The Tomorrow War, Amazon’s latest juggernaut release, was made accessible for streaming earlier this month, and it has received mainly excellent customer feedback since then. It centers around Chris Pratt’s character, Dan Forester, and his family, and how they, as well as the rest of the planet, react to people returning from the future seeking assistance in fighting a future war.
The battle is being waged against the most powerful adversary humanity has ever faced. Aliens known as the White Spikes appear in the film with Pratt, J. K. Simmons, Yvonne Strahovski, and Betty Gilpin. These monsters are equipped with everything. Tentacles. Teeth. Limbs. Claws.
The White Spikes of the Tomorrow War have it all. The organisms are capable of jumping, crawling, climbing, running, gliding, and swimming. Basically, these ugly white animals are hazardous in any form, but they’re even more so when they’re enraged.
We’ll take a closer look at these aliens from Chris McKay’s film in this video, as well as discuss the numerous cinematic inspirations for them, such as John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Xenomorphs.
The Plot
At the beginning of the film itself, we learn a few things, like much of the story is going to take place in the year 2050( Factual detail:Unsure about the year). Dan Forester Junior is a dedicated father and a loving husband, apart from being an ex-military and an exceptional scientist who wishes to work for a prestigious research center. He does apply to one such research center but gets rejected because he didn’t have prior work experience in the private sector.
To make things worse, this happens on Christmas Eve while everyone was celebrating Christmas, and well… the finale of the Soccer World Cup was on. To get you guys a little up to speed about his background, our man of the hour, played by Chris Patt, has a challenging and sour relationship with his father, played by J. K. Simmons. Forester Senior is a Vietnam war veteran and an expert mechanical engineer, and his son followed his footsteps and served two tours in the Iraq war as a Green Beret first sergeant. Coming back to the soccer finale, Brazil was about to score, but just then the striker is interrupted by some 50-60 armed men from the future.
Yeah, you heard it right. They came back in time, to warn humanity against its possible extinction in the next thirty years, unless the people from present times answer their cry for help and rise up to fight a global war against one common enemy, alongside their children and grandchildren.
The people in the future were combating alien invaders called White Spikes, who presumably landed on Earth in the November of 2048. In the subsequent three years, the White Spikes annihilate most of the global population. In response to the situation, the world governments came together to fight the White Spikes. However, these aliens were too powerful for human beings, even with advanced technology.
They were in need of more able-bodied people to fight the war and save humanity. It was now that the governments had their hands forced to request the people in the past to join the future war. Naturally, the present governments formed alliances and sent their soldiers as well as civilians to participate in this epic battle. A device called the Jump Link was set up, which assisted people to travel through time, but the draftee survival rate was less than thirty percent. It all seems like a nice idea, bringing together world governments to fight a common enemy, but there’s an acute lack of originality at the end of the day.
A year later, people start feeling skeptical about the draftings, and many begin to question fighting an enemy that hasn’t arrived yet. Riots break out in several parts of the world as governments continue to send people into the future. While teaching in school, Dan Forester gets notified that he’s supposed to report to the nearest drafting facility. There, Dan has a startling revelation as he learns that he would be dead in seven years. This new development promotes him to Active 2 status; in other words, he was ready for immediate conscription, a law that dictated that if you’re able to fight, you have to fight.
The personnel fit him with a device that would facilitate his travel through time via the Jump Link. When he tells his wife, Emmy Forester, about the circumstances, she suggests that they should make a run for it, escaping the government and, by extension, the drafting. However, Dan had served as a soldier and then a school teacher, and wasn’t acquainted with what it takes to survive on the run from the government.
Emmy, played by Betty Gilpin, tells him that he should contact someone with expertise in this matter—Forester Senior. Taking her advice, Dan goes to meet his father, who had left him and his mother after returning from Vietnam, due to extreme PTSD. Dan’s father is the only one with the ability to skillfully remove the armband installed by the drafting personnel. Dan meets his father, but their already sour relationship proves to be the deal-breaker. The conversation between Dan and his father reflects the hardships that wars inflict on people. Even after a war ends, its after-effects continue to linger on.
Dan returns home to talk to his wife and daughter Muri, their extremely sweet daughter, who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps(the best at science.) Muri’s character played a crucial role in bringing out the depth in Dan, showcasing his inherent kindness. She was a little child who looked up to her father and wanted to be like him, but Dan lacks faith in himself and doesn’t seem to believe he’s worth her respect and admiration. Although, it is certain that he loves her to the moon and back.
After putting his affairs in order, he leaves for his basic training with other draftees. Strangely, all the draftees appear to be in their middle ages while the ones tutoring them in combat and other skills seem to be pretty young. The draftees get divided into two groups, the D Force and the R force. Dan and another draftee named Charlie, get assigned to the R Force or the Research Force. Like Dan, Charlie was also a scientist, and both of them deduced that the people who would make the jump thirty years into the future have to be dead by 2051, while the trainers who came from the future were yet to be born.
This was necessary to avoid a paradox, and also because the director needed a seemingly complex explanation behind the whole time travel fiasco. Anyway, among the draftees is a man named Dorian who had made the first jump to Russia, and had survived three jumps in total. The personnel brief the draftees about their mission. They’d be sent to a fortified research facility in Miami, where their objective would be to share and exchange information. Some more details about the Jump Link are given at this point, but clearly, the government is hiding something from these civilians.
Dan and the other draftee were supposed to be sent into the future after their training was completed, but the White Spikes had attacked the last research facility standing that studied the aliens. Naturally, everything was rushed, and they were hastily preparing to make the jump. In an epic, nerve-wracking cinematic scene, the draftees rise up in the air and then enter the post-apocalyptic world with buildings on fire and smoke rising.
They all descend on top of a building, and only the few who fell into the swimming pool survive. Colonel Forester, the young field commander of the operation, contacts Dan through comms and tells him that there was a mishap. Furthermore, Dan and his team’s mission changes course from a research operation to a rescue mission. They were to escort the researchers who were stranded in the building to safety.
Due to his prior combat and military experience, Dan takes over command of the draftees and leads them into the research facility. They must achieve their objective quickly, as the government had ordered airstrikes to wipe out the city of Miami along with the White Spikes.
The team soon reaches the research facility, and we see the first indication of the White Spikes being present there, in the form of spikes embedded in the wall at several places.
One year ago, Dan was a regular guy hustling for his dream job and taking care of his family, but suddenly his world had turned upside down, changing Dan’s life, his motives, his visions, and missions. However, at the facility, the team discovers that the research team was already dead, and Dan receives central command orders to secure their research. After securing the hardware and some ampules filled with some biological elements, the combat team of civilians head to the exit as guided by the command.
It is now that we get the first glimpse of the White Spikes, grotesque creatures with pale white skin and tentacles. But don’t worry, we’ll come to their description in a while. Numerous White Spikes attack them; only Charlie, Dorian, and Dan make it out of there alive. Putting up a very brave fight, the civilians truly show what it meant to act as a team, as a couple of them willingly sacrifice their lives to save the others. Dan wakes up in a military camp in the Dominican Republic, where he meets Colonel Forester, who had been guiding him in Miami.
It turns out that Colonel Forester was his little daughter Muri Forester, now grown up and leading men and women in a fight that would decide the future of humanity on Earth. Furthermore, the R force was her brainchild and she was the lead researcher. We can only imagine the pride Dan was feeling at this revelation. Anyhow, Dan joins Muri and her extraction team in a mission targeting the female White Spike, probably the only one of her kind.
The purpose was to understand her physiology to figure out a way to kill her. The female was more aggressive than the males and typically larger. Moreover, all the males would die to protect her. Does this remind you of another alien species? Yes, you’re right. The Xenomorphs! After a fierce and bone-chilling ordeal, they manage to extract the female and head to their base.
Meanwhile, the research team had come up with a toxin that was powerful enough to kill the males, but the female’s body could somehow detoxify this external toxin. They had to figure out how her physiology was able to do so, but the task would need thousands of tests. It’s almost like making a vaccine, but a vaccine that kills and not protects. After several thousand failed attempts, Muri finally manages to make the toxin that would work against the White Spikes, but the males reach the protected facility in the middle of the water and breach the high walls of the perimeter.
This scene looks pretty similar to the hordes of zombies breaching the perimeter wall in the film World War Z. The males overrun the entire facility and break the female White Spike out of containment. Muri convinces her father to go back in time so that the toxins could be mass-produced in order to stop the war from ever happening. He manages to come back to the year 2023, but the Jump Link in the future gets destroyed; which led the present world to assume that the future war was lost.
Dan tells Emmy about meeting Muri and how she had managed to create the toxin, but he was in great despair as he believed that everything was now lost. However, Emmy comprehends that just because the White Spikes attacked in the year 2048 doesn’t mean that they arrive in that same year. This was a much-needed epiphany. Dan immediately goes to meet Charlie and Dorian. Dorian was in possession of a White Spike claw; Charlie studied it and figured out that the claw had traces of volcanic ash originating from China.
Dan then consults one of his high school students with a particular proclivity towards volcanoes. (Dan: Class what does martin want to talk about? Class: Ancient Volcanoes APPEARS CLOSE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE FILM.) Martin tells them that there was a massive volcanic eruption on the border of China and Russia in 946 AD. The eruption contained the power of a thousand nuclear bombs, and the ash spread all across the globe; which explained why they found volcanic ash in the claw.
When global warming melted the Russian glaciers, the White Spikes thawed and revived, wreaking havoc in 2048. Dan takes this theory to the higher officials, but they don’t seem to be interested in sending a covert team to the sovereign nation, because the world was already falling apart due to rioting and looting. They now had to find someone who would be game for this anti-government mission; someone crazy enough to enter Russia without a permit. Well, any guesses who Dan would approach? Yup! His father.
Dan forms a team including Charlie, Dorian, Forester Senior, and officers from the future to go to Russia and find an alien ship to destroy its denizens. On Komsomolets Island, they find this spaceship. Here they are faced with the dilemma of whether to kill the aliens themselves or to inform the world governments about the problem. They conclude that it’ll become a political nightmare and ultimately a disaster, and decide to take up the onus of destroying the spaceship on themselves.
Furthermore, they discover that the White Spikes were not aliens, but bioengineered weapons that were designed by a superior race to obliterate planets. The team injects the toxins into several dormant White Spikes but wakes up the others in the process. The ensuing chaos leads to the female White Spike’s escape. Dorian, who was to die of cancer in a few months, convinces the team to let him stay behind so that he could detonate the C-4 charges. Both the Foresters pursue the female as the ship blows up. In a long and tiring battle, they manage to subdue the female with two doses of the toxin.
Destructive Pets of a Superior Alien race
According to the film’s timeline, the gruesome and monstrous White Spikes surface in Northern Russia sometime in the year 2048, from where they spread to every continent, (show the helicopter scene where Muri speaks about how they spread) and in a matter of about three years, the world’s population is reduced to a mere five hundred thousand. Strangely, no one notices the White Spikes’ alien ship; they came stealthily and remain undetected from any radar, satellite, or any such equipment.
This tells us that they were a brilliant species that used advanced forms of technology. However, as seen in the film, the White Spikes are far from being bright and brilliant; they use sheer brute force and attack in packs to slay their enemy. In fact, as organisms, they don’t even use any stealth tactics that are a staple to species like wolves or raptors. In addition, they make no use of any technology or strategy.
So, how do they manage to go about undetected? Well, this is explained at the end of the film, when Dan and his team visit the Russian glacier to locate the White Spike spaceship. There, they learn that the aliens were biological weapons designed to expunge the denizens of planets. The superior race that created them would employ them to later settle down in the wiped-out world. Unfortunately for these intergalactic colonists, the ship bearing the White Spikes, crash-landed on Earth in Russia and froze because of the climate.
As Dan’s student Martin, played by Seth Schenall explains, the White Spikes had volcanic ash from 946 AD in their claws, which naturally meant that they had chanced upon Earth much prior to that event. They remained dormant until enough ice melted by the year 2048, after which they thawed out of their slumber.
As seen in the film, the White Spikes were kept in a highly advanced cryogenic state. On being injected with toxins, the other White Spikes are woken up due to the outcries of pain. So, a potent noise was all that was needed to awaken them, and something similar would have happened in the year 2048. These destructive pests are supposedly one of the most advanced biological weapons ever seen in film history.
White Spikes And The Tyranids
The White Spikes bear an uncanny resemblance to the Tyranids of the miniature war game Warhammer 40000 and the Brain Bug from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
The Tyranids are an entire ecosystem of space-faring monsters with the same gene sequence. They evolve rapidly and work as an extragalactic superorganism, that visits worlds to prey on anything that moves. The Norn Queens of the Tyranids are the most crucial members of the ecosystem because if they die, further reproduction halts.
These queens are primogenitor organisms that modify their offspring according to the environment they are in, and are also capable of harvesting the genetic codes from the lifeforms that the queens encounter. This way, the offsprings serve as bio-engineered organisms, whose base genome is that of a Tyranid. Likewise, the female White Spike is the most crucial member of their society; without her, nothing would be possible. Furthermore, like the Tyranid progeny, the White Spikes are also bioengineered organisms.
White Spikes And The Brain Bug
The 1997 film, “Starship Troopers”, is set in a futuristic Earth ruled by a single global government called The Global Federation of Earth. Boys and girls have to join the military if they want to be called CITIZENS! There is an impending interplanetary war between Earth and the planet of Klendathu. The enemy planet houses an insectoid population that ravages other planets and makes it their own. The Earth’s military tries to battle these giant dinosaur-sized insects! These insectoid aliens were commanded and controlled by the Brain Bug through a hive mind.
The brain bugs were a leadership cast of the arachnid forces and served as a hive mind for the rest. They were smart organisms that guided the fighting casts against threats and enemies. Like the female White Spike, the Brain Bug was the more superior being amongst its kind and possessed a spectrum of telepathic and mental powers. In case the Brain Bug was threatened, the hordes of its arachnidian armies would quit everything else and assemble to get it to safety. This is precisely what happened in Tomorrow War when Dan and Muri capture the female White Spike.
White Spikes and Xenomorphs
Anyone with even passing knowledge of the Aliens franchise will find vast similarities between the White Spikes and Xenomorphs. The male White Spikes serve as the Xenomorph drones, which not only kill the hostiles but also arrange food for the hive. If the Xenomorph queen is threatened, the warrior Xenomorphs or the Praetorians save her or die trying. Likewise, the male White Spikes hold no qualms for violence and bloodshed when their female is under threat. In many instances, the female White Spike flees from tricky situations, if she felt that staying there would be a threat to her life. This psychology is lacking in males.
Yes, there are acute differences between the physiologies of the White Spikes and the Xenomorphs. For instance, the Xenomorphs have acidic blood and dark metal-like bodies, but the White Spikes have pale white and muscular bodies. However, as far as their sizes are concerned, the male White Spikes and Xenomorph drones are comparatively smaller than the female White Spike or the Xenomorph Queen. Both the alien races operate with a hive mind that the respective females control.
Furthermore, the reproductive process of both these species are potentially similar, but we are not sure if the female White Spike lays eggs like the Xenomorph queen or reproduces live infants like mammals. We know for a fact that the White Spikes were a biological weapon created by a superior race.
It is now often theorized, that the Xenomorphs were also created as a biological weapon by a superior race of ancient beings called the Engineers. Even if one is to discard this theory, it is well beyond doubt that the money-hungry Weyland Yutani Corporation intended to, in more than a few instances, transform the Xenomorphs into biological weapons. If you wish to learn more about the dark secrets of the Xenomorphs, don’t forget to check our video titled 8 Mind-Bending Mysteries Of Xenomorph Anatomy Unraveled – Reproduction To Origin Everything Explored. We’ll leave the link in the description.
Influence of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” on “Tomorrow War”
Apart from the stuff that we mentioned earlier and the parallels that we drew, one marvelous horror piece that may have served as a potential influence around this film is John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Both the films revolve around a hostile otherworldly being that escapes an icy prison and lays waste to the world.
At the end of Tomorrow War, a group of civilians and soldiers, struggling to contain a wrathful alien before it reaches any heavily populated area and gives rise to an extinction-level event. And wait, what was the plot of “The Thing”? Oh! Pretty much the same! John Carpenter’s cinematic masterpiece was well-received upon its initial release, and later, both viewers and critics started to appreciate the grim, claustrophobic and paranoid environment that it sought to create.
Chris McKay planned on painting a similar picture, when he took his team to the middle of nowhere, in the cold desert-like region of Russia with nothing but ice, and a bunch of nasty aliens who only know to kill and survive. Having said that, it would be criminal to say that McKay copied anything from Carpenter because inspiration after all isn’t theft.
Is There Going to be Tomorrow War 2?
The Chris Pratt film did fairly well upon its initial release, with more than twenty thousand viewers rating it 4.5 out of 5 points. In fact, Amazon saw a jump in its viewership in Asian countries like India and Japan, making Tomorrow War a juggernaut of this season’s OTT releases.
Naturally, Amazon thought it was prudent not to waste time, and according to the latest reports, it is in talks with Skydance for a sequel. Director Chris McKay and writer Zach Dean are being consulted about the future film. Moreover, many of the original cast members like Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge, and J.K. Simmons are set to return for Tomorrow War 2.