The Tomorrow War

[Tyndmyr]

Alright, fun premise here. Trailer level plot overview is as follows: Earth is invaded in the future, and they're drafting soldiers from the past to save humanity.

That concept is honestly kind of fun. And I like Chris Pratt, and it's a free watch on Amazon Prime, so...easy?

Overall, this seems like another attempt at the streaming blockbuster, but it's...mixed. Some of the imagery is pretty cool. Some of the plot makes zero sense. Well, most of it. It's not unwatchably bad, though some parts may get into so bad it's funny territory. More spoilery review in the spoilers.

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Alright, it's aliens. Which are being dealt with in a horror/realistic way. Not impossible, Battle for LA did this. Problem is, they don't really keep anything consistent. We start out with nobody being shown the aliens or informed in any kind of way before deploying, because "if we did, nobody would go." Cool premise for horror, if ludicrously impractical from a military standpoint. Sending random businesslady with a gun and zero information directly info a fight with no training seems foolish. The show seems absolutely insistent on a breakneck pace, even though it's like...a few decades before the world ending event, and you literally have time travel.

The aliens mostly hide and do the creeping horror thing for a while, and when they first see one it is basically unkillable, and they shoot maybe a couple of thousand rounds into it to no effect while it pursues them, and then they kill it with an axe. Leaving aside for the moment why an axe works when endless firepower does not, we're clearly establishing these guys as juggernauts. This morphs into a swarm threat, where they're basically like the Aliens in Aliens, only without acidic blood. Then we find a queen, and we're back to juggernauts. By the end of the movie, the protagonist is defeating them by jumping into them in midair with a snowmobile, and then talking about family and oh god, this is a Fast and Furious film now.

The future people are basically giant jerks at every opportunity. Drafting you without any recourse. If you try to dodge the draft, they take your family and send them to certain death instead. I believe they are intended to be portrayed as heroic, but between the fixation on getting humans killed and the refusal to tell anyone anything, they do come across as remarkably stupid evil, to the point where it sort of feels like they deserve death.

Anyways, the entire plot revolves around nobody remembering that time travelling back in time allows you to do things while back in time. Because apparently they're counting on the audience never having seen Terminator, or Avengers, or having heard of the killing baby Hitler scenario. The idea that instead of all dying like lemmings in the future, they can instead just track them down in the past is treated like a massive 11th hour reveal that literally nobody on earth has thought of, even though you probably thought of it five seconds after time travel is introduced.

Nobody bothers to do things like using the time machine for logistics. Or stockpiling logistics in the past. Or sending the specs for the time machine into the past. This all gets in the way of murdering humans.

It is also made a big deal of, that nobody who is alive in the future can be sent from the present. They say that this rules out half of all humanity, and is why they have to send random people instead of just all military. This sounds cool, and you assume that this sort of paradox is perhaps part of the plot. It is not. In fact, they explicitly say that only a couple hundred people are still alive. I can only assume that nobody involved in the writing of this understood math.

The aliens themselves are purely animalistic, save for their queen. Just like Aliens, really. Anyways, the humans, knowing that the female can communicate with the males, and they they will suicidally engage in zerg like attacks to save her, decide to...bring her to their base for research. The only base left for all of humanity. This goes predictably. But they NEED a toxin to kill the females, they insist, despite the strong evidence that there is only one, and many, many males. They have a toxin for the males. They never use it.

But I guess the toxin is useful when they bring it to the past, where they can use it to...no, they blow the ship up with explosives after stupidly failing to surprise attack the queen while she's in stasis, freeing the queen for the big dumb fight where they literally punch it a lot.

I hope some of ya'll watched this, because there's more to rant about. A lot more.

[Palanan]

I saw the trailers for this starting a few weeks ago, and one major issue turned me off completely.

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I read the novel years ago and loved it, since it's deservedly a classic of military SF.

Unfortunately, from what I gathered in the trailers, they threw out just about everything that made the book so good--in particular the fact that it takes place on planets other than Earth, with time dilation and other issues involved.

Apparently that was Too Much Science for their estimate of today's audiences, so they replaced the novel's premise with...whatever strange time-heist approach it's taking instead.

And, Chris Pratt. I don't dislike him, but even in the Jurassic World movies he's a bit on the goofy side, and of course no one can forget the dance-off to save the universe. So he's not someone I can really take seriously in a role like this.

But, given what I'm reading from the summary in the OP, it sounds like no one could have rescued this script from itself. Time to read the book again.

[Tyndmyr]

I believe you are thinking of the Old Man's War series?

That one at least started out pretty interesting, though it went off the rails a few books in. No relation to this one, I think. At least, I don't know of a Tomorrow War book that this is based on.

Edit: Alternatively, The Forever War would also meet that definition, though I despise it.

[Wintermoot]

I saw the trailers for this starting a few weeks ago, and one major issue turned me off completely.

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I read the novel years ago and loved it, since it's deservedly a classic of military SF.

Unfortunately, from what I gathered in the trailers, they threw out just about everything that made the book so good--in particular the fact that it takes place on planets other than Earth, with time dilation and other issues involved.

Apparently that was Too Much Science for their estimate of today's audiences, so they replaced the novel's premise with...whatever strange time-heist approach it's taking instead.

And, Chris Pratt. I don't dislike him, but even in the Jurassic World movies he's a bit on the goofy side, and of course no one can forget the dance-off to save the universe. So he's not someone I can really take seriously in a role like this.

But, given what I'm reading from the summary in the OP, it sounds like no one could have rescued this script from itself. Time to read the book again.

You are thinking of the Forever War, not the Tomorrow War (the novel)

the movie has nothing to do with Joe Haldeman's novel at all. So you are holding an unrealistic grudge against the movie for not being the same as the novel it isn't supposed to be related to anyway.

Not that that makes the movie any better.

We watched it this weekend and it was... fine... very very dumb and kind of felt like the director needs a course on how to actually diagram out a movie structure. But it had good special effects and was fun enough for what it was.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
Alternatively, The Forever War would also meet that definition, though I despise it.

Gah, you're correct. For some reason I thought this was an adaptation. It was, umm, a long time ago when I read it.

But doesn't sound like this movie does all that much better as a standalone premise, at least in the execution.

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Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
By the end of the movie, the protagonist is defeating them by jumping into them in midair with a snowmobile, and then talking about family and oh god, this is a Fast and Furious film now.

Pretty sure I laughed harder at this than I would have at anything in the movie itself.

Snowmobile? Really?!

[Psyren]

Uh... so is it true they

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spent the whole movie making a toxin to poison the aliens in the past... but just blowing the aliens up in the past worked just as well?

[Talwar]

For much of the run-time, I felt like I was watching Starship Troopers except played straight and serious.

Totally agree with the complete failure of imagination with respect to use of time travel in this scenario.

[Traab]

Ok, I watched Screen Rants do a Pitch Meeting video on this. All I have to say is, im a huge fan of pitch meetings and have learned how to tell when they are exaggerating for effect and when the movie really is problematic. This movie comes off as really REALLY problematic. A plot with more holes than a cheese grater, character actions that make zero sense, decisions made that literally only have "so the movie can happen" as an excuse, and an ending that basically makes you go "what was the point of the plot again?" It may not be "as bad" as it comes off as, but at best it sounds mediocre and a shut your mind off popcorn flick.

[oudeis]

I believe you are thinking of the Old Man's War series?

That one at least started out pretty interesting, though it went off the rails a few books in. No relation to this one, I think. At least, I don't know of a Tomorrow War book that this is based on.

Edit: Alternatively, The Forever War would also meet that definition, though I despise it.

Why did you dislike TFW so much?

[Dr.Samurai]

Spoiler: What I liked...

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1. The character arcs. I like the theme of second chances. I like that Forester holds a grudge against his dad who he believes quit on him and his mom, but that Forester also ends up not feeling fulfilled in life and eventually quitting on his wife and daughter. It speaks to the difficulty of every day life for mundane people. And I like that future Muri gives her father a second chance and is able to redeem him (presumably) which in turn leads to him giving his father a second chance.

That said... there were a couple of issues here too that I'll add in the "What I didn't Like" section.

2. The whitespikes were cool. Their design as armored displacer beasts was cool, and I liked that they also had ranged attacks to keep the soldiers on their toes. I think they were a little misplaced in this movie, but I do like them as an alien concept.

3. Really really really like the concept of the future losing a war and needing to recruit the past to assist. I think it's fun and interesting and raises questions about what sort of obligations do people have when the future seems hopeless; enjoy the rest of your life or risk it all to fight a hopeless war in another time?

Spoiler: What I didn't like...

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1. To me, it seems that Forester felt he wasn't living up to his true potential (he says he is destined for greatness) and future Muri tells him that he never seemed happy and eventually he left them. I do think this is topical, though I won't say more on that than that, but I also feel that the lines are blurred about Forester's growth. Does he commit to his family in the present because he realized what he would have given up by leaving? He says as much in the movie. But also, he is the awesome hero of the movie and gets to save the Earth, so he also did something amazing. So maybe that's why he doesn't leave them in the current timeline. It just seems a little like having your cake and eating it too. Not a major deal, but something that stuck out to me.

2. I liked that Muri chose her father because she thought he was the only one she could trust to carry out the mission. It speaks to her feelings about him from her childhood, as opposed to the anger and resentment she feels after him leaving. It's complex and she is dealing with both realities of her father. I do like that Forester ends up giving his father a second chance, but it is cheapened a little because Forester literally has no other recourse. There is no other option except to fail if he doesn't go ask his father for help. JK Simmons has a funny line here though which was perfect, and Forester gives the speech about second chances at the alien ship, but I do think the necessity of Forester's dad sneaking them across international borders undermines a little the experience of Forester learning he ditches his family, but his daughter still believed in him enough to give him a second chance.

3. The fight against the whitespike queen. Dear god... what in the absolute *insert expletive here*? This is actually a complaint about the whitespikes in general. They are godly tough. The initial staircase scene when Forester's team is trying to escape the rescue mission seems absolutely impossible. Like... why, if the whitespikes can shrug off all that gunfire, can't they seem to make it down the stairs fast enough to maul literally everyone? And where is all the heavier weaponry? Why those little baby rifles if they hardly work? The whitespikes were way too invulnerable to have them be so fast and agile (climbing up and down and sideways with ease), to have ranged attacks, to have a summon ability and call everyone to their location, and to have godly numbers to swarm everyone. On the one hand, you can see how they would wipe out humanity. On the other hand, you can't see how our plucky band of heroes could have actually accomplished everything they did.

But back to the queen. She is the toughest of all of them. She is the entire reason they can't win, because their toxins can only kill the males, and she keeps reproducing. So how in the world am I watching Forester engaging in fisticuffs with her? Why am I watching this lowly mortal punching this alien demigod in the face repeatedly? You can't show these aliens shrugging off gunfire, explosions, fire, etc and then switch it up with forester bobbing and weaving and throwing punches and dagger stabs. Totally took me out of the movie.

4. They should not have set up his father's sacrifice if he was just going to save him. Either keep the dad alive so Forester can introduce Muri to her grandfather, or allow him to sacrifice himself as part of a redemption arc. But don't pretend he is going to sacrifice himself and then juke the audience out at the last second. It was totally pointless and worsens the scene.

5. There were a couple of plot points that didn't make sense.

5a. I like the idea that to avoid the paradox you can only send people to a timeline where they don't exist. But the fact that only about half of humans can go into the future for this reason doesn't seem to add up when you find out there's only some hundreds (of thousands?) of humans left on the planet in the future. Seems like you could send virtually everyone to go fight.

5b. The movie once again undermines itself in the third act. Muri gets to save the world by creating the toxin that will destroy the queen. Forester gets to save the world by bringing that toxin back to the present and mass producing it. This was actually a nice twist that I enjoyed; the toxin is created in the future, but the future is no longer in a position to save itself even when the toxin is discovered. They can only hope to send it back and save the alternate timeline from the same fate. However, the resolution to all this ends up being "blow up the spaceship". Unfortunately, once the humans from the future come to the present and reveal that the whitespikes appeared in Russia one day, and once someone comes back with a claw, literally none of the other events in the movie are relevant. They could have simply realized, as Forester's wife did almost immediately, that they were searching in the wrong year, done a little homework, and found the spaceship and nuked it from orbit. The entire part of the movie between the opening scene and the third act can be removed.

Overall, the movie seem rushed, and also longer than it needed to be. I had several issues with it, and yet I really enjoyed it and would watch it again if I came across it flipping the channels.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by oudeis
Why did you dislike TFW so much?

Yeah, I was wondering this myself.

[Dire_Flumph]

Uh... so is it true they

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spent the whole movie making a toxin to poison the aliens in the past... but just blowing the aliens up in the past worked just as well?

Spoiler: Go back to sleep Zoot, nobody's landed

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So, that wasn't really anything that bugged me in the movie. The idea was the future guys didn't know where the initial alien landing was and by the time they started encountering the creatures they had reproduced out of control already.

Wasn't until Chris Pratt goes back at the end that they piece clues together that the aliens crash landed over a thousand years ago, causing the Millennium eruption where the beasts have been in stasis since (Turns out they were a biological weapon intended for an entirely different planet). So telling the past "Just shoot the aliens when they deboard the plane" wasn't initially considered a viable strategy.

That said, they had an absolutely mind boggling lack of preparation for the obvious hitch of "What happens if we accidentally wake these things up early?"

It looks like if lockdowns hadn't hit, this would have been another in a wave of underwhelming films to hit theaters in 2020. About the best review I can give was that it was a fun enough movie to keep on in the background while I was batch-painting miniatures last night.

Spoiler: Edit: Forgot one thing that really did bug me....

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So they can't give the people they are sending into the future to fight the alien menace any viable intel on what they're actually going to be fighting because....they don't want to upset them?

Ok, I know the real reason is they want to build suspense for the audience as to what the aliens look like, but couldn't they have come up with a better excuse?

[Starbuck_II]

I liked it.

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Granted, I expect an after credit, one of them crawls out of the wreckage and escapes. Leaves it open for a sequel.

I thought for a while the creatures couldn't swim, but then they attacked the ocean base.
So, was it confirmed that the creatures were bio-created in a lab by aliens or were they zoo keepers transporting them when they escaped kill the crew?

[Tyndmyr]

Gah, you're correct. For some reason I thought this was an adaptation. It was, umm, a long time ago when I read it.

But doesn't sound like this movie does all that much better as a standalone premise, at least in the execution.

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Pretty sure I laughed harder at this than I would have at anything in the movie itself.

Snowmobile? Really?!

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Oh god, yes, that actually happens. Also, fistfighting the big ol' Alien queen that is made of teeth and claws and stuff.

Uh... so is it true they

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spent the whole movie making a toxin to poison the aliens in the past... but just blowing the aliens up in the past worked just as well?

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They do primarily use explosives. They start out injecting a couple of drones, which die, but wake everything else up. Then they use explosives to kill 99% of them, and the big punchy battle with the queen starts. They do use the toxin on her a couple of times to some effect, but there's also a lot of other stuff, so clearly it's not AS good.

The toxin ends up feeling remarkably pointless, and the deployment system being "hold still for a shot" seems really impractical.

The pitch meeting is...very accurate, and also hilarious. I highly approve of it.

Why did you dislike TFW so much?

All of the rape, mostly. The protaganist's view is...pretty reprehensible in general, and yeah, maybe the 70s were a really odd time, with a lot of strange views, but protaganist is not only a monster, nobody really calls him out for it, and the sheer author insert nature of it is...kind of an implicit endorsement of evil. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the author genuinely likes the idea of a society in which women are legally forced to be sexually available to whoever.

The time jumping eternal war is cool, but it's not enough to get me past that, and anyways, that same concept appears in plenty of other books.

[Wintermoot]

All of the rape, mostly. The protaganist's view is...pretty reprehensible in general, and yeah, maybe the 70s were a really odd time, with a lot of strange views, but protaganist is not only a monster, nobody really calls him out for it, and the sheer author insert nature of it is...kind of an implicit endorsement of evil. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the author genuinely likes the idea of a society in which women are legally forced to be sexually available to whoever.

The time jumping eternal war is cool, but it's not enough to get me past that, and anyways, that same concept appears in plenty of other books.

Wow... you know, I love that book for the time dilation physics and the subtle anti-war messaging somehow I blocked that out entirely. I had to go look it up to see what you were talking about. Totally mind blocked that entire subtheme.

Still, I see it as an extension of the "war is reprehensible" messaging. The author experienced Vietnam firsthand, and was writing in parable about that war. There was, sadly, quite a lot of documented rape in that war, and the idea that they enforce sexual availability among the troops to diffuse that aggressive energy isn't that far fetched of an extension of that.

But yeah. Pretty terrible. No wonder I've blocked it out. Now I understand how all those people who still love Michael Jackson music and Woody Allen movies can do it.

[Dargaron]

Saw the trailer, wasn't motivated enough to actually see it: which I guess is a good thing after reading this thread.

Based on the trailer, I had been absolutely sure one of the following would happen:

Spoiler: Blind theories

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1: The whole "future war" was a con being run by the aliens in order to divide and conquer the human race. Send a whole bunch of combatants to the future where they can't actually do anything because the aliens already won, while those left behind are overrun in their now-weakened state, causing the bad future that's the linchpin of the con.

2:The "aliens" that the humans are fighting are actually human war machines, and the draftees are being used by aliens in order to crack the last remnant of human resistance before they can deploy their super-ultra-anti-alien beam they've been researching.

3: Related to the above, this isn't an alien-on-human war: it's a civil war between humans and our own creations. We made life, tried to destroy it, and lost, big time. Now future!humans are trying to use past!humans to clean up their own mistakes.

[Rodin]

But yeah. Pretty terrible. No wonder I've blocked it out. Now I understand how all those people who still love Michael Jackson music and Woody Allen movies can do it.

Slightly different I'd say. If I show someone who hasn't heard of Michael Jackson one of his songs there's nothing in the song itself to offend them. Forever War's distressing content is in the book itself, so you can dislike the book while having no opinion on the author.

I'm kind of in the middle. I know I've read it, but it bounced off my memory entirely. I didn't dislike it because I finished reading it, but neither did I find it particularly memorable.

Kinda sad that the movie sounds so bad, the trailer looked interesting in a B-movie sort of way.

[Dire_Flumph]

Based on the trailer, I had been absolutely sure one of the following would happen:

Spoiler: Blind theories

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1: The whole "future war" was a con being run by the aliens in order to divide and conquer the human race. Send a whole bunch of combatants to the future where they can't actually do anything because the aliens already won, while those left behind are overrun in their now-weakened state, causing the bad future that's the linchpin of the con.

2:The "aliens" that the humans are fighting are actually human war machines, and the draftees are being used by aliens in order to crack the last remnant of human resistance before they can deploy their super-ultra-anti-alien beam they've been researching.

3: Related to the above, this isn't an alien-on-human war: it's a civil war between humans and our own creations. We made life, tried to destroy it, and lost, big time. Now future!humans are trying to use past!humans to clean up their own mistakes.

Spoiler: Nope, nothing that interesting.

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It was an interstellar oopsie, the aliens crash landed carrying what were apparently biological weapons meant to attack a completely different planet.

[Tyrant]

Wow... you know, I love that book for the time dilation physics and the subtle anti-war messaging somehow I blocked that out entirely. I had to go look it up to see what you were talking about. Totally mind blocked that entire subtheme.

Still, I see it as an extension of the "war is reprehensible" messaging. The author experienced Vietnam firsthand, and was writing in parable about that war. There was, sadly, quite a lot of documented rape in that war, and the idea that they enforce sexual availability among the troops to diffuse that aggressive energy isn't that far fetched of an extension of that.

But yeah. Pretty terrible. No wonder I've blocked it out. Now I understand how all those people who still love Michael Jackson music and Woody Allen movies can do it.

I too was wondering what was wrong with the book and this surprised me as I don't recall that from the book either. Is there a particular part of the book where this is present?

[Julian84]

Oh boy

In the words of Yahtzee Croshaw, "Please, load up your shotguns, join me around this barrel, and let's take it out on some motha****ing fish."

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Where do we even begin?? I can't say there are parts I disliked explicitly because this movie is so hilariously bad that it becomes entertaining to watch anyhow, if only to watch these gormless morons get more and more people killed in the most unnecessary of ways. The entire plot is so full of holes the Vatican is considering appointing it a saint. One thing I haven't seen pointed out yet is that at the climax, they contradict the entire conceit of the film by saying getting the world governments involved might make it a disaster.

But we've already seen that the world governments could rapidly and decisively commit to a multinational collaboration to save the future with no apparent backstabbing or scheming to enrich themselves. They did it in less than a year! And they stuck to it despite encountering hilariously insane casualty rates that would make Josef Stalin blush with shame.

Not to mention that Muri sticks to the idea that only her father can be the one to transport the toxin to the past, which is... Sentimental, but from a rational perspective, totally insane. The movie would have made a lot more sense if she had covertly decided to recruit only her dad for the mission and had to work around the other people who are in charge of the war effort and who would be undoubtedly personally overseeing her project. Or they could have reinforced that this stone-cold badass is actually still a terrified child on the inside and is trying to save her family in the past by giving her dad a mission that would fulfill his apparently massive ego. But that might make him a bit too unlikeable.

Also something I haven't seen mentioned is the fact that no one had the thought to shoot the female while she was chained up, which at least could have caused some confusion amongst the invading male Whitespikes and also would prevent her from being a massive spanner in the works. Sadly we go along with the theme that enforces the expendability of women as motivational tools for male protagonists by killing Muri instead. You'd think the super-smart badass who is single-handedly creating the killer toxin would have the thought to take out a major strategic threat, but then again she decided that using the toxin to wipe out large populations of males en masse wasn't a good enough solution for buying them more time.

Might have been super useful to have for a cloudburst if, I dunno, a massive horde of male Whitespikes are knocking down your front door.

All in all, it's a fun movie to just pick apart for how absolutely ludicrous and dumb it is.

[Tyndmyr]

I too was wondering what was wrong with the book and this surprised me as I don't recall that from the book either. Is there a particular part of the book where this is present?

I'm on a work computer, so I'm not googlin' for it at present, given the context. However, there were several such scenes after the combats. He takes pains to repeatedly say that this is required by law, and therefore...cannot be reasonably considered consensual, even after you get past the whole "the US government is making everyone turn gay" cringe bits.

Glancing at the wiki, it appears that some publications of it were abridged. I don't know what got cut out, but a great deal of that seems like a good candidate for some very harsh editing, so I suppose it's possible that one's experience with the book might vary depending with which printing one had.

[J-H]

I think I remember that book and the references in there. It was probably an outgrowth of the '60s, "free love," "sex is just physical and has no consequences or baggage," etc. movement.
Or maybe it was something slipped in by someone with worse problems, like Arthur C Clarke or the stuff with Breen and his wife (Mists of Avalon author, don't remember her name). I know my kids will not be reading some of the science fiction I read as a kid, because of who some of the authors turned out to be.

[Traab]

Ugh I cant read anything about dark sexual themes without thinking about Anne Bishop and her Dark Jewels trilogy. It was a series I dont exactly regret reading, but I will never read it again. And if you knew HOW MANY TIMES I reread all my books you would understand what a big deal that is. Its fantasy and not sci fi but it has women sexually enslaving men and torturing them, men lashing out at any women they can overpower out of a desire for revenge, rape as a tool for both genders, and an endless spiral of worsening conditions due to all sorts of mystical reasons. Its also kind of unexpected because Saetan SaDiablo the High Lord of Hell is one of the primary good guys, along with his two sons.

[Tyrant]

I'm on a work computer, so I'm not googlin' for it at present, given the context. However, there were several such scenes after the combats. He takes pains to repeatedly say that this is required by law, and therefore...cannot be reasonably considered consensual, even after you get past the whole "the US government is making everyone turn gay" cringe bits.

Yeah I remember that last part. I honestly figured that was probably the issue.

Glancing at the wiki, it appears that some publications of it were abridged. I don't know what got cut out, but a great deal of that seems like a good candidate for some very harsh editing, so I suppose it's possible that one's experience with the book might vary depending with which printing one had.

I'll have to check my copy now. Maybe I have an abridged version.

[Hopeless]

Spoiler: Nope, nothing that interesting.

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It was an interstellar oopsie, the aliens crash landed carrying what were apparently biological weapons meant to attack a completely different planet.

First observation

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So would this have been improved if that ship was shot down and only became a problem when they tried to scavenge the ship instead of blow it up thinking they could control and develop the bio-weapons found aboard unknowingly giving them the time they needed to break out.
And in the subsequent resulting confusion have colonised the ocean floor where they remained undetected until needed?

Second observation

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That isn't the Earth of the Chris Pratt's future they simply accessed a parallel world as they couldn't travel into their own past.
So whilst they succeeded in blowing up that alien cargo ship, that other parallel world has the means to travel to their world and the aliens once they reverse engineered it can then use it to jump into that parallel world, which doesn't know the truth about the situation they were in...

Third observation

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What did they give those governments to make them willing to send troops and even civilians to almost certain doom?
Imagine they gave them the same bio-weapons currently running amok in that future of course our governments ignore the fact this will only result in the same outbreak that destroyed the parallel world they're in contact with?

[Tyndmyr]

Yeah I remember that last part. I honestly figured that was probably the issue.

I'd put it as a contributing factor, certainly.

Part of it is how it aged, and old timey views for sure. There's a bunch of older books with parts that are at least troublesome. I don't mind so much if it's part of the characterization of the evil folks, and the protagonists are fighting against it, standard dystopia portrayal there, yknow? Though even there, it can get used to much, as the Sword of Truth series demonstrates.

There's definitely a fair number of books that I've read that I probably wouldn't pass on to kids these days.

[t209]

So Chris Pratt in other works than Tomorrow War.
Forever War- Chris Pratt as Mandela (no relations to Nelson) fight in space war but came back to gender fluid future.
Gunbuster- see above but as Top Gun
Old Man’s War- Chris Pratt as an old geezer who became young to fight in space war.
Into the Breach- Chris Pratt have to travel time and dimensions MULTIPLE TIME after each failures.

[Thrudd]

Saw it. Shouldn't have bothered- at least it didn't cost anything beyond the subscription I'm already using. The script is imbecilic. It has a possibly interesting premise which is ruined by the entire world of the film being populated by morons. It is an absolutely cringey example of "former special forces brilliant scientist perfect dad downtoearth funny selfless heroic guy" saving the world by himself apart from a handful of disposable friends who are thrown in with him only by happenstance.
I mean, this is worse than Independence Day levels of dumb. I was yelling at the TV for the entire second half of the movie, at least, because of how poorly thought out and completely immersion breaking the whole scenario was. If that's the sort of movie you like, this is it baby!

I'm guessing they intended this to be an Independence Day style big dumb schmaltzy melodramatic blockbuster that you aren't supposed to take seriously at all. Just look at the scary monsters and stuff blowing up and snicker when characters make terrible attempts at comedy, and shed a tear for how much a guy loves his family and people sacrifice for one another.

[J-H]

I've occasionally run across a theory that Hollywood, especially the streaming parts (where the P&L is more obscured and they seem to waste tens of millions of dollars on idiotic things like this) is partly used for money laundering. It's one explanation for why they blow big money on junk like this...

[Rodin]

I'm guessing they intended this to be an Independence Day style big dumb schmaltzy melodramatic blockbuster that you aren't supposed to take seriously at all. Just look at the scary monsters and stuff blowing up and snicker when characters make terrible attempts at comedy, and shed a tear for how much a guy loves his family and people sacrifice for one another.

The impression I got is that somebody saw Kill, Die, Repeat (aka Edge of Tomorrow) and thought they copy it on the cheap to make a tidy profit.

Unfortunately, you need decent writing to make people care about the characters and Chris Pratt is no Tom Cruise.

Independence Day gets a lot of crap, but it knows exactly what genre it is and manages to be awesome regardless. It combined the mass destruction of a disaster movie with awesome action sequences and the action comedy chops of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in their prime. Is the movie dumb? Yes, absolutely. Do I care? Hell no. It's one of my favorite action movies of all time and shows that you don't need a deep plot if you get everything else right.

Independence Day works because the characters take logical actions based on the movie universe they're in. Hacking the aliens is dumb, but once you accept the premise the aliens can be hacked the rest of the plot falls into place. From what I've seen of Tomorrow War that isn't the case. They don't deal with the time travel well, the Macguffin doesn't matter, and people make stupid decisions repeatedly that should have resulted in the human race being wiped out.