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The Tomorrow War

I just read a very comprehensive critic of the movie, going scene by scene and le fucking wow, how exactly could this scenario be validated by anyone, let alone written?
Drugs. Probably.

"Hey, man. Let's make, like, Terminator... but to stop aliens."
"So the aliens will go back in time to stop the good guys?"
"Nah. Nothing will really matter enough for them to do that. The aliens have already won. Barely any humans are alive any more."
"But going back in time will fix things in the future."
"No. It's an alternate timeline that's fucked. So instead they send people into the past to recruit millions of people for their forlorn hope."
"So they aren't going to help the past to stop the future invasion, and actively make the present far worse with a large number of people dying senselessly?"
"Sort of. They need the people in the past to help them make a special toxin in the future. Then that toxin can be used in the past to stop the alien invasion."
"Oh, so they spread that toxin around so the aliens die when they land on Earth?"
"No. The aliens are already here, hibernating. And they mostly get killed by explosives and guns and stuff."
"Pass me more of that weed and we can talk budget."


Also incompetence.
 
It was kind of like Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but somehow an order of magnitude dumber.
  • I'd just watched A Quiet Place Part II, which was way, way fucking better, and I've gotta say... why are all movie monsters just tiny versions of Clover from Cloverfield, now? "We're gonna make 'em pale with greasy looking skin! And, uhh... the forelimbs will be, uhh, kinda backwards-looking! Shit, I just made Clover again, didn't I? Fuck it. Throw it in."
  • IRL, we have quadrotor drones with collision-avoidance, and we have swarm AI programs for autonomous aircraft, and we have thermal cameras, and we have explosives. Combine all of the above to make an exploding kamikaze quadrotor with like 5 pounds of C4 in it that can recognize the shapes of specific heat signatures. Send thousands of them into areas with White Spikes and then piss them off with loud noises and get them to swarm outdoors. Laugh as they all die messily when the quadrotors pick up their heat signatures and dive into them. OR! Or... you could just recruit grandma. Fuck grandma. She has breast cancer anyway.
  • Seriously, why are they fighting these things with infantry? And if they're fighting them with infantry, why don't they just give them vests that shoot people up with massive doses of warfarin and VX when they die so that the White Spikes are poisoned when they eat them?
  • Speaking of which, what the fuck are these things eating for there to be so many of them? They're obligate carnivores with fast metabolisms and there are gigantic swarms of them. Why aren't they starving to death by the millions after having completely exhausted the biosphere of edible megafauna?
  • They're trying to capture the female. I see that sedatives don't exist in the future.
  • Oh wait, they do have sedatives.
  • Oh look, Chris Pratt is now doing genetics for some reason. Oh hey, the props are actually pretty good. They have slides and pipettes and... wait, what the fuck are they actually doing?
  • Oh, they do have drones, but they have miniguns and there are like two of them. Lame.
  • So, his daughter died to get him the toxin.
  • Oh my god. They did that thing where the weird kid in the class is a super-genius and solves everything for them at the eleventh hour.
  • They used the toxin on like... several of them... by fucking hand. After billions of lives were spent making it. The rest, they took out with explosives. Actually, why didn't they just take the whole alien ship out with explosives immediately? Why the big dramatic fight scene? The movie has officially dragged on past the actual climax.
I think I lost a few brain cells. I mean, the acting was alright, and the action shots and VFX were plenty competent, but the plot is atrocious!
 
Starship Troopers was anything but dumb. It's an excellently made movie designed for several readings from the start.

Paradoxically only recently in the US people started to see forshadowing of militarisation of society and how "fun" it is. Guess it take more time to reach adulthood for them.

Overally the film was not bad as an action mil s-f. Of course it has it's insane moments (like that swarm swimming to that off shore base, trying to catch the alien female "by hand" as if their were no flashbangs or electrolaser/teaser, whole security around the nest, and in the end illegl op in the Russia - I would just run with all info and toxin to the nearest embassy), but are composed into the story in such way it not hampers watching the film and enjoying it.
There is no infallible s-f, aside our own stories.
And any mil s-f film is better than no, or another Marvel.
 
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