conscript who dies gets $1 million, and conscripts who lose limbs are seen with very advanced robotic prostheses and in support groups. So with a survival rate of 20%, the government is paying at least $800,000 for each conscript it sends back to fight for one week, if that. With all that money it's shelling out to the survivors, why is it skimping so ridiculously on basic military equipment on the conscripts while they're still alive?
  • Similar in concept to the way the Weimer Republic tried to pay off WWI by printing more money. What's a bigger headscratcher is why after a few days of this we aren't seeing massive, rampant hyper-inflation and thousands of millions of dollars suddenly enter the economy?
  • This is especially egregious when it's revealed that bullets do almost nothing to the creatures, something that the recruiters from the future should obviously already know. While they can be killed with guns it seems to require tons of precision shots by trained marksman, so the rest of the random civilians they send to ding the outer hide of the monsters are failing to help in any way. This isn't just trying a zerg rush of weak combatants, this is trying a zerg of people that might as well be completely unarmed. Explosives on the other hand do seem to work, so why aren't they being sent with some sort of rocket-propelled grenade weapon instead? I get that the idea of civilians actually using such a weapon effectively is far-fetched, but not any more than the rest of the movie and at least it would a coherent plan on the part of the future military since they'd actually be able to... y'know, kill some of the creatures they were sent to fight.
  • Seems to be a case of "no medium weapons in Hollywoodland". As in there is no weapon in between an M16 and a tactical nuke(which is especially egregious when you see vehicle-mounted 50-cals, why aren't they taking THOSE with them?!)
    • There might not be any equipment left. The time skip mentions that most of the world's military was already sent forward and wiped out and now many nations in the present are on the verge of collapse due the draft/nihilism about the future/war protests etc.
    • The mistake was already made before the time-skip. The past has a functional economy and massive industry. Building huge numbers of medium arms to send to the future would not have been a problem at the start of the film. Its only gotten so bad after the time-skip because the campaign was horrifyingly miss-managed from day 1.
• The recruits about to go through the wormhole are told they will drop five to ten feet on arrival. Even if you were dropping onto completely level ground, a five foot drop still puts you at significant risk of injury, while a drop of ten feet pretty much guarantees that you will be injured in some way. (Is it any wonder that 70-80% of draftees don't make it, when they're starting out like that?) Equipping the soldiers with parachutes (and training them to use them), then dropping them from much higher up would be a far safer approach, particularly given that the only mass jump we see goes badly wrong anyway.
  • Parachutes are still dangerous and hard to train for. Maybe a pod filled with air bags would be more viable. Also using parachutes would have made the battle royale comparison a bit too apt (where we droppin' boys?).
• Also, in terms of two-dimensional thinking; the Whitespikes can run and swim, but they can't fly, only glide. Their spike-throwing ability has to have an upper limit on effective range, as well, particularly if they're shooting up, working against gravity. And we know that future humanity still has helicopters and aircraft, because we see them used. The obvious tactical approach would be to use aircraft to provide saturation bombing of an area, then fly helicopter gunship missions to further reduce the numbers, and only then send in troops on the ground if necessary. Instead, we only see aircraft conducting a bombing run against an area where their own troops are mixed in with the enemy, and helicopter gunships flying low enough to be attacked.
  • It is implied that the mission we see is not standard. They were sent forward without any training and dropped in a very dangerous location because future humans had no more troops in the area and needed that research. It is very subtly implied that there are multiple different organizations at work because Future!Muri clearly thinks the research on the toxin is humanity's best chance but when the whole area is going to be carpet bombed she says she cannot stop the bombs from dropping. In the ending we see them use aerial drones all over but due to sheer numbers/durability/speed it doesn't make much difference.
  • Even better plan: use the time machine to drop bombs. There doesn't seem to be any restrictions on sending non-organics back and its established most of the world had already fallen to the Whitespikes. Explosives are easy and cheap to manufacture, and a single 200lb bomb would seem to do more good than a barely-armed 200lb soldier.
  • The jump link is barely-tested technology held together with bailing wire and duct tape, so the operators are probably hesitant to send anything volatile that might damage their facility if something went wrong. Also, people are more versatile - there are tasks people can accomplish that bombs cannot - such as performing search-and-rescue, driving vehicles, or even tending to wounded.
• Everyone in both time periods seems committed to the idea of not giving the conscripts any training. The future people won't tell anyone what they'll be fighting even after being drafted, and the present government makes no attempt to train the population before conscription. You'd think that the government would just start giving everyone some basic training, or that people would go out and seek it themselves knowing that they might be conscripted at any moment and receive only a week's crash course before getting thrown into combat.
  • For that matter, assuming that they really could not spare the time for basic training, why do they not also send private military contractors (i.e. mercenaries) or civilian militia volunteers to the future frontlines? While inferior in quality compared with government military forces, they are still better than civilian conscripts with zero military experience or training.
    • During the "1 year later" time skip a news report talks about how the majority of the present's military force has already been sent forward and gotten wiped out which is why the draft was implemented.
  • And given that they apparently received zero training, how is it that they all appear to know how to communicate by radio? The completely untrained draftees never babble, never leave their channel open, understand terms like "Romeo Actual" without questioning, and tend to send short, to-the-point messages even if the sender is allegedly terrified and badly out of their depth.
    • The radio equipment could be configured to be easy to use, or easy to train for. Also, in R-Force's case, Dan Forester, an experienced veteran, is the first to answer the radio, so its not too farfetched that the others would realize it is better to shut up and let him talk than to speak up unnecessarily. It's possible that the draft tries to add someone with some military background in with civilian draftees to improve their odds of survival, but we just don't hear about it.
• Why are they even sending people to fight in the future timeline? The way time-travel seems to work here is by maintaining two separate timelines, whatever happens in their past (our present timeline in the movie) doesn't actually seem to change their present (the future timeline). For example, they didn't suddenly gain memories of people being recruited into the future war 30 years ago once they started this plan and at the end the plan seems to be to just die off anyway so that other versions of themselves can maybe live in another timeline. So... why bring in people from the non-doomed timeline to die here? I get that those people are going to die within 30 years anyway but that's a really long period of time and most of those deaths are probably going to be preferable to being mutilated and eaten by monsters. It comes across as just ruining a bunch of alternate reality lives for essentially no reason at all.
  • Its never implied that these are 2 separate timelines. Presumably as time passes in the current timeline it will eventually become the same future. The whole point of time travel is to change the past.
    • Logically they must be. Unless those in the future have memories/history of people turning up from the future (which opens up a whole new can of worms) then the act of coning back alone in such a public way means they have changed the timeline and it can't ever become the future they came from and aren't so much time traveling as timeline hopping. This means that whatever happens in the past has no affect on the future. While they are perhaps wise to make sure no one meets themselves I personally don't think they thought of that, just thinking of the possible changes to history — which are already proven to be irrelevant. They aren't even trying to change the past as they should realise they could do, they are trying to preserve their already doomed future with backwards logic.
• Taking it further, why not just jump ship altogether? Some people wouldn't be able to go back due to creating paradoxes (or at least that is implied), but everyone under 30 can just leave the doomed future and become a refugee in the safe timeline. The looming threat of the coming attack would still be there but they'd have more time to prepare for it, could hypothetically bring the plans for the time-travel device with them (potentially even creating infinite retries if so desired) and don't have to kill of boatloads of the population in two different timelines fighting a war they're actively planning to lose. Taken to the extreme, the world could even just... stop having kids, settle down to coast for 30 years of relative utopia and ride out the end. The point is there are a lot of different ways to play this and the future army seems to have chosen one of the worst, if not the worst, strategies for everyone involved in both worlds.
• Why do the future people never take full advantage of their link to the past? All that they ever seem to request are more bodies to throw into the Whitespike meat grinder. They have a toxin that is effective against male Whitespikes, but it's mentioned that they lack the means to mass-produce it. However, the past has a huge amount of functioning infrastructure that would probably allow them to mass-produce the toxin easily. Even if the past doesn't have the necessary technology, they could send back a machine that is necessary to synthesize the toxin, and a team of scientists and engineers could reverse-engineer the tech necessary. Judging by the highly advanced robotic prosthetics that we see returned conscripts rocking in the past, the future is willing to send back advanced technology. The past could start pumping out swimming pools full of the stuff and load it into explosive bullets that would detonate and aerosolize the toxin on impact. Furthermore, they also don't seem willing to send back any Whitespike material to the past to help the past figure out where the Whitespikes will land. The only Whitespike material we ever see in the past is a claw that a conscript brought back with them, and even that was enough to figure out exactly where the Whitespikes came from.
  • It's implied that the first vials that Dan Forester recovers from the lab are the male toxin. He presumably was unconscious for a day or so while they tested the samples he retrieved. Therefore the first usage is when they tried to kill the nest but realized the female is still alive. The mission then became to capture the female to fix the toxin first prior to it being sent to the past for manufacturing. Remember they assumed they'd have at least a short time to safely return the sample before being overrun.
• So the alien ship stores its bioweapons in cocoons that they can easily break out of? What's the logic here? Also, they probably could have overrun the Earth easily if they'd escaped as soon as they crashed, but they waited hundreds of years instead. What was their impetus to escape? Boredom?
  • Because if they escaped as soon as they landed, the whole movie wouldn't be a ham-fisted commentary on global warming, of course! Seriously, that was the reason given: global warming caused the frozen ship to melt freeing the alien terror. Really, the time travelers should have been telling everyone to buy a Prius.
  • Why are we assuming the Whitespikes are bio-weapons at all? This is only speculation on the part of humans. The aliens could easily have some mechanism we don't know of to control them. The Whitespikes could literally have been Alien Cows, being taken to Space McDonald's when they crashed.
  • The cocoons survive a space crash that killed all of the crew and were able to maintain stasis for over 1000 years (although it is unclear whether this was because of the glacier or alien tech or both).
  • Perhaps the Whitespikes in their cocoons can sense the conditions of the environment outside, such as the air temperature, and stay dormant in such conditions unless their lives are actively threatened. The ship could have kept them at a low temperature until it crashed and the power went out, after which the outside conditions made it inhospitable instead. That would explain why they emerged when the ice melted in 2048, but also when they were being killed by the toxins.
• Why does no one in the past know what the whitespikes look like? True, the future people don't want to tell the recruits because they don't want to scare them, but first: the recruits have already shown up after being drafted of their own volition, and second: 30% of the draftees return, and they have memories and verbal descriptions which made their way to the internet.
  • There seems to be an effort made to suppress information leaks about the war for reasons of morale. The ones who return could describe the creatures, but it wouldn't have the same impact as images or footage. Many draftees also probably sign NDAs as a condition of their service.
• Um... crashed interstellar spacecraft filled with technology humans don't have? Yeah, let's just act instinctually, wake the whitesnakes up and then blow the ship up.
  • To be fair the plan was to kill the whitespikes quietly in their sleep with the toxin. The team didn't know the hive mind would let the others awaken and that there were far more whitespikes in stasis than they were expecting so it went to Plan B.
• We're drafting people from the present to fight a war in the future. It's okay though, because they all would have died anyway before this war, so no time-travel paradoxes can come up because of it! Um, no... this is impossible! Number one, every time someone dies in the future instead of in their normal timeline, everything they did from 2022 until their previously scheduled death is erased! Have these future people never heard of the butterfly effect? Any change, no matter how insignificant, might go on to have enormous impact? They are altering their own past! Now, it may be that they don't care, because at this point anything is better than what they've got, but there's no possible way they could trace all the links between every single person in the past to determine who can be "spared", whose death won't make a difference. Moreover, those who come back from the future will further alter the timeline just by the nature of their own experiences that they would not have gone through before! Basically the future, everyone in it, and all their history should be changing every time a new person comes through or goes back.
  • Add in one more wrinkle: by the time our hero is sent to the future, something like 99.9% of the population has already been killed. At that point shouldn't basically anyone be eligible for the draft?
    • The movie never shows us any paradoxes occurring so it is entirely possible the fear of "time paradoxes" was either a lie made up to help justify why some people were drafted and others weren't, or a cautionary measure taken because they were dealing with untested time travel technology. This might have been a compromise made between the scientists who understood this was dangerously untested technology and the military that needed bodies for the meat grinder. There is the line "if it wasn't for an extinction level event we would still be using lab rats".
    • "...something like 99.9% of the population has already been killed. At that point shouldn't basically anyone be eligible for the draft?" No, the draft is for people who die before the war begins. Drafting anyone who died during the war would mean that they weren’t present during the war, which might alter the future for the worse.
• So the Whitespikes have very few females but legions of males, and also happen to be Explosive Breeders? A shortage of breeding females would greatly limit the fecundity of the species, and a Reign of Fire style scenario of few males and many females seems to make more sense on how the populations can increase exponentially in a matter of days.
  • It could be possible that the females just lay a lot of eggs in a very short space of time, while the "Males" are more like infertile drones. A more appropriate comparison would be Fire Ants in the real world. Queens lay hundreds to thousands of eggs per day, and given that a single nuptial flight can release hundreds of new queens into the air, they are basically the real world version of the White Spikes... albeit a few thousand times smaller.
• Why is the return point for the Jump Link in 2023 just a large outdoor block with a concrete floor? Why not something a bit softer, like floor padding or a trampoline? They are expecting these people to return from the future and fall a distance of between 5-10 feet, and not all of them are going to be upright (especially the ones who don't return with both of their legs) and the paramedics arriving to check on them seem to indicate that they are expecting them to return at that location. Concrete is not soft, especially for people who are older or less physically fit, AKA the same people being sent into the future in the first place, so they are just asking for a bunch of unnecessary injuries and thus, staff and resources tied up in treating them.
• Why are the nurses who check draftee's eligiblity for the jump wearing scrubs with the camo pattern. Do any military nurses wear scrubs made of camo? Wouldn't they just wear scrubs or the uniform, not both?