The Dumbest Way To Fight A War | The Tomorrow War 

It makes perfect sense. The people of 2050 realized they were in a movie and their only option was to scour every other dimension and timeline for people to throw into the meat grinder until someone with plot armor wins the war for them.

Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."

I knew you guys wouldn't let this slide. They wanted to pull the reverse terminator.

"You don't need Training" *The ONLY guy we know that came back was HIGHLY TRAINED* 🤣

You're missing the critical subtext. The human resistance was crippled by the fact that all their generals, tacticians, strategists, and generally competent military leaders had been killed, leaving them with only the tactical sophistication of a Hollywood screenwriter.

Quick question: if there are only half a million people left in the future, why not evacuate them to the present? You could then use their tech and knowledge of future events to solve concurrent problems and prepare for the invasion. Heck one could even make a series about the potential drama and resulting social and political rammifications. I hate it if bad stories may create interesting ones if you just turn their premise a bit

Can we all stop for a second and appreciate the guy who had 24 hours to prepare for a future war vs aliens and decided to rock a full on chef uniform?

The biggest flaw in this movie is assuming Universe A (2022) would willingly send ALL of their combat capable citizens to help Universe B. In reality they would have quickly realized that saving the future does absolutely nothing for them and promptly told their future visitors to pound sand. After that they would probably have just scoured Siberia until they found the ship and then nuke it to oblivion.

What I don't understand is how the future military was losing so badly. They figured out how to cram several hundred rounds of ammo into a 30 round magazine so it should have been a cake walk.

"We need help the planet is overrun" "Well I guess you can have these 4k odd nuclear warheads" "no we need random civilians" "what"

It’s like the Script was made by a kid who only knew Human wave tactics and basically was like, “Yup, this will surely save humanity from an alien race”

My biggest issue with this movie was the ending. Crisp Rat comes back from the future knowing exactly where the alien ship had landed. He tries to bring the info to the government but despite good reason to believe him and their previous willingness to throw thousands of lives at the future war, they suddenly have no interest in stopping the same thing from happening in their timeline. So then Chris Pratt goes to kill the mothership on his own instead and very nearly fails which would have started the invasion early in his timeline. It's hard to say who is more incompetent: The future military command, the present military command, or Chris Pratt's character who I refuse to Google the name of. The one good thing I can say about this movie though is that the creature design was top notch. that's probably the only reason I watched it to the end.

Kinda weird too how the world governments were so willing to listen to these people who claim to be from the future and spend money to send their people to die, but not willing to save their own time and prevent it from happening towards the end of the movie.

I get the feeling whoever is responsible for this movie wanted to do a "Edge of Tomorrow", but only saw the movie once during release, doesn't understand sci-fi or military, repeatedly ran into glass doors as a child and managed to get his/her hands on incriminating evidence to finance this mess.

As a vet I was super confused at the whole “you get 7 days of ‘training’ then we’re throwing you out there with no gear or support in whatever you came in wearing” thing. Almost as if they had no military observers on set to be like “no”.

the fact that not one person on the *entire planet* thought "hey? why don't we take a look at where they first appeared" is the among the most unbelievable things in this movie

If there are only 500,000 people left why wouldn’t they just evacuate to the past and bring their resources and knowledge back with them to prevent the war in the first place?

The thing that bothered me the most was that the draftees only went there for 7days. There is no incentive to achieve strategic objectives if you know you are only there 7days. It effectively becomes a defensive manoeuvre where every man and woman tries to stay alive for a week

They're scared of fire. So of course we'll use flamethrowers in literally one instance and never again!

Another thing that was a massive plot hole is that they should have moved the development of the bio weapon into the past, as it would not have been in constant risk of destruction

When i first saw the trailer all I could think was : "Why not just use time travel to prepare for the alien invasion by training an army of verteran soldiers for a decade or two, or why not look for a way to prevent the alien invasion in the first place, 30 years seems like a nice buffer to get plenty of stuff done. Oh we are just going to use our ancestors as cannon fodder so their are even less people to fight in the future... that is literally the worst use of time travel that I have ever heard"

Never try to out zerg the Zerg when you're playing Terrans.

I laughed at the line in the film... "If we showed you what they look like, it would be impossible to fill that hanger [with recruits]" They used a global draft, then tracked recruits along with the threat that their loved ones would go in their place if they failed to show. After all that and finally getting them to turn up at the base, still didn't want to show them what they were fighting.

My biggest issue with this movie is that they don't tell the troops what the hell they're fighting. Yes they say it's alien, but it is big, small. How do they fight, nothing is explained and you expect to win a war. They basically said you're so worthless you don't need to know how to fight or what your fighting.

Oh man, so the plot is even worse than i though. From the small clips in the trailer i saw, i thought they were prepping for the future war, but instead them are sending random people into the future? Wow.

you only need one tactic in warfare: "Get em ladz, WAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!"

The whole film was like an algorithm where the plot was mined using data. People like aliens in America? Yes. People like a patriotic navy seal? Yes. People like a family man? You bet. People like aliens which are bloodthirsty? We got this. People like time travel? Duh. This is Netflix’s bright all over again. The plot is just duct tape to stick all the tropes.

I really have to wonder… why not just evacuate the future? Especially if the worlds are basically separate. I love how the entire plot falls apart at the tiniest bit of pushback.

This is would be basically like playing plague inc and instead of warning the past of the disease, they brought people forward to try and cure it.

If it's two timelines, all they're doing is sacrificing a separate timeline's chance at survival to do nothing to save their own. If it's the same timeline, then all they're doing is wasting their only chance at surviving by making no attempt to actually change the past at all. As both a veteran and a writer, I want to have a word with whoever made the screenplay...

Those drones did a pretty decent job. why not start mass producing them instead ?

Lmao as soon as you explain the premise of the Tomorrow War, I immediately said "wtf why send people from past to die in the future? what?!"

With technology and knowledge from the future, they could just spend 30 years improving their defenses. And if it still fails, just use time travel to go back and keep improving. With time travel you literally have all the time in the world to prepare.

Like PUBG: no proper clothing, no training and shitty teammates!

“Hey, want to go fight in a war 30 years from now?!” “Depends, what are my chances of survival?” “None! We’re blindingly incompetent and we’re not going to train you!” “No thanks, maybe we deserve to die.”

Biggest plot hole in the movie: If you can go back and give yourself 30 years of extra prep time, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU TAKING SOLDIERS INTO THE DOOMED FUTURE WHERE THE WHITE SPIKES HAVE THE ADVANTAGE?!?

"Wonder why there only few people alive" *Spawn on the sky and 90% of them fall to death.*

It sounds like they're employing gamers, not actual soldiers.

Don't forget: the science lady is Yvonne Strahovski, Mass Effects Miranda Lawson. She is familiar with suicide missions.

A great idea would have been to say "NOPE" and the resistance taking all the data and people they had through the time hole and leaving a nuke to go off behind them to destroy any chance of the spikes accidentally making it through

Wait... They whitespikes arent just dumb, strong, fast monsters, right? The kind of monsters not smart enough to operate missile defence systems? And they first appeared in Russia, a country with enough nukes to vaporize all of siberia, and a history of scorched earth tactics???? This alternate reality must be related to the idiocracy one.

His wife being the only person out of the billions of people on earth to figure out that the aliens might have been here longer than they thought is hilarious and unbelievable 😂😂😂

When I first saw the trailer, I thought their plan was effectively to give people of the past knowledge of future events to change said future events, not send people like cannon fodder into a losing battle.

The idea is good, basically following better movies like Edge of Tomorrow, a time travel story where a military searches for victory across multiple timelines They took this idea to the absolute dumbest denominator, "Time travel...ooga booga...more troops...bang bang" The worst part isn't how stupid the final story was, it's that the outline was there to make a truly great movie, like giving a tricorder to a caveman

"Hey, let's send a bunch of ordinary people with no training and totally ineffectual weapons into battle with murderous aliens and we'll do it in drips and drabs." "Sounds like a plan. Should we tell them what the aliens look like so they know what to shoot at?" "Don't be ridiculous."

As a former MLRS driver, just one of us could destroy an entire grid square. I firmly endorse this idea of all of us going over there.

It's like the Tyranids vs the Imperial Guard, except the Imperial Guard is smarter than whatever those people have got going on.

The still using Humvees part actually makes a bit of sense when looking at the Russians in their invasion of Ukraine. They got their modern (ish) tanks and APCs chewed up pretty horribly and are now fielding tanks that were originally built over 50 years ago. If the resistance fighters in 2051 were in a similar predicament, they might well be fielding equipment that was new in 2001, and antique by 2022.

I love how the F-22s at 8:40 are just dropping hellfire missiles out like they are unguided bombs. There are so many ways to represent a realistic saturation bombardment on a city, and they clearly have the CGI budget. Why did they choose the wrong aircraft to incorrectly deploy the wrong kind of weapon in the least realistic manner?

They didn’t even let the conscripts know what the enemy was, what they look like, what to expect, I got better training in COD 2 throwing potato’s like they were grenades

Future people: We're from the future, there's only half a million of us left and we need your people to fight in a war that's already claimed the lives of approximately 8.5 billion humans Dumb people: Okay sounds good Smart people: Wait why don't we just bring you guys in as refugees?

The worst is how they find the ship and make the worst possible decisions to destroy it themselves where it can go so horribly wrong.

The only logical reason why universe A wanted to have the draft was to DELAY the whitespikes and keep them busy with eating people from the past, while they create a cure and save themselves, dooming a weakened Universe B to be eradicated. That sounds more horrible and frightening than the whitespikes …

My favorite part was how out of the entire population of the world the only person who knew what’s I assume is pretty basic volcano knowledge was a high school kid.

We have 20 years to prepare. Let's train for 7 days. That should be enough.

People are usually entirely unaware of the kind of distances involved in modern combat. When Jarhead ended without the protagonist firing a single shot in anger, people thought that was the case for him, not the majority of the solders, who simply went through the wreckage left after artillery, missile and aircraft sorties. Add to that that it doesn't really make for compelling fiction to have soldiers firing at some windows in the distance where they saw some movement for half an hour, before deciding whatever was there is probably dead or gone and moving on. What then some dude doing a 14 hour shift as a glorified Uber Eats driver, flying bombs in and then going to replenish. But yeah. Super dumb moves made in this movie. If nothing else, they could have just time traveled all of the survivors of the future back to Earth and then fortified it for the potential future. Why throw millions into the grinder to reclaim it for 500k people?

"We need help! Send us soldiers!" "You think we can open one of those wormholes above a Minuteman silo?"

That thing that really bugged me from the beginning of the film was that nobody seemed to ask the question of how do we prevent this from even happening? Like (before the final act reveal) "How do destroy the aliens the second they get off their ship?" so they don't result in a long duration war or un-winable odds? Like setup a nice warm landing pad with Tsar bombs?

I haven't watched this movie yet but the worldbuilding seems to be just an excuse to have Chris pratt isekai'd into a generic sci-fi conflict

while the premise and especially the ending were ridiculously dumb, I did enjoy the "montage" at the beginning on how everyone is getting recruited, and feeling the dread of the characters, that things are getting perpetually worse. that was well done

I can accept that someone got hammered by hard drugs and wrote an idiotic screenplay. I am flabbergasted that some suits decided it's okay to put 200 million dollars on this abomination.

Well, in Armageddon, they thought that training miners to become astronauts makes more sense than training astronauts to become miners.

The plot of this movie makes no sense. Why would you fight a war in the future that you're just going to fight again in the present? Except with severely diminished resources and manpower because of the pointless future war...

Governments should’ve given a majority of the draftees, Atchisson AA-12 Automatic shotguns (like Adrien Brody’s character had in Predators). Since the Whitespikes are weak in the neck area, new draftees do not need to be as accurate in their shots, but just hit in that general area to take them down. Also, you can give them rectangular magazines instead of the drum magazine so draftees can carry more ammunition & magazines that are less cumbersome than drum magazines.

"Sir what shall we use? Tanks? Aircraft? Drones?" "No, we shall use the most dangerous weapon in nature. MAN!"

This movie mashed so many different plot points from so many sci-fi films/media. The monsters look and their inexplicable arrival was alot like All you need is kill/Edge of tomorrow. The draft thing reminded me of The forever war in its implementation. It was a honest try with very poor execution.

You'll never know why this comment has so many likes, mwahahahaha

Shilkas. Shilkas ZSU-23-4 are the best weapon against whitespikes. They combine both the lightest armour and the heaviest weapon which can make sense, their turrets traverse faster than of some APCs or IFVs, they can shoot in full hemisphere and they are super reliable and easy to maintain.

You know that the writers fucked up when even my little pony friendship is magic made a better time travel story.

"You will receive no training... no running, jumping, crawling or obstacle courses! Now, the next thing we are going to do is drop you into combat where you will have to run, jump, climb skyscraper stairwells and navigate obstacles up, down, left, right, front and back of your position at any given moment. No, we won't give or even advise you to use adequate body armor that you have in abundance here in your time (or the resources, manpower and industrial capacity to produce quickly on a massive scale)... we just want you to shoot small caliber weapons at a beast we won't describe, but which has natural exoskeletal armor which perhaps higher caliber weaponry would be more useful, but naaaaah! Oh!... and let's not forget, we will tell you where on the animal to shoot but won't tell you how to identify it's height, proportions, size, weight, or anything that would let you know if you're pointing in the right direction or at the right spot or not. And those grossly inadequately under-powered small caliber weapons we are going to send you with (instead of 7.62 or 30-06 or .300 winmag or 6.5 creedmoor or 300 blackout or 458 lott, or 30-30, or .50 cal, etc.)... well we are going to give you ridiculously inefficient or ineffective optics and accessories for the weapon platform which you are issued." I liked this movie - sorta, but also hated it on so many levels at the same time.

Premise of this army: "What if Volkssturm but worse in every imaginable way?"

You know, if they were able to create time travel technology (with how ridiculous their plans were), they could have just built mechs that could mimic the White-Spikes and fought then with those.

The only thing stupider than the future's plan to win the war, was Chris Pratts character almost starting the war 30 years early. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Spoiler: I also "like" how they create naratives that are at odds with each other, the recruitement having to be of people that are dead in 2051 or risk creating a paradox is completely at odds with the idea that these are supposedly parallel universes.

"Mankind has had ten thousand years' experience of warfare, and if he must fight, he has no excuse for not fighting well." --T.E. Lawrence

You forgot about the part when trunks comes from the future and kills all the whitespikes in the present to warn the world about the androids.

F-22: state of the art fighter with smart guided bombs that can strike targets kilometers away. Also F-22: fly low af and dropping missile like they were bombs ww2 style

Something that caught my eye in the film as just funny is the mentioned attrition rate. 70% attrition for a one week tour. The Imperial Guard has better numbers!

The only sci-fi universes where i accept the "send more people into the meatgrinder" are Starship troopers (movie) and WH 40K. The first is a satire where the incompetence of the high command is actually part of the story and Warhammer....it's just insane.

it fails at the first point: "why should we help you? I mean thank you for the intel, we'll ramp our productions. But what would you have to offer? you're even scarcer in oil than us."

Producer: "Why don't the future people explain all the details of the war instead of sending random people through time to die?" Screenwritter: "So the movie can happen" Producer: "Oh ok, fine by me"

Why didn't they just bring all their intelligence back in the first place? Because that would be too easy.

I haven't seen the movie, but it seems to me that at least some of the factions' motivation would make more sense if they just kept the 2051 (A) and 2022 (B) universes as completely separate. The Resistance knows that giving 30 years of prep time to 2022 is all fine and dandy for Universe B... but it does nothing to help Universe A, the timeline they actually care about. So, they withhold their future intel as a bargaining chip for Universe B's resources. Now, each side has something the other needs. It paints the Resistance as more selfish and even villainous, but that could be developed into an interesting plot about the ethics of saving your own reality at the expense of another. Of course, this still completely ignores the larger problem of why the resistance needs the random citizenry of 2022 instead of literally any tank but it might at least go some way into making things less confusing.

The game "Into The Breach" actually has the same concept and in my opinion, does it right. There`s a team of mechs from the future who have time warping tech and go from timeline to timeline trying to save everyone from alien bugs. Although it's never explained which future they came from, saving the past still makes a ton more sense than trying to save the future.

the quote i'm most impressed by: "Since only 50% of the military are qualified to jump, civilians were needed to support the war effort"

I just didn't understand how Physical Training was going to be irrelevant to a person's survival. Also why the marksman training and weapon knowledge of basic training was irrelevant lmao.

Even ignoring the paradoxes... Why did the past even agree to this? It's one thing for John Connor to go back in time and simply ask a few men to go back and take down Skynet. It's another when he it's the last stand and just wants cannon fodder.

I thought that after watching the trailer, the plot would be that the future people were lying about being from the future. Instead they are from an alternate dimension. They can't time travel but they can hop between dimensions. So they would travel to different dimensions and recruit people by lying that they are from the future. Or something like that.

"Whitespikes" "Oooh, they're being attacked by hard seltzer?" - Ryan George

The more I learn about this movie, the more it sounds like someone's bad fanfic put to screen. When someone like me, who has zero military training or experience, can look at your 'battle plan' and see how useless and wasteful it is, then you've got a real problem if you're looking to create any kind of compelling narrative.

I just feel like there’s an infinitely more compelling version here. If you’re gonna have humanity instantly unite to defend the future, then I don’t think it matters if this is an alternate reality or not. The world has been destroyed in 2051. And changing the past would either do nothing or undo everyone who lives there anyway. What if you had everyone from 2051 flew to 2022. The. The refugees and heads of the resistance spend the next twenty years using everything they know to help prepare. That way when you do the big blockbuster invasion break out you could have an interesting mix of people fresh to the alien fight as well as now older resistant members. Determined to not see things go down the same way. I feel like there’s a lot of potential there for interesting character arcs. And it fill the purpose of an inspiring story where humanity bands together and uses our collective warfare knowledge to survive and win.

“Gentlemen, this time travel device allows us to change the past to bring resources to the future as our last hope to survive. Options?” “What if we take past soldiers, get them all killed for no effect, and when we run out just send even more useless civilians?” “What if we contact a massive number of alternate pasts, send them all our schematics so that hundreds of fullyfuncfional Earths can get churning out munitions and gear we pay for with our future tech schematics so we gain an insurmountable logistical advantage?” “Nnnno, operation Suicide Idiots it is.”

This was a PHENOMENALLY stupid movie, with plot points so preposterous and plot holes so immense as to defy description. But if you just wanna see some cool monsters fuck shit up, it kills a couple hours. Weed helps a lot.

"Hey, we need to take soldiers from your timeline to throw in large numbers at our enemy. This will have no tactical advantage to you and have little to do with saving our timeline." "Uh, no." *roll credits*

I have the feeling there was some way they tried to explain this, but it got cut. It would be cool if you saw a scene where they try to send a nuke through the time portal and the who facility blows up. I don't think that would have slowed down the movie.

Whoever named them 'The White Spikes' definitely just hates Seven Nation Army but didn't wanna get sued

“Did their plan make sense?” I’m still not convinced there was a plan

I like how there are a million unexplored historical and sci-fi movie and series ideas left unexplored. And this confusing mess is what gets put on the screen.

you got SEVERAAAAALLL points there institute future man.... but as the aliens where presented in the movie, they where too fast and small to be the target of a tank cannon, and too many to be held at bay by covering fire, they would just zerg rush everything in seconds. then again.. throwing my grandma to an unbeatable alien does seems like a bad idea.

I feel like this movie was one of those movies that’s just fun to watch and to not think to much about it. Because the movie was fun as hell to watch, but when I started thinking about it the movie became....less fun to watch.