Fridge / The Tomorrow War

Unmarked Spoilers below.

Fridge Brilliance:

• The future soldiers arriving during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 was a perfect way to get the world's attention for a number of reasons:
  1. The World Cup is one of the most highly-televised events on the planet, routinely scoring billions of viewers, thus maximizing the audience exposed to their message.
  2. The World Cup takes place in a large, open field with a soft surface, allowing a comfortable margin of error when placing the wormhole. This is important because the technology is imprecise enough that a drop of 5-10 feet can be expected after transitioning.
  3. The event would be televised and recorded, meaning that they could plan when to make their appearance down to the second. They know when and where cameras will be pointed in a certain direction and even when commercial breaks will be scheduled to occur.
  4. They can show up in full military gear to emphasize the severity of the threat without getting shot by security, as they might have been had they appeared during a session of Congress or the United Nations.
• The draft for the future war is a bit more selective than it seems on the surface. It not only has to account for when people will die, but also for whether they will have any new children in the future. Each person chosen for the draft would also have to be screened to ensure that they made no significant contributions in their remaining life that would severely alter the timeline. Unfortunately, this also restricts the quality of who gets sent into the future - many of the ones that would be sent are past their prime or suffering from health problems, and brilliant scientists or engineers that might have otherwise qualified likely still have major achievements ahead of them. What remains are people who are at a dead-end in their lives already.
• The drop that Dan goes on ends badly because of a miscalculation that drops his group hundreds of feet off the ground rather than 5-10 feet. This probably occurred because the calculations to send them forward in time are normally carefully plotted and triple-checked. Since their deployment was rushed, they couldn't verify that their planned destination would work.

Fridge Horror

• Charlie survives the film, but he was one of the conscripts who had died before the beginning of the war. For all we know, he'll still die of cancer or some congenital health defect in a few years anyway.
• The Whitespikes in 2023 are successfully killed off before the war begins. This means that tens of thousands (probably a lot more) have lost their lives or now suffer from PTSD from their experiences in a war that will never happen. The surviving draftees now live with the foreknowledge that they are likely to die within 25 years, since the processing staff announce the date of their death. It's a victory, but a bittersweet one.
• The people from the future trapped in the past have no way to return to their own time, meaning that they may need to make some hard choices down the road to avoid creating paradoxes when their past selves are born.