MovieChat Forums > The Tomorrow War (2021) Discussion > Primitive Aliens with the IQ of a hamste...

Primitive Aliens with the IQ of a hamster on crack invade earth...


...to consume human flesh? Really??? How did that get green lighted?

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Those "white spikes" aliens were actually pretty impressive and one of the best predators on screen. They're strong, agile, can run fast, jump down from high above, swim, glide, attack in swarms, are hard to shoot and don't die easily, can take quite a few hits, and have built-in weapons (throw spikes).

The "smart" aliens who built the spaceships were different btw.

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but they must have some kind of advanced transportation to travel to earth, which means they are technologically advanced, but the only resource they want is human flesh?

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That part is left vague; all we know is their ship crash landed on Earth a thousand years ago, while the "white spikes", which are "perfect for clearing a planet", were merely cargo.

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It wasn't vague at all. It was clearly shown in the film that the aliens were brought here by an advanced race.

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Well, we don't know for sure why they crashlanded though; were they simply passing through the solar system, or are they conquerors, like the aliens from Independence Day?

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I was responding more to Einstein than to you. But yes, it was not clear if they were headed for Earth and crashed upon arrival, or crashed en route to parts unknown.

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The film made it very clear the white spikes were cargo on the crashed ship. To me, they are a weapon to drop onto a planet to clear it of life. Perhaps it's a one size fits all alternative solution to developing a biological virus type weapon which might be challenging for an alien race needing to wipe out all life on a planet as some species might survive if they're not 100% sure of what sort of resistance various species might have.

Dropping a bunch of white spikes onto a planet and leaving them to procreate and consume seems like an OK way to wipe a planet's population out. You more or less leave infrastructure intact much like releasing a biological weapon. I suppose they would then spread some type of poison that rapidly spreads through the white spikes population leaving a planet ready to be the alien's new home, strip of resources or whatever their plans are.

Alternatively, they were being carried for use as prey in some type of alien hunting exercise. Though they seem far too dangerous to intentionally drop somewhere to hunt for sport.

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Not really as good as you make it out to be, because the whitespikes don't leave the infrastructure intact at all. Did you not see the way they were ripping chunks out of buildings to get at people? The perfect bio-weapon to remove life would do so while leaving every non-living thing untouched. This assumption that they were intended to wipe a planet of all life is also flawed because it didn't appear that the whitespikes removed any of the vegetation from the planet. If you were trying to wipe all life from a planet you would want to remove vegetation as well because if you were an alien species some species of plant could be the toxin that spells doom to your kind that was trying to take over a planet.

The most plausible explanation would have been that the alien craft was simply transporting the whitespikes to a zoo or lab for study. I mean if you had a mission to eradicate life on earth why would you suddenly give up when one ship is lost? You're a alien civilization with space travel so surely you would have more than one ship when you decided to conquer planets.

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Notice I said "more or less leave infrastructure intact". Ripping out chunks of random buildings is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Consider what an actual war might be like against an intelligent alien race. Key infrastructure would most likely be targeted much like how Humans target strategic stuff like airfields, energy production and distribution etc with conventional weapons ie. explosives.

Though of course, what use would an intact Earth infrastructure be to an alien race if they did indeed want to come here to make Earth their home? They will surely have different ideas about living. Though I suppose if they can't bring any alien tech/or make use of alien tech on Earth, such as means of proving power they will need whatever we have left behind. Nuclear power etc. They will make use of that, improve on it.

I didn't really mean all life, to include vegetation etc. That is a bit of a stretch for an alien creature like the white spikes. Perhaps only Human life was targeted and any animals would just be collateral damage.

Yeah, transport to a zoo or lab is a viable theory. Though you'd think an intelligent alien race capable of space travel would want to transport such a dangerous cargo more intelligently. Like transporting the queen separately from the regular WSs. The aliens piloting the ship clearly knew a lot about them considering their advanced stasis system. I don't think it is akin to a bumbling Human discovering something and wanting to study it.

For all we know, the ship crash landing was considered a win for that alien race. Not ideal, but not a complete failure. There was power to the ship still. Who know if comms systems were still viable and if another planet could have confirmed the landing, even if it wasn't to plan. Then it's just a waiting game for them.

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Also, I think when you consider the distances involved in space travel, it seems unlikely an alien would accidentally get near Earth to be able to crash. Add to that the WS's ability to breath oxygen just fine. What are the chances I wonder. It just seems intention was there.

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Well, when you "consider the distances involved in space travel" then you pretty much have to fuck right off with 99% of science fiction movies.

Aliens transporting the White Spike (for whatever reason) crash on Earth. Simple as that.

The pre-hate and ignore-the-details haters are on a witch hunt. It is crazy. It is not a perfect movie but the complaints are bullshit 9 out of 10 times. The last 5 science fiction movies to come out have been full of way more problems but have waaaay less scrutiny. Why is that?

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Well yeah. It's pointless to think too much into it really. It's just a film but it's fun to speculate.

I think it's just how negativity works on the Internet these days. Like how 10% or so of Twitter users create 80% of the tweets. And a lot of those Tweets come from a negative group of blue haired lunatics that attack stuff if it doesn't align with their dumb beliefs. Hence the hate from some people for this film due to Chris Pratt being in the film and he's a current target for the mob. So a small group are kicking up a fuss and they then amplify it in their sad little echo chamber.

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Well said.

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Say you are travelling with Hyperlightspeed and you notice, you have a problem with it - what would you do? Trying to reach the next inhabitant planet and land there, so you survive and find a solution to go on. We might not know anything about the advanced aliens, but they unlikely were concerned about the WS themselves. And if they were interested in conquering earth, they likely had come meanwhile again. Why? Because the space ship was clearly only a cargo, not an arch for the advanced aliens. It is very unlikely aliens would play such a long game to conquer any planet.

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Again, it's all just speculation but yeah, I suppose there is the possibility they could have been forced to pull out of whatever advanced form of space travel they were in and just happened to be near Earth and we able to crash land and it was all just a coincidental disaster. It begs the question though, why no recovery mission?

Who knows how another species would think. If they're playing the long game and not concerned about time, either by transfer of consciousness into clones or whatever, perhaps they're OK to just wait for the WS to do their thing eventually.

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People who speculate along these lines always make the (erroneous) assumption that the alien race is homogenous.

When Columbus crash landed, did France have anything to do with it? Germany? Egypt?

These could've been big game hunters, explorers, criminals, arrogant scientists, idiot hijackers, etc, etc, etc. . .

Ascribing the motives of an entire species/civilization to ONE ship is deeply flawed thinking.

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Well yeah. The speculation is based on a limited line of thought. Smugglers "gun running" a dangerous alien bio weapon in the form of WSs and then encountering technical issues with their ship resulting in a crash landing on Earth is an interesting idea. That would explain why no recovery mission. Much like how cartels write off numerous narco subs filled with millions of $ of drugs.

I like the theory that there is intelligent life out there but they have made an agreement to not visit Earth and compromise the natural development of man. Treating Earth like a wildlife reserve to be protected and not messed with until they observe we have reached a key point on whatever metric life is rated on to be in the space club.

It stands to reason that there might be individuals within that species of alien or an entirely different alien race that either don't agree with Earth being off limits and want to travel here anyway like we would go on a safari in Africa.

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Yup.

The last Predator movie explored this idea a bit. . .essentially positing different tribes from the Predator homeworld, with differing motives/plans for earth, and battling it out once they got here.

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Star Treks Prime Directive.

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Most of the destruction was done by humans. You dont see whitespiles leveling highways. it was the human bombers that did that.

You do NOT want vegetation removed if you want to colonize the planet.

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If you watch, you will learn that they are not advanced at all. They're like ants or bees, but were brought here by a more intelligent race.

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Did you watch the film? The flesh-eating aliens were about as intelligent as ants or bees, and did not have any technology to speak of, much less the ability to build or pilot a spaceship.

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No. Two different species. The smart aliens with a ship crashed. The whitespikes were just cargo.

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"Primitive Aliens with the IQ of a hamster on crack invade a ship/planet ..."

Sounds like the plot of the greatest sci-fi horror flick ever. And I'm not sure if it's Alien or The Thing ...

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hmmm, you got good point there

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In Alien the creature hitched a ride on Ripley's ship and then laid thousands of eggs.

They weren't capable of interstellar travel on their own.


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Erm?

Did you see this movie???

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I did.

I was just pointing out the difference, but if you already knew, then okay.


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I guess you didn't. Or you didn't pay attention.

They said that the aliens are not the ones that had built and piloted the ship but some kind of weapon that the advanced civilization that built the ship was using to wipe out life on other planets before colonizing them.

Guess what: exactly like in Alien, they weren't capable of interstellar travel on their own.

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Yeah, I am aware.

Not sure why you felt the need to explain. [shrug]

Also, that doesn't suddenly make the movie good - it was pretty embarrassing at times.


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Well, if you were aware then your post makes NO sense.

Alien and this movie have actually beings that have been engineered as weapons and were NOT capable of interstellar travel on their own and they were basically cargo on some other advanced species ships.

So sorry but i don't see the difference.

And point me to where I said that this movie was good ...

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Okay [shrug]

You are getting fired up over nothing.


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The white spikes weren't dumb. Remember how the queen immediately responded when she saw that Miri concocted a toxin to kill her and the other females.

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She reacted to the males coming to the rescue. She did hold a grudge afterwards though.

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You haven’t actually watched it have you? This is explained in the 3rd act, and the aliens are pretty smart

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If anyone was dumb, it was the humans. Spends first 2 acts trying to develop a virus to kill aliens and in 3rd act, they used the virus on 3 of them and simply blew all the others up with C4. Why they didn't use the C4 as soon as they entered the ship I have no idea.

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Because an explosion doesn’t guarantee that they’ll all die. Heck it doesn’t even guarantee that every section of the ship will be blown to smithereens, and this will probably be the premise to explain the sequel.

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Given the choice between injecting aliens one at a time(there were a shit load of those pods) or blowing them all up, I'll take the latter every time. Hell, it was virus that nearly got them all killed and almost freed the damned things. Going the bomberman route was what saved the day.

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Oh I agree. Given the choice at the time, C4 was the plan B to go for.

But short of a nuke, the explosion wouldn’t have guaranteed there were no survivors.

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so bring a portable nuke ... and c4.

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Lol, like in Starship Troopers.

Unfortunately it was still 2022, and they didn't have military support.

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what?

they were drafting people for war all over the world WITH military support (as shown in the movie) and suddenly when he comes from the future with the weapon and the location they are like "neah, we don't care, we are not interested"???

I have to admit I kind watched it while mustitasking so I might have missed that part (about the military support) but then it's highly dumb. Might have to rewatch that part but anyway is DUMB!!! Yeah, I just rewatched it. Financial reasons???? Hahahaha.

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I'm referring to the 3rd act when everyone's dead in the future, and the present day military told them they won't support them.

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Yeah, the military 100% supported them until them with millions of people being sent to the future but when he comes back with the means to destroy them they are like "neah bro, too expensive".
Really????

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It's classic government. They are about power, and that's it. They don't care about anyone but the 1%.

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Then they wouldn't have sent anyone in the future ... that operation would have cost the government a LOT more than a small expedition in Russia. Even a small covert operation to gather the intelligence or something.

I don't buy it, no matter how stupid the government is ... it's not THAT stupid ...

Just a plot device to keep the movie going ...

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No, as usual with war, they make a lot more money than they lose. Why do you think the U.S. has been in Afghanistan for 20 years? They could've ended the cave warriors within a week if they had the motivation!

Obama, Trump, and now Biden have all tried to get the military to leave (at least publicly). Now we even know that the military committed treason and shared fake intel with Trump when he was telling them to leave. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=military+fake+intel+when+trump+asked+to+leave+Afghanistan+&t=h_&ia=web

They lied again about troop numbers in Syria. Lying directly to the U.S. President: https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/13/senior-administration-officials-lied-to-trump-about-troop-levels-so-he-wouldnt-pull-out-of-syria/

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I don't think you're thinking straight.

The government spends trillions on weapons that could protect USA from a foreign attack but they don't care about a force proven to wipe all life in 30 years??

They might not care for others but still they have kids.

And as I was saying: they spent billions or more drafting, training and sending millions of people in the future. They were that desperate. And suddenly, nah, can't do.

If they were only about making money: producing that toxin alone would have made them billions.

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It's not that your logic is missing, you raise some good points.

But if anything you are failing to equate "spending" with profiting. Spending is not a loss for the government. That money has to go somewhere. When the government spends, it's a wealth transfer to the 1%, and then the leaders in the government make that back through political donations from the same 1% they've made wealthy.

Are you seeing the circle of life yet?

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" Spending is not a loss for the government. That money has to go somewhere. When the government spends, it's a wealth transfer to the 1%, and then the leaders in the government make that back through political donations from the same 1% they've made wealthy."

And THAT is what i said: just by producing the toxin to kill the aliens in the present would bring them billions ... an opportunity they would not pass if given the chance.

Plus: if you know that your house is going to crash in 5 days would you be worried in how to fix it or how to fill it with things that would be useless in 5 days???

Makes no sense. Even if the 1% would care only about profit and themselves, they would still care about their families and their children, enough to try and save the world so someone can spend those profits.

Don't tell me that you would be ok with killing your own children for 2 more dollars in profits ...

And again: the excuse was "we cannot spend tax payers dollars to save the taxpayers" - the most stupid excuse ever ...

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Most of the people in government wont be alive in 30 years. They are too old.

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Their kids would be.

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Their kids are only useful to politicians in as much as it can get them elected.

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Harsh and cold.

I don't thing that's the case.

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There were no motication to end the cave warriors because nowadays we consider that "war crimes"

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Or at least spend few days or hours and identify all the females (if more than one) and inject them first, all at the same time ...

Injecting some randoms KNOWING that the others will wake up is quite moronic ...

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What indication was there that they knew the others would wake up?

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They say that in the movie, that they are interconnected and the pain suffered by one would most likely wake the others.

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Frankly the injecting them solution made no sense. Remember they were practically bullet proof and yet they can easily be stabbed with a needle? It would have made more sense if the toxin was something they could spray like bug spray the injection theory was just dumb. Then again the movie was pretty dumb if you bothered to think about it. They can only time travel backwards 30 years because it is so hard to do... well the simple solution is to travel back your 30 years with all the knowledge you used to make your time travel device with you... now you've got 30 years to work on improving it and making it easier and better and even if you haven't perfected it in 30 years time you would still have even more research and development to send back 30 and could keep doing that until you had time travel completely worked out... at which point you could do all the traveling you needed to, to win the war easily.

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Or if you jump back in time with the knowledge and tech just build the same thing and jump another 30 years back in time. Poof, you have 60 years ...

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You must have been multitasking while watching.

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That i did. It wasn't as engaging as to keep me 100% focused.

So explain to me: what would stop them from replicating the exact time machine in the present time and jump again 30 years in the past. That would give them 60 years of advance.

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As explained in the movie: They said that they got lucky opening a wormhole that created a specific gap of time travel. A character even asks the question.

Complaining about a movie that you didn't really watch. Doing laundry or the dishes while "watching" does not count as watching. Especially if you are going to point out details that you think are missing.

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But even if you were limited to only a 30 year loop you could continue use it looping back research, developing it further then relooping and on and on until you were so advanced the white spikes wouldn't be anything more than a nuisance to your now super advanced technology.

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Both gates proceed at the same rate of time. They share an immediacy.

It would be cool to see what you say in a sequel "History War" where they now have time to further research the tech and create gates into the far past. It could be a great vehicle for the Time War book series by Simon Hawk.

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No, i saw that part pretty clear. And it doesn't mean that they will not be able to open another wormhole to the past if they reproduce it in the present. They might even use 3-5 years the refine the technology and make it better.

Science has this annoying quality: if you reproduce an experiment with the same variables you get the same results.

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In that time, the future war (progressing along at an even rate with our present) would be over and no survivors.

Nothing wrong with studying the tech but it wasn't the magic bullet for the story. The threat was immediate. Your idea seems to hinge on the idea that there was plenty of time.

"Science has this annoying quality: if you reproduce an experiment with the same variables you get the same results."

Feeling defensive?

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There's plenty of time, after getting back 30 years, to replicate the tech to create another wormhole to a different past time and so buy more time.

Obviously the future doesn't matter (it will not happen) when they can reset the timeline (like they did by exploding the ship/killing the female).

It would had made a lot more sense to buy a lot of time in the past to prepare for the future war than to send millions in the future to certain death to fight in an already lost war ...

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Obviously the future doesn't matter (it will not happen) when they can reset the timeline (like they did by exploding the ship/killing the female).


They didn't reset anything. That timeline is still there. If creating a new past was going to effect their future, it would have happened the second they appeared at the world cup or from any of the other infinite number of ways they butterfly effected the timeline.

Even when Dan happily returned to his family from Siberia, there was still an earth with a very dead Muri and aliens running around the ruins doing god knows what.

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Well, we don't know that. More precise the movie doesn't bother to be consistent or to try ANY explanation on how the time travel works in this movie.

I mean ... they dradt people from the past that are not alive in the future, but in doing so they practically erase them from the timeline for the close future. The main character was supposed to die in 7 years ... and the ones from the future had records of him dead.
So ... what timeline did he actually go to? One in which he survives 7 more years? Or one in which he doesn't exist but the aliens are still there?

And that's valid for every person sent to the future ... thet would be sent to which timeline? And which timeline is saved?

Again, the movie doesn't even try to cover or minimally explain what are the rules.

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From the information the movie gives us, they all went to a future that basically was going to happen, had the time travelers never come back.

There are two pieces of evidence supporting that. One, is when Muri tells him how he originally died in 7 years in a car accident. The second, is how she tells him that the aliens showing up was a sneak attack they had no clue was coming.

If this were a future based off of anything post world cup event, they obviously would have known the aliens were coming, both where and when.

No clue why a person couldn't go to a timeline they were already alive in though. I feel like this is one of the ways the writers were trying to work multiple time travel rules in at once and ended up with a nonsensical mess.

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"and ended up with a nonsensical mess."

and that's exactly my point :D

He went from his present to a timeline in which he was there 7 more years. And not only that but in that timeline he never went to the future and back or they would know. It's filled of grandfather paradoxes in which events that should influence the following events don't. So there are multiple timelines and which one do they save and why???

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If by save, you mean save from the aliens, then it's the past one that Pratt is in. But both are still in existence. That future Pratt went to went to shit when the queen called in her troops and finished Muri and her people. Sucks for any surviving humans still there.

There's no reason to think that future one got wiped away. Why would it?

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That future Pract went to is practically impossible since he was removed from the past of that future.

And that is the problem: not only that people shouldn't have been alive in that future but that future should already have known about them being pulled ahead. The future MUST be aware of it's own past ... even if it's a different timeline.

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What you guys call "a nonsensical mess." I call respecting the audience's intelligence. It was good world building and didn't have to slap you to establish its rules.

Also, they said the wormhole was an accident. Why assume it can be reproduced? How many other movies can be retroactively declared bad via assumed developments?

There's a lot of people hating this movie for reasons easily applicable to honored classic sci-fi movies. If it isn't Pratt hate then what is it? Standard modern internet trolling?

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you told me i was multitasking while watching ...

so where you??

The guy said "we would still be experimenting with mice" so the science behind it was quite sound and could be reproduced but was not properly tested.

" I call it insulting the audience's intelligence" - fixed for you.

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Of course they are experimenting with it. But he said that the creation of it was accidental. (iirc)

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It's definitely not that I hated the movie. With the actors in it(Pratt, Stravosky, Gilpin, Simmons, Gail the Snail), I went in with high hopes and was able to enjoy it on some level.

But my big gripe with it is that it does the same thing that Prometheus did, where the story and all the plot conflicts are driven by the characters making absurdly stupid decisions that no person or organization would make. Especially in the damned 3rd act!

I'm not talking typical movie shit like exploring a dark hallway when you shouldn't. I'm talking batshit insane decisions like Pratt having a virus that can wipe out the aliens and nobody outside of his crew giving fuck! That's a logic fail!

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I don't think it is perfect but I disagree with most of the criticisms I am reading ITT.

Respectfully, could you give examples of the "absurdly stupid decisions that no person would make?"

Though asom and I are crossing swords over other details, his complaint about not porting some nukes into the future is a very good one.

re Prometheus: shitty film that I liked more when I thought the guy at the start was left behind on accident and they were trying to clean up the mistake of genetic impurity. But Ridley says nope. What a shit show.

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Respectfully, could you give examples of the "absurdly stupid decisions that no person would make?"


Fair enough. I won't get into the whole past people fighting the future war thing or what the future people could have done. That's been litigated plenty in another thread. But just sticking with the 3rd act:

- The govt not caring about Dan's toxin. So they've thrown and insane amount of resources into this war(a war they 100% know they'll be fighting again in a couple decades) and when a man comes back with with a surefire way to kill them, they just suddenly don't give a shit? They just let some civilian walk away with an invaluable weapon.
- Expanding on that first point, how the fuck are these people coming back from the future allowed to take anything home? You can't bring food in from an international flight, yet these people who've returned from a future post apocalyptic warzone are allowed to just walk away with anything they happened to pick up, including alien body parts. There is no scenario where those people wouldn't immediately be stripped down, deloused, and quarantined to be damn sure they are safe.
- Information and research would be vital to fighting and killing the aliens, yet somehow not a single soul prior to Dan's wife had the thought that the aliens were already here somewhere? It took him a day to follow those bread crumbs and figure everything out. The future could have sent a research team back, found the ship, had plenty of subjects from which to make their toxin(hopefully in aerosol form this time) and totally saved their timeline.
- Dan made the right call obviously to search for the ship himself, but them taking out the aliens alone was batshit insane. Time was on their side so there was no rush, and if they lost(which easily could have happened), they are fucking everyone on earth.

I could keep going, but this seems like plenty.

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I can't dispute these points.

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>Frankly the injecting them solution made no sense. Remember they were practically bullet proof and yet they can easily be stabbed with a needle?

If you had seen the movie it was clearly shown multiple times that their neck and torso was not bulletproof and thats where they were supposed to aim their weapons.

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I watched it and if you paid attention you would have noticed that sometimes they bullets bounced off areas that would other times be penetrated. It was selective damage to move the story which was the problem, no consistency.

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You clearly didnt pay attention.

Firstly, they didnt just eat humans, they were eating and killing anything indigenous to Earth as evidenced by the wild horses being chased and slaughtered by the white spikes.

Secondly, the white spikes were not the species that flew the space craft, they were cargo, Pratts character even suggested that the white spikes be used to clear a planet of life.

Once all the indigenous life is wiped out, the white spikes die, leaving the planet clear for a superior alien species to move in.

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This^

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As others have said in this thread, the whitespikes are pretty much ripped off straight out of Alien. It’s another species that was flying the ship and they crashed on earth, that’s all the info we get from that other species. The whitespikes were cargo, much like the ship in aliens had the facehuggers in the ship.

Then they escape and they mass reproduce and that’s that.

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you are a moron

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They were cargo or livestock, much the same way cows are to us. Let cows loose to graze land, but these white spikes have a different task, wipe out life! The actual aliens accidentally crashed on our planet thousand or so years ago, and the spaceship was frozen. When they entered the ship near the end of the movie, they saw the pilot and said, "That doesn't look like a white spike." So that was our glimpse of the an actual intelligent alien. They drop these white spikes on planets to wipe out life preparing for their arrival I guess. Earth wasn't a target, cargo driver was simply drunk.

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