History Film / TheTomorrowWar

* ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: The Whitespikes are white, and one of their (several) notable traits is their ability to shoot spikes.

In 2022, the world is shocked when a portal opens up and soldiers from the future step out, saying that humanity is facing annihilation from vicious aliens known as whitespikes and that they are desperate for reinforcements. The world's governments send troops, only for them to be wiped out. Unwilling to commit more trained soldiers, but needing to support the war, a global draft is instituted. Draftees who manage to survive seven days get to come home. Among the draftees, James Daniel "Dan" Forester, Charlie and their field commander Muri Forester will prove to be humanity's unlikely hope against the whitespikes.

* AllForNothing: The toxin that Muri develops to kill all the whitespikes. The key to defeating them turns out to be [[spoiler:finding the alien spacecraft housing them in a glacier back in 2023, where they've been frozen since crash-landing in medieval times, then killing them all there before they have a chance to escape the ship and begin reproducing. This is mostly accomplished by blowing up the ship with C4 rather than using the poison.]] Muri's mission to capture the female whitespike and the subsequent [[spoiler:destruction of Deepswell-9 that it causes when the whitespikes retaliate]] is all done to develop a weapon that is only ever used to kill a few of the aliens, in circumstances where conventional weapons easily could've done the job anyways.
* AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs: The whitespikes pull this [[spoiler:on the ocean oil rig base in response to the humans capturing and holding one of their females there.]]

** Many of the soldiers that survive being sent to the future return to the present with fewer limbs than they started with, presumably after being maimed by the whitespikes.
** Combined with ItCanThink when [[spoiler:the last female whitespike bites off its own limb to avoid dying from a dose of Muri's toxin.]]

* AttackItsWeakPoint: The whitespikes have to be shot in the neck or abdomen to kill them; hits anywhere else appear to slow them down, but only those spots are lethal.
* BackToBackBadasses: Dan and his father do this during the final battle when they lose the whitespike female in their sights.

* BioweaponBeast: What the whitespikes are implied to be, given that they are [[spoiler:found dormant in pods on an alien spaceship that landed approximately a thousand years ago, with a different alien species found dead in the ship's apparent cockpit, presumably the pilots who were carrying the whitespikes as cargo.]] This would explain their extreme aggression, combat prowess, rapid breeding, and other such traits (including the implied ability to cross oceans). One character speculates that they are a "planet-clearing weapon."

** Dorian's souvenir spike [[spoiler:ends up revealing where the aliens were hiding in the present day, and is also used to slash the whitespike female's throat]].

** Charlie having a [=PhD=] in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at a university becomes handy when [[spoiler:Dan needs someone to identify what the sediment on Dorian's claw is from, as it can tell where the whitespikes landed]]. Which leads to...

* ClusterFBomb: Charlie, face to face with a whitespike:

* CombatTentacles: The whitespikes have two of them on their backs, which they can use to grapple or to fire their namesake spikes to impale people.
* CowardlyLion: Charlie, who reveals that he hid for a large chunk of his tour after his first mission. [[spoiler:He ends up killing a whitespike by ''ramming a circular saw in its face'']].
* DeathEqualsRedemption: [[spoiler:Dan's father attempts to heroically sacrifice himself during the final battle against the female whitespike, but she gets diverted from her lunge towards him and he survives to the end.]]

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler:Dan and the others are able to prevent the BadFuture by killing the whitespikes before they can awaken, Dan and his father make amends, Dan allows his father to meet Muri, and Dan can rest assured that Muri and the rest of humanity can live a safe tomorrow.]]
* ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: The whitespikes are white, and one of their (several) notable traits is their ability to shoot spikes.

* FutileHandReach: Dan attempts to reach for [[spoiler:Muri as she's falling into a swarm of whitespikes]], but is yanked away by [[spoiler:the Jumplink sending him back]].
* HellIsThatNoise: The whitespikes make a variety of creepy noises, especially their weird, throaty clicking, which is remarked upon by a traumatized veteran as being particularly haunting.

** [[spoiler: Cowan and Norah]], after being badly wounded, hold the line to fight off the whitespikes long enough for fighter jets to drop bombs.

** [[spoiler: Dorian, wanting to die on his own terms, detonates the explosives that destroy the alien ship in the present, as Lt. Hart and a few other soldiers hold the whitespikes at bay.]]
** Attempted by [[spoiler: Dan's father]] to draw a whitespike queen away from Dan, but averted.
* HiveMind: The aliens seem to possess this, as when one of their females is held captive alone on an oil rig 25 miles offshore, the rest of them promptly show up to rescue her as soon as she manages to roar. [[spoiler:Likewise, on the alien ship housing the whitespikes in the present day, killing a few of them with Muri's toxin suddenly causes the entire colony to awaken.]]
* HollywoodAcid: The toxin that Muri develops seems to function more like this than a poison, causing the whitespikes' body to progressively melt away starting from the point of injection.
* HollywoodTactics: Instead of doing careful research and expeditions into the future to discover the best way to take on the whitespike threat, the world's governments just dump their militaries into the Jumplink and when the whitespikes kill most of them they enact a worldwide draft, quickly give the draftees the most basic of training and throw them into the future with no proper body armor or equipment aside from automatic rifles.
* HordeOfAlienLocusts: The whitespikes are just vicious animals, with no particular drive beyond reproduction and devouring everything in sight. [[spoiler:Since they were probably developed as living planet-killing weapons, the lack of sustainability of this ravenous drive is likely built in.]]

** The Secretary of Defense, when Dan goes to him with [[spoiler:the theory that the whitespikes are already on Earth in 2022, buried in a glacier in northern Russia.]] The Secretary argues that they don't know if it will work and the US can't send a mission into Russian territory, but given that the prevailing belief at this point is that [[spoiler:the Future War will inevitably be lost and humanity itself is doomed]], there is really no excuse at all not to at least give it a chance. At the minimum, one would think the information would be shared with the Russians so that they could act on it, given that the entire world apparently had no trouble uniting to draft its citizens into the Future War.
** Dan himself and his team when they decide to [[spoiler:go to Russia on their own, since the government refuses to act.]] Rather than sharing their information with other governments or just posting it on the Internet, they go by themselves, simply hoping that [[spoiler:the cases of Muri's toxin]] will be enough to get the job done. Sure enough, they turn out to be under-equipped for what they encounter, [[spoiler:getting several of them killed and very nearly allowing the whitespikes to escape into the wild 30 years ahead of schedule.]]
* ImMelting: The effect of the toxin created by [[spoiler:adult Muri]] on whitespikes. It turns them into green glop in a matter of seconds, to gruesome effect.
* JustBeforeTheEnd: Mankind has been reduced to a population of ''500,000'' by the time Dan heads into the future, and it's very clear that humanity is a hairsbreadth away from extinction. [[spoiler:Future!Muri reveals that the forces from the future don't even have the ability to mass-produce the toxin that can kill the whitespikes, so their plan is to send the toxin back to the present and mass-produce it so that the aliens can be killed ''before'' they wipe out mankind]].
* Leitmotif: The appearance of whitespikes is usually marked by some low and threatening notes.

* MadeOfIron: As a whole, whitespikes can take an absurd amount of damage, even if you attack their most vulnerable locations. [[spoiler:The last remaining female has to be subjected to a RasputinianDeath to permanently kill her.]]

* MoreDeadlyThanTheMale: The female whitespike is larger, stronger, more aggressive, more durable, and more resistant to toxins than the males. It's implied that they might be capable of asexual reproduction [[spoiler:(not that the cast is going to take that chance).]]

* NothingIsScarier: Used to great effect. The audience is does not see a whitespike for a long time, and even then we see them from enough distance that all we know for a while is that they are white, roughly the size of a horse, and have way more appendages than they should. The only description we are given of whitespikes beforehand is that they're so frightening that conscripts would refuse to face them if they knew what the monsters looked like. Critics and audiences of the film generally agreed with that assessment.

* RasputinianDeath: [[spoiler:Due to her insane durability, the final surviving whitespike is, in order, [[MoreDakka shot to hell]], [[AnArmAndALeg has her arm cut off]] (''of her own volition'' to [[AmputationStopsSpread avoid being poisoned]]), [[EyeScream stabbed through both eyes]], [[DeathOfAThousandCuts hacked up several times with both a knife and another whitespike's severed claw]], before finally having the last remaining poison shoved down her throat, after which she falls quite a distance and is ''vaporized'' by the final impact]].
* SanDimasTime: In a brief InfoDump, it's explained that the time jump technology establishes a semi-stable connection between itself in the present and a point thirty years into the past, which cannot be changed. Humans and materials can only go back and forth between the two points, and the points move forward in time at the same rate, so no one can jump to some time before the whitespikes arrived to preemptively stop the war. Given limited resources, the one device they have is all they can build, and they dare not mess with it for fear of never being able to repair it.
* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: A thousand or so conscripts sent to the future die each week, which is made out to be a huge number that causes complete societal collapse rather than the globally insignificant rounding error it actually is. Mosquitoes are responsible for about fifteen times as many casualties in the present timeline, and high blood sugar kills more than ''seventy'' times as many people. A person's chances of being sent to the future to be killed by a whitespike are barely over twice the chance of being killed by a snail.
* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: [[spoiler:Muri has Dan take the perfected whitespike toxin back into the past, where it can be mass-produced and wipe out the threat before it ever happens. Dan ends up taking this a step further and wiping out the whitespikes before they can even crawl out of their ship.]]

** Emmy Forester runs a support group for veterans of the future war suffering from PTSD, which notably includes many who lost limbs after being attacked by whitespikes. One of them can barely talk about the experience without breaking down.

** The whitespikes are like ''[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons Dungeons & Dragons]]''' [[https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Displacer_beast Displacer Beasts]] - with their 6 legs and 2 tentacles - on steroids. Compared to their tabletop counterparts, they are much more durable, faster and can [[spoiler:shoot spikes from their tentacles]], but the basic structure is not so different. Fortunately, they do not possess the Beasts’ eponymous Displacement ability, but make up for it by being [[MadeOfIron exceedingly difficult to wound]], [[NighInvulnerability let alone kill]], even if a shot lands on them.

* TalkingIsAFreeAction: As the whitespikes swarm the ocean compound, Dan and a wounded Muri have plenty of time to talk.

* YouAreAlreadyDead: {{Exaggerated|Trope}} with the various conscripts -- not only are they practically guaranteed to die due to the power and ferocity of the whitespikes, but everyone sent into the future is revealed to have died before the aliens arrived in the original timeline, so that no temporal paradoxes are caused if they die.
* YouDoNOTWantToKnow: The future soldiers refuse to tell the present-day recruits what the whitespikes look like, reasoning that how they look will just demoralize them, though their reaction indicates [[ThisIsGonnaSuck they wouldn't be motivated either way]].
* ZergRush: The only tactic of the whitespikes. Given their numbers, speed, and combat ability, it's plenty effective -- everything the humans throw at them in the battles we see only slows them down a little bit from whatever target they're swarming at or chasing after.

In 2022, the world is shocked when a portal opens up and soldiers from the future step out, saying that humanity is facing annihilation from vicious aliens known as Whitespikes and that they are desperate for reinforcements. The world's governments send troops, only for them to be wiped out. Unwilling to commit more trained soldiers, but needing to support the war, a global draft is instituted. Draftees who manage to survive seven days get to come home. Among the draftees, James Daniel "Dan" Forester, Charlie and their field commander Muri Forester will prove to be humanity's unlikely hope against the Whitespikes.

* AllForNothing: The toxin that Muri develops to kill all the Whitespikes. The key to defeating them turns out to be [[spoiler:finding the alien spacecraft housing them in a glacier back in 2023, where they've been frozen since crash-landing in medieval times, then killing them all there before they have a chance to escape the ship and begin reproducing. This is mostly accomplished by blowing up the ship with C4 rather than using the poison.]] Muri's mission to capture the female Whitespike and the subsequent [[spoiler:destruction of Deepswell-9 that it causes when the Whitespikes retaliate]] is all done to develop a weapon that is only ever used to kill a few of the aliens, in circumstances where conventional weapons easily could've done the job anyways.
* AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs: The Whitespikes pull this [[spoiler:on the ocean oil rig base in response to the humans capturing and holding one of their females there.]]

** Many of the soldiers that survive being sent to the future return to the present with fewer limbs than they started with, presumably after being maimed by the Whitespikes.
** Combined with ItCanThink when [[spoiler:the last female Whitespike bites off its own limb to avoid dying from a dose of Muri's toxin.]]

* AttackItsWeakPoint: The Whitespikes have to be shot in the neck or abdomen to kill them; hits anywhere else appear to slow them down, but only those spots are lethal.
* BackToBackBadasses: Dan and his father do this during the final battle when they lose the Whitespike female in their sights.

* BioweaponBeast: What the Whitespikes are implied to be, given that they are [[spoiler:found dormant in pods on an alien spaceship that landed approximately a thousand years ago, with a different alien species found dead in the ship's apparent cockpit, presumably the pilots who were carrying the Whitespikes as cargo.]] This would explain their extreme aggression, combat prowess, rapid breeding, and other such traits (including the implied ability to cross oceans). One character speculates that they are a "planet-clearing weapon."

** Dorian's souvenir spike [[spoiler:ends up revealing where the aliens were hiding in the present day, and is also used to slash the Whitespike female's throat]].

** Charlie having a [=PhD=] in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at a university becomes handy when [[spoiler:Dan needs someone to identify what the sediment on Dorian's claw is from, as it can tell where the Whitespikes landed]]. Which leads to...

* ClusterFBomb: Charlie, face to face with a Whitespike:

* CombatTentacles: The Whitespikes have two of them on their backs, which they can use to grapple or to fire their namesake spikes to impale people.
* CowardlyLion: Charlie, who reveals that he hid for a large chunk of his tour after his first mission. [[spoiler:He ends up killing a Whitespike by ''ramming a circular saw in its face'']].
* DeathEqualsRedemption: [[spoiler:Dan's father attempts to heroically sacrifice himself during the final battle against the female Whitespike, but she gets diverted from her lunge towards him and he survives to the end.]]

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler:Dan and the others are able to prevent the BadFuture by killing the Whitespikes before they can awaken, Dan and his father make amends, Dan allows his father to meet Muri, and Dan can rest assured that Muri and the rest of humanity can live a safe tomorrow.]]

* FutileHandReach: Dan attempts to reach for [[spoiler:Muri as she's falling into a swarm of Whitespikes]], but is yanked away by [[spoiler:the Jumplink sending him back]].
* HellIsThatNoise: The Whitespikes make a variety of creepy noises, especially their weird, throaty clicking, which is remarked upon by a traumatized veteran as being particularly haunting.

** [[spoiler: Dorian, wanting to die on his own terms, detonates the explosives that destroy the alien ship in the present, as Lt. Hart and a few other soldiers hold the Whitespikes at bay.]]

* HiveMind: The aliens seem to possess this, as when one of their females is held captive alone on an oil rig 25 miles offshore, the rest of them promptly show up to rescue her as soon as she manages to roar. [[spoiler:Likewise, on the alien ship housing the Whitespikes in the present day, killing a few of them with Muri's toxin suddenly causes the entire colony to awaken.]]
* HollywoodAcid: The toxin that Muri develops seems to function more like this than a poison, causing the Whitespikes' body to progressively melt away starting from the point of injection.
* HollywoodTactics: Instead of doing careful research and expeditions into the future to discover the best way to take on the Whitespike threat, the world's governments just dump their militaries into the Jumplink and when the Whitespikes kill most of them they enact a worldwide draft, quickly give the draftees the most basic of training and throw them into the future with no proper body armor or equipment aside from automatic rifles.
* HordeOfAlienLocusts: The Whitespikes are just vicious animals, with no particular drive beyond reproduction and devouring everything in sight. [[spoiler:Since they were probably developed as living planet-killing weapons, the lack of sustainability of this ravenous drive is likely built in.]]

** The Secretary of Defense, when Dan goes to him with [[spoiler:the theory that the Whitespikes are already on Earth in 2022, buried in a glacier in northern Russia.]] The Secretary argues that they don't know if it will work and the US can't send a mission into Russian territory, but given that the prevailing belief at this point is that [[spoiler:the Future War will inevitably be lost and humanity itself is doomed]], there is really no excuse at all not to at least give it a chance. At the minimum, one would think the information would be shared with the Russians so that they could act on it, given that the entire world apparently had no trouble uniting to draft its citizens into the Future War.

** The Whitespikes are like ''[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons Dungeons & Dragons]]''' [[https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Displacer_beast Displacer Beasts]] - with their 6 legs and 2 tentacles - on steroids. Compared to their tabletop counterparts, they are much more durable, faster and can [[spoiler:shoot spikes from their tentacles]], but the basic structure is not so different. Fortunately, they do not possess the Beasts’ eponymous Displacement ability, but make up for it by being [[MadeOfIron exceedingly difficult to wound]], [[NighInvulnerability let alone kill]], even if a shot lands on them.

* TalkingIsAFreeAction: As the Whitespikes swarm the ocean compound, Dan and a wounded Muri have plenty of time to talk.

* YouAreAlreadyDead: {{Exaggerated|Trope}} with the various conscripts -- not only are they practically guaranteed to die due to the power and ferocity of the Whitespikes, but everyone sent into the future is revealed to have died before the aliens arrived in the original timeline, so that no temporal paradoxes are caused if they die.
* YouDoNOTWantToKnow: The future soldiers refuse to tell the present-day recruits what the Whitespikes look like, reasoning that how they look will just demoralize them, though their reaction indicates [[ThisIsGonnaSuck they wouldn't be motivated either way]].
* ZergRush: The only tactic of the Whitespikes. Given their numbers, speed, and combat ability, it's plenty effective -- everything the humans throw at them in the battles we see only slows them down a little bit from whatever target they're swarming at or chasing after.

** Dan himself and his team when they decide to [[spoiler:go to Russia on their own, since the government refuses to act.]] Rather than sharing their information with other governments or just posting it on the Internet, they go by themselves, simply hoping that [[spoiler:the cases of Muri's toxin]] will be enough to get the job done. Sure enough, they turn out to be under-equipped for what they encounter, [[spoiler:getting several of them killed and very nearly allowing the Whitespikes to escape into the wild 30 years ahead of schedule.]]
* ImMelting: The effect of the toxin created by [[spoiler:adult Muri]] on Whitespikes. It turns them into green glop in a matter of seconds, to gruesome effect.
* JustBeforeTheEnd: Mankind has been reduced to a population of ''500,000'' by the time Dan heads into the future, and it's very clear that humanity is a hairsbreadth away from extinction. [[spoiler:Future!Muri reveals that the forces from the future don't even have the ability to mass-produce the toxin that can kill the Whitespikes, so their plan is to send the toxin back to the present and mass-produce it so that the aliens can be killed ''before'' they wipe out mankind]].

* MadeOfIron: As a whole, Whitespikes can take an absurd amount of damage, even if you attack their most vulnerable locations. [[spoiler:The last remaining female has to be subjected to a RasputinianDeath to permanently kill her.]]

* MoreDeadlyThanTheMale: The female Whitespike is larger, stronger, more aggressive, more durable, and more resistant to toxins than the males. It's implied that they might be capable of asexual reproduction [[spoiler:(not that the cast is going to take that chance).]]

* RasputinianDeath: [[spoiler:Due to her insane durability, the final surviving Whitespike is, in order, [[MoreDakka shot to hell]], [[AnArmAndALeg has her arm cut off]] (''of her own volition'' to [[AmputationStopsSpread avoid being poisoned]]), [[EyeScream stabbed through both eyes]], [[DeathOfAThousandCuts hacked up several times with both a knife and another Whitespike's severed claw]], before finally having the last remaining poison shoved down her throat, after which she falls quite a distance and is ''vaporized'' by the final impact]].
* SanDimasTime: In a brief InfoDump, it's explained that the time jump technology establishes a semi-stable connection between itself in the present and a point thirty years into the past, which cannot be changed. Humans and materials can only go back and forth between the two points, and the points move forward in time at the same rate, so no one can jump to some time before the Whitespikes arrived to preemptively stop the war. Given limited resources, the one device they have is all they can build, and they dare not mess with it for fear of never being able to repair it.

* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: [[spoiler:Muri has Dan take the perfected Whitespike toxin back into the past, where it can be mass-produced and wipe out the threat before it ever happens. Dan ends up taking this a step further and wiping out the Whitespikes before they can even crawl out of their ship.]]

* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: A thousand or so conscripts sent to the future die each week, which is made out to be a huge number that causes complete societal collapse rather than the globally insignificant rounding error it actually is. Mosquitoes are responsible for about fifteen times as many casualties in the present timeline, and high blood sugar kills more than ''seventy'' times as many people. A person's chances of being sent to the future to be killed by a whitespike is barely over twice the chance of being killed by a snail.

* PapaWolf: Pretty much how Dan becomes once it is revealed that his daughter is fighting in the Future war, and a large part of the second half of the film orients around him trying to prevent the war from taking place so that Muri will not have to experience and die in the war all together.
** Looking at the greater scope of the conflict and sending people from the past to fight the future war, it would not be surprising there will be alot of examples of this trope along with the opposite gender trope * MamaBear since all the soldiers from the futures that are fighting are either the children or grand children of the people who are being sent to the future, it would be safe to assume that not just Dan, but many of the draftees after joining the fight will have this incentive, more so if like Dan they met their future children.

* MilitariesAreUseless: The head of the Department of Defense refuses to do anything when [[spoiler:Dan and co. try to explain to him that they know a way they could prevent the BadFuture]], citing that he doesn't want to waste money and time on something they're not sure about, forcing them to do it themselves. At the end, [[spoiler:in a news interview, [[BlatantLies he claims credit]] for Dan and co.'s success, saying that he gave it the go immediately, and he would do it again if he had to.]]

** [[Dorian, wanting to die on his own terms, detonates the explosives that destroy the alien ship in the present, as Lt. Hart and a few other soldiers hold the Whitespikes at bay.]]

* DisappearedDad: During his deployment into the future[[spoiler:, it was revealed that Dan's future self had abandoned his family and was killed in a car accident.]]

** Dorian, who

** Dan's father abandoned his family after returning from Vietnam, which foreshadows the future Dan has with Muri - in her timeline, Dan left the family and got killed in a car accident.

* AnArmAndALeg: Combined with ItCanThink when [[spoiler:the last female Whitespike bites off its own limb to avoid dying from a dose of Muri's toxin.]]

* {{Determinator}}: Dan utterly refuses to give up on his responsibilities in the future.

'''D'''eep '''S'''well-'''9''' is a [[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine remote habitation with a concentric-circular design that controls a portal to a distant (though in time) location]], and [[spoiler: at some point is "occupied" by the major antagonists of the story]].

* DoesThisRemindYouofAnything?: '''D'''eep '''S'''well-'''9''' is a [[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine remote habitation with a concentric-circular design that controls a portal to a distant (though in time) location]], and [[spoiler: at some point is "occupied" by the major antagonists of the story]].

* HollywoodTactics: Instead of doing careful research and expeditions into future to discover the best way to take on the Whitespike threat, the world's governments just dump their militaries into the Jumplink and when the Whitespikes kill most of them they enact a worldwide draft, quickly give the draftees the most basic of training and throw them into the future with no proper body armor or equipment aside from automatic rifles.

* ShoutOut: The Whitespikes are like ''[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons Dungeons & Dragons]]''' [[https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Displacer_beast Displacer Beasts]] - with their 6 legs and 2 tentacles - on steroids. Compared to their tabletop counterparts, they are much more durable, faster and can [[spoiler:shoot spikes from their tentacles]], but the basic structure is not so different. Fortunately, they do not possess the Beasts’ eponymous Displacement ability, but make up for it by being [[MadeOfIron exceedingly difficult to wound]], [[NighInvulnerability let alone kill]], even if a shot lands on them.

* SpiritualSuccessor:
** To ''Film/{{Alien}}''. [[spoiler:In the final battle, Dan and co. discover the hibernating aliens -- possibly created as bioweapons -- being carried in a crashed ship with a dead pilot in a cold, wintery environment. Sound familiar?]]
** The film also serves as one to the similarly titled 2014 sci-fi military action film ''Film/EdgeOfTomorrow'', which features a NewMeat protagonist and his comrades being sent into the meat-grinder of a [[HopelessWar losing war]] of humanity versus a HordeOfAlienLocusts species of extraterrestrial invaders sporting CombatTentacles and a HiveMind and bent on the extermination of life on Earth. The initial battle also involves [[ItsRainingMen getting dropped into combat]] into a beach setting from a great height (though in a controlled manner rather than teleportation above the ground) before the protagonist [[TookALevelInBadass gradually develops their combat skills]] at the hands of a female military authority figure, [[spoiler:who bonds with the lead protagonist, and then dies in battle before the protagonist is able to destroy a critical target that ends the invasion in its tracks]].

''The Tomorrow War'' is a 2021 sci-fi film directed by Creator/ChrisMcKay. The film stars Creator/ChrisPratt, Creator/YvonneStrahovski, Creator/JKSimmons and Sam Richardson.

''The Tomorrow War'' is a 2021 sci-fi film starring Creator/ChrisPratt, Creator/YvonneStrahovski, Creator/JKSimmons and Sam Richardson.

** The similarly titled 2014 sci-fi military action film ''Film/EdgeOfTomorrow'' also features a NewMeat protagonist and his comrades being sent into the meat-grinder of a [[HopelessWar losing war]] of humanity versus a HordeOfAlienLocusts species of extraterrestrial invaders sporting CombatTentacles and a HiveMind and bent on the extermination of life on Earth. The initial battle also involves [[ItsRainingMen getting dropped into combat]] into a beach setting from a great height (though in a controlled manner rather than teleportation above the ground) before the protagonist [[TookALevelInBadass gradually develops their combat skills]] at the hands of a female military authority figure, [[spoiler:who bonds with the lead protagonist, and then dies in battle before the protagonist is able to destroy a critical target that ends the invasion in its tracks]].

* ShoutOut:

** The Whitespikes are like ''[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons Dungeons & Dragons]]''' [[https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Displacer_beast Displacer Beasts]] - with their 6 legs and 2 tentacles - on steroids. Compared to their tabletop counterparts, they are much more durable, faster and can [[spoiler:shoot spikes from their tentacles]], but the basic structure is not so different. Fortunately, they do not possess the Beasts’ eponymous Displacement ability, but make up for it by being [[MadeOfIron exceedingly difficult to wound]], [[NighInvulnerability let alone kill]], even if a shot lands on them.

* SoftWater: Dan and several fellow conscripts fall into a recreational swimming pool from the height of about 100 stories above it and simply splash in like they just jumped off the diving board. In reality, just hitting the water would have been fatal, to say nothing of the concrete floor only a few feet below the surface.
* SpaceWhaleAesop: [[spoiler:Don't allow climate change to melt the ice caps, or it will result in humanity being destroyed by killer aliens from under the ice.]]

** Looking at the greater scope of the conflict and sending people from the past to fight the future war, it would not be surprising there will be alot of examples of this trope along with the opposite gender trope * MamaBear since all the soldiers from the futures that are fighting are either the children or grand children of the people who are being sent to the future, it would be safe to assume that not just Dan, but many of the draftees after joining the fight will have this insensitive, more so if like Dan they met their future children.

* PapaWolf: Pretty much how Dan becomes once it is revealed that his daughter is fighting in the Future war, and a large of the second half of the film orients around him trying to prevent the war from taking so that Muri will not have to experience and die in the war all together.