"The Tomorrow" War is a topsy-turvy time travel adventure starring Chris Pratt fighting aliens.
From the fate of its heroes to the future of mankind, here's the ending of "The Tomorrow
War" explained.
When we meet him, Dan Forester is obsessed with becoming the scientist he'd always hoped
to be, making his family proud in the process.
When that plan doesn't work out, Dan begins to spiral.
He eventually learns that his insecurity over his path splinters his family ... before his
own death in an accident in 2030.
For Dan, the future he made for himself — the one that began the night he was told he didn't
get his dream job — was a bleak one.
"You just, you never seemed happy with your life."
But fighting in the future war, returning safely, and defeating the White Spikes before
they could spread seems to have turned Dan's outlook around, if not his whole life.
The movie doesn't tell us exactly what his future holds.
We have no idea if he's able to parlay his heroics into getting his dream job after all,
or even if he manages to survive past 2030 in the new future he's helped to carve out.
But the good news for Dan is that he's finally found the real purpose and meaning in his
life, thanks to losing his daughter in the future.
For however much time he has left, Dan is focused on his family, and that seems to be
enough.
Though he jumps into the future and then back into the present, Dan Forester's "Tomorrow
War" story is actually fairly straightforward.
The same cannot be said for his daughter, Muri Forester, who grows up to become a respected
and tireless military research scientist and ends up working with her dad in an effort
to save the world.
We follow Dan for the whole film, but we see Muri in fragments, and her ultimate fate in
the film means her future is rather ... complicated.
We know that during her childhood, Muri was very interested in science, so it makes sense
that she grew into a key researcher in the fight for humanity's future.
But by the end of "The Tomorrow War," future Muri isn't just dead — the future she was
a part of has been changed by her father's heroism.
The last time we see her in the film, it's as a child, still full of hope and promise.
As with Dan, we don't know if Muri's future still holds these things.
The film doesn't tell us what she grows up to be after the future war is wiped away.
"The Tomorrow War" ends with the future everyone has accepted being wiped away, leaving plenty
of unanswered questions for our heroes and for the world at large.
Many of these unanswered questions are positive things, leaving open endless possibilities
now that humanity is no longer going to be wiped out in 30 years by an alien horde.
But one question might linger over at least one character like a terrifying eventuality.
When he meets the future version of his daughter, Dan learns that he and his wife, Emmy, eventually
divorce, in part because of his own personal insecurities throughout the 2020s.
When he arrives back in the present, recommitted to his family, Dan seems resolved to keep
that from happening by being a devoted father and husband, but can he ever really know that
he'll prevent it?
What if he and Emmy are just destined to have a finite marriage?
What if some other disappointment comes along to make him spiral again?
Dan can work as hard at being a husband and father as he wants, but some things might
be inevitable ... or not.
Early in "The Tomorrow War," we see Emmy Forester using her own skills and expertise to help
in the war effort, serving as a trauma counselor for veterans who've returned from their seven-day
tour of duty in the future.
Though they survived their fight with the White Spikes, many of these people are missing
limbs, and the psychological damage runs even deeper.
It's a major mental health crisis amid the larger crisis of the battle for the future.
By the end of the film, the fight for the future is seemingly over, but that doesn't
change the experiences of the veterans who made it back to their present.
The battle is over, and for those in the future, it never even happened.
But for the soldiers who survived, the scars will remain forever.
In a world eager to move on from crisis, will those veterans be taken care of?
Hopefully, people like Emmy will keep fighting for them because their wounds didn't vanish
when the White Spikes did.
Early on in "The Tomorrow War," as the human race of the present is just learning to comprehend
the future threat and the time-travel system that warned them about it, Dan and his new
friend, Charlie, make a discovery.
All the soldiers who've been sent back to train them for future battle are quite young,
so young that they haven't been born yet when the film kicks off, presumably to avoid some
kind of paradox in which they run into their past selves.
It's the same reason why soldiers from the present who are sent to the future are all
people who will be dead by 2051.
It just keeps things easier.
"Why don't we just jump back earlier in the war?"
"The jump link doesn't work like that."
This system makes sense, but as the film ends, it leaves a few lingering questions, particularly
since the time-travel mechanism in the future is destroyed.
What happens to those future soldiers?
Since the future has presumably been changed by destroying the White Spikes, it's possible
they were never born at all, so do they just ... vanish?
It's one of the most fascinating wrinkles in the film's world-building.
Late in the film, after he returns to the present and finds himself cut off from the
future, Dan goes looking for the origins of the White Spikes in the hopes of preventing
the future war from ever happening.
With help from Charlie and one of his brightest students, he realizes that the White Spikes
went undetected not because they were stealthy but because they actually landed on Earth
centuries in the past.
In fact, they were frozen in Russian glaciers for 1,000 years until the ice finally thawed
out and freed them in the late 2040s.
This means that climate change and the continued thawing of polar ice around the globe contributed
to the awakening of the White Spikes and helped cause the invasion.
Humanity didn't know it, but by failing to address the Arctic melting, they sealed their
own fate.
This development is essentially presented as a throwaway explanation in the overall
plot, but it leaves the human race with some major future wisdom that they perhaps didn't
have before.
The White Spikes may be gone, but the ice is still melting, and that creates future
danger of a very different kind.
Word of the future war arrives quickly, without warning ... and with a lot of catching up
to do on the part of humanity in the present day.
One day, everyone's enjoying a soccer match, and the next, the whole world has to prepare
for a war 30 years in the future.
In the universe of "The Tomorrow War," we learn that once proof of the future threat
is established, the world's governments leap into action.
Countries band together, uniting against a common enemy on a scale never before seen
in human history, and institute a global draft to ensure there are enough soldiers to battle
the White Spikes.
It's a massive effort, but what happens when the future war ends?
As the film closes, the human race is celebrating the end of the White Spike threat, but they're
also facing other issues.
The present has endured massive loss of life from the war, and there's also the ongoing
collective trauma of the survivors.
Families are shattered, incomes lost, entire communities ravaged.
It's a good time for the world to remain united even though the larger threat is gone.
The question is ... will they?
The White Spikes, the menacing aliens that dominate "The Tomorrow War," are set up as
seemingly perfect predators.
They're heavily armored, fast, strong, and they even have offensive weapons in the form
of the spikes they shoot from their limbs.
They spread across continents in a matter of months, overrunning the world through a
combination of aggression and a strong reproductive cycle.
They do all this after sitting in stasis under ice for a millennium, and just one small colony
manages to reproduce and conquer an entire planet.
So, even though that colony has been wiped out, the governments of the world have to
be wondering, where did the White Spikes come from, and how do we stop them from trying
to take over the planet again?
Are they on other planets in our solar system?
Is there a chance we could encounter them again?
Could more colonies still be in stasis somewhere in the world?
There are a lot of lingering questions about these fierce predators, and the world needs
answers.
When Dan and his team arrive at the White Spikes crash site near the end of the film,
they discover a crashed spaceship, but it doesn't belong to the Spikes.
No, those fierce aliens were actually cargo.
The ship itself was piloted by a pair of more humanoid-looking aliens who've since died
but were very clearly in charge of the ship.
Sadly, because they have to blow the whole vessel up to stop the White Spikes, Dan and
company don't get to preserve these alien bodies, but their very existence poses a number
of questions.
How did they crash 1,000 years ago?
Was Earth their target, or did they end up here accidentally?
Were they using the White Spikes as weapons, or were they for something else?
Are there more of them out there already on the way to our planet?
Whatever they are, more than one alien species poses a potential threat by the end of "The
Tomorrow War," and they might just be biding their time.
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