History Headscratchers / TheTomorrowWar

* We're drafting people from the present to fight a war in the future. It's okay though, because they all would have died anyway before this war, so no time-travel paradoxes can come up because of it! ''Um, no... this is impossible!'' Number one, every time someone dies in the future instead of in their normal timeline, everything they did from 2022 until their previously scheduled death is erased! Have these future people never heard of the butterfly effect? Any change, no matter how insignificant, might go on to have enormous impact? ''They are altering their own past!'' Now, it may be that they don't care, because at this point anything is better than what they've got, but there's no possible way they could trace all the links between every single person in the past to determine who can be "spared", whose death won't make a difference. Moreover, those who come back from the future will further alter the timeine just by the nature of their own experiences that they would not have gone through before! Basically the future, everyone in it, and all their history should be changing every time a new person comes through or goes back.

* Why are the nurses who check draftee's eligiblity for the jump wearing scrubs with the camo patter. Do any military nurses wear scrubs made of camo? Wouldn't they just wear scrubs or the uniform, not both?

* Why is the return point for the Jump Link in 2023 just a large outdoor block with a concrete floor? Why not something a bit softer, like floor padding or a trampoline? They are expecting these people to return from the future and fall a distance of between 5-10 feet, and not all of them are going to be upright (especially the ones who don't return with both of their legs) and the paramedics arriving to check on them seem to indicate that they are expecting them to return at that location. Concrete is not soft, especially for people who are older or less physically fit, AKA the same people being sent into the future in the first place, so they are just asking for a bunch of unnecessary injuries and thus, staff and resources tied up in treating them.

** Perhaps the Whitespikes in their cocoons can sense the conditions of the environment outside, such as the air temperature, and stay dormant in such conditions unless their lives are actively threatened. The ship could have kept them at a low temperature until it crashed and the power went out, after which the outside conditions made it inhospitable insteas. That would explain why they emerged when the ice melted in 2048, but also when they were being killed by the toxins.

* Why is the return point for the Jump Link in 2023 just a large outdoor block with a concrete floor? Why not something a bit softer, like floor padding or a trampoline? They are expecting these people to return from the future and fall a distance of between 5-10 feet, and not all of them are going to be upright (especially the ones who don't return with both of their legs) and the paramedics arriving to check on them seem to indicate that they are expecting them to return at that location. Concrete is not soft, especially for people who are older or less physically fit, AKA the same people being sent into the future in the first place.

* Why is the return point for the Jump Link in 2023 just a large outdoor block with a concrete floor? Why not something a bit softer, like floor padding or a trampoline? They are expecting these people to return from the future and fall a distance of between 5-10 feet, and not all of them are going to be upright (especially the ones who don't return with both of their legs) and the paramedics arriving to check on them seem to indicate that they are expecting them to return at that location.

* So the Whitespikes have very few females but legions of males, and also happen to be [[ExplosiveBreeder Explosive Breeders]]? A shortage of breeding females would greatly limit the fecundity of the species, and a ''Film/ReignOfFire'' style scenario of few males and many females seems to make more sense on how the populations can increase exponentially in a matter of days.

** Before Chris Pratt goes to the future, the world isn't entirely convinced that everyone is doomed. When he comes back to 2022, the time link has just broken and now everybody, including the governments, are convinced nothing can be done. Future!Muri probably intends them to find the point of origin and kill them there before they're a threat. So a) her plan is to have factories and past scientists figure out a better way with the presumed 28 years they have and b) even if that wasn't her intention, an official strike force could have eliminated all the whitespikes at once without waking them up, thus there being functionally no threat. But the point really is that they could have aerosolized it or something.

** The jump link is barely-tested technology held together with bailing wire and duct tape, so the operators are probably hesitant to send anything volatile that might damage their facility if something went wrong. Also, people are more versatile - there are tasks people can accomplish that bombs cannot - such as performing search-and-rescue or driving vehicles.

** It's implied that the first vials that Pratts character recovers from the lab are the male toxin. He presumably was unconscious for a day or so while they tested the samples he retrieved. Therefore the first usage is when they tried to kill the nest but realized the female is still alive. The mission then became to capture the female to fix the toxin first prior to it being sent to the past for manufacturing. Remember they assumed they'd have at least a short time to safely return the sample before being overrun.

** Perhaps the whitespikes in their cocoons can sense the conditions of the environment outside, such as the air temperature, and stay dormant in such conditions unless their lives are actively threatened. The ship could have kept them at a low temperature until it crashed and the power went out. That would explain why they emerged when the ice melted, but also when they were being killed by the toxins.

** There seems to be an effort made to suppress information leaks about the war for reasons of morale. The ones who return could describe the creatures, but it wouldn't have the same impact as images or footage. Many draftees also probably sign NDAs as a condition of their service.

** Similarly, why does everyone act like losing the link to the future means they've lost the war? Of course it's upsetting, since now the soldiers from the future are stranded away from their home and any surviving loved ones, but they all seem to think it means they're just flat-out boned--when, as mentioned above, they have both the toxin and plenty of time to figure out how to make more. Heck, they have the chance to do exactly what they end up doing, which is end the war before it even starts. Yet even our hero doesn't think of that and falls into despair before his wife nudges him with the idea the whitespikes might already be here (which it ''also'' makes no sense for no one else to have thought of).
*** From the news reports it seems like even before the link was severed the world's governments were on the brink of collapse. The kids in the classroom comment how nothing matters because everyone knows humanity is doomed. At the end when they talk to the Secretary of Defense he makes a side comment that the USA might not even exist by the end of the year.

** Also, in terms of two-dimensional thinking; the Whitespikes can run and swim, but they can't ''fly'', only glide. Their spike-throwing ability has to have an upper limit on effective range, as well, particularly if they're shooting up, working against gravity. And we know that future humanity still has helicopters and aircraft, because we see them used. The obvious tactical approach would be to use aircraft to provide saturation bombing of an area, then fly helicopter gunship missions to further reduce the numbers, and only then send in troops on the ground if necessary. Instead, we only see aircraft conducting a bombing run against an area where their own troops are mixed in with the enemy, and helicopter gunships flying low enough to be attacked.

*** Questionable writing decisions aside I think it was hanging a comedic lampshade on the fact that these are horribly unprepared civilians. The reason only sending them with small arms is because it is implied that all the major military equipment was already sent forward and this is the easiest way to send meat into the grinder. We don't know how early operations went but at this point it is clear the Future is just sending cannon fodder as either a meat shield or a distraction to buy time to develop the toxin.

** Taking it further, why not just jump ship altogether? Some people wouldn't be able to go back due to creating paradoxes (or at least that is implied), but everyone under 30 can just leave the doomed future and become a refugee in the safe timeline. The looming threat of the coming attack would still be there but they'd have more time to prepare for it, could hypothetically bring the plans for the time-travel device with them (potentially even creating infinite retries if so desired) and don't have to kill of boatloads of the population in two different timelines fighting a war they're actively planning to lose. Taken to the extreme, the world could even just... stop having kids, settle down to coast for 30 years of relative utopia and ride out the end. The point is there are a lot of different ways to play this and the future army seems to have chosen one of the worst, if not the worst, strategies for everyone involved in both worlds.